Availability of Pure Storage Cloud Block Store

By Cody Hosterman, technical director, VMware solution engineering, Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. released into public preview Pure Cloud Block Store block datastore support for Azure VMware solution.

Learn more about the solution and collaboration behind it.

Let’s think in terms of outcomes. You want to move some or all operations into the cloud without disrupting your business and without incurring significant overhead costs.

Specifically, you want to migrate the right workloads to the cloud on your timelines. This means making sure that you’re not under pressure to move quickly because you’ve committed to a significant infrastructure investment. You want to move fast without breaking things.

To maximize ROI and minimize disruption to business, a cloud migration approach that preserves application architecture with a consumption-based pricing model is the ideal approach. This is where Microsoft Azure VMware Solution really shines. Migrate your workloads with consistent tools and run them confidently.

You want:

• Cost containment and flexibility
• Flexibility to use cloud native services in the future without having to refactor existing applications, especially with VMware workloads
• Operational consistency for existing and new related applications while investing in new strategies for new ones

Without: 

• Changes/disruption to business operations
• Overhead and complexity of managing cloud infrastructure
• More security risk 

Azure VMware solution cleanly solves these issues. But the VMware platform itself is not always the whole story. A significant building block with on-premises VMware deployments is external storage. A majority of VMware workloads on premises run on external storage – a large portion of which is block-based. Something, up until now, has been missing in VMware deployments in the cloud. Providing the same consistent external block storage architecture in the cloud has not been fully tackled – leaving customers and workloads stranded from cloud migration or deployment.

Collaborating to optimize Azure VMware solution storage experience
Pure Storage released into public preview Pure Cloud Block Store block datastore support for Azure VMware Solution. This allows to provision additional storage as needed to make full use of an Azure VMware solution deployment without the need to scale out compute resources. The fastest, simplest path to ROI for moving on-premises workloads to the cloud just became even faster, simpler, and more cost-efficient. 

Pure Cloud Block Store is a 100% software-delivered product running entirely on native Azure infrastructure that brings all of the relevant Purity features and capabilities to Azure. Data reduction, thin provisioning, instantaneous snaps and clones, always-on data-at-rest encryption, snapshot scheduling, continuous replication, active/active replication, QoS, SafeMode, offload to Azure blob storage, and of course all of the VMware goodness we’ve built over the years.

This last part is really what gets us excited. More on that in a bit…

To further improve the collaboration, Pure Cloud Block Store has also taken an important step forward in its architecture that simultaneously improves both cost efficiency and performance. To achieve this, it now offers Azure Premium SSD v2 as backend storage, improving cost efficiency compared to our previous version by 200%-300%. Furthermore, due to concurrent improvements in our compute instances that run Purity, we’re seeing up to 30% improvement in IO/s and throughput. Pure entirely passes these savings to its customers.

Azure customers can leverage their Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) to purchase and attach Pure Cloud Block Store storage as VMware Datastores to their Azure VMware solution environment. 

Customers can also leverage their Evergreen//One subscription to relocate capacity from on-premises FlashArray systems to Pure Cloud Block Store in Azure as needed. Combined with VMware Universal licensing supported with Azure VMware Solution, this allows your on-premises VMware deployment on Pure to be truly mobile. This combined flexibility and mobility of licensing de-risks this migration or hybrid cloud architecture rebalances. Migrations and capacity allocation do not need to follow an arbitrary contract refresh cycle, but instead, they follow the needs of the business.

History of excellence with VMware
Purity is the operating environment that provides the intelligence and features of all Pure platforms such as FlashArray. At its core, it is designed for simplicity and efficiency. Efficiency comes from our data reduction engine that of course does the basics (like thin provisioning) but also introduces major efficiency through the real contributors: de-dupe, compression, and pattern removal. Our platform is based on this. Every feature we build is designed on top of that – to not bloat but instead preserve that efficiency on the platform and when replicated. 

On top of this, we built the Evergreen model of delivery of continuous innovation – continuously improving the product without migrations of applications.

These principles combined make Pure Storage a fit with VMware environments. Density. Performance. Flexibility. Simplicity.

To truly deliver the use case, Pure has spent the last decade integrating block storage from its Purity product suite into the VMware vSphere platform. We focused on building a best-of-breed solution ensuring that integration worked out of the box – eliminating tuning and multi-step configuration requirements. Working directly with VMware to make preferred behaviors default, we formed engineering design partnerships with VMware product teams to build better together and bring our robust feature set into a VMware environment as seamlessly as possible.

VMware moved into the cloud and so did Pure. Just like we built the backend of Purity for FlashArray to optimize for flash, we designed the backend of Purity to take advantage of Azure and named that product Pure Cloud Block Store. Same Purity features, different backend architecture.

In summary, this collaboration of Pure Cloud Block Store with Azure VMware Solution is not about a simple port of our on-premises software into a VM. This is an architected storage platform for Azure, to truly bring the power of Purity+VMware to Azure VMware solution.

Faster and more cost-effective
This solution allows joint customers to take advantage of Premium SSD v2 with their Azure VMware Solution environment with the decade-plus of VMware-integration work that Pure Storage has built.

The combination of Pure Cloud Block Store allows customers to grow their footprint of Azure VMware Solution, unlocking storage-heavy workloads and related applications while remaining fully cost-effective. This collaboration mirrors the storage experience customers are used to on premises to native resources in the cloud. The company is helping you take advantage of Premium SSD v2 in your Azure VMware Solution (AVS) environment.

Summary:

• Fast-tracking path to ROI
  For all customers, the ability to use Pure Cloud Block Store block storage allows for right-sizing your storage to better match storage purchase to consumption. This can reduce the overall cost of AVS at scale, speeding up the time to ROI and allowing for more workloads to be migrated to the cloud or redirecting spend to service (e.g., SQL as a service). 

• Simpler migration with proven tools
  Use familiar tools to migrate. Use VMware’s suite of migration tools to move your workloads to AVS. On-premises FlashArray customers have the additional benefit of being able to use all of the data services of Purity to replicate data to AVS. Data on Pure Cloud Block Store volumes are in the Purity Operating Environment and have all of the and fully interoperate. 

• Securing your destination for you
  Up-front investments aren’t just costs. There’s also the investment in processes and security. All of the storage management tools and data protection features of Purity are available and free. SafeMode is always-on so you’re protected on arrival from ransomware. This frees up your time to evaluate app modernization for your legacy workloads with Azure data services as you integrate the cloud as part of your larger infrastructure strategy.

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