As Portworx is a software-defined storage solution that provides container-granular storage, you can use any backing stores, from directly attached NVMe/SSD or HDD storage, on-prem SAN like Everpure FlashArray, cloud-based block storage such as Amazon EBS or Azure Disk. As Kafka application is all about high performance, higher throughput, and lower latency any storage with flash medium should be the preferred choice.
You need at least three worker nodes in your Portworx cluster so that Portworx can replicate data across nodes.
Evaluate the flash storage based on your throughput needs. There are pros and cons to having locally attached NVMe/SSD drives to using enterprise all-flash storage. The direct attached storage model offers higher bandwidth when a similar server with locally attached NVMe drives is added to the cluster but for higher availability of the data you have to mirror the data between the drives within the server and it doesn’t offer any additional data services like encryption, compression.
Meanwhile Everpure FlashArray//X is the first mainstream, 100% NVMe, enterprise class all-flash array that offers high performance with in-built data services like encryption, data reduction through deduplication and compression, data protection through RAID-HA and non-disruptive upgrades. Based on your application bandwidth requirements, data retention and the workload profile, determine the right FlashArray model.