bedrijfsnieuws over Pure Storage wants to demolish your storage silos

Its Storage Cloud service can manage data anywhere, and save cloud costs to boot

Pure Storage originally developed its cloud offering as a hybrid companion to its FlashArray on-premises

systems. It has since found that its VMware migration target facilities and dramatic cloud storage cost

savings attract entirely new customers.

Dan Kogan, VP of cloud & new products at Pure Storage, explains the basics of the Pure Storage Cloud.

"We've taken the Purity operating environment, but instead of dropping our appliance in a hyperscaler's

datacenter, we run the software on top of the back end that's presented by the cloud services," he says.

In this case, that's Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Pure Storage helps customers develop an Enterprise Data Cloud, a virtual pool of data, that spans the

on-premises and public cloud worlds. The Pure Storage Cloud is the public cloud part of that.

Customers see the same Pure software that runs on-premises on each cloud service: "The operating

system stays the same. The control plane in Pure Fusion stays the same. All of our APIs work. All our

 replication technologies work. Everything works and looks and feels as if it's the same product," Kogan

says. "But one happens to be running with no physical gear; it's a software-defined resource in the cloud,

 versus the other which is a physical appliance running in your datacenter. From an operating environment

 standpoint though, it is exactly the same product."

Two back-ends, one interface

The back ends abstract the two cloud providers' hardware, software and service infrastructure. Pure Storage

 Cloud presents a consistent interface that runs on two different physical infrastructures underneath; one in

 AWS and one in Azure."

"We've evolved the relationship with Azure to now deliver a fully-managed, first party-like Azure service

where we're actually just presenting volumes as a service," says Kogan. "The customer doesn't even see

any of the backend operations of the array."

Instead, customers balance performance and capacity vectors, and then consume the service as they would

 any other fully-managed cloud service. You can think of it as the storage array equivalent of a serverless

architecture.

Pure Storage's original Cloud Block Store on Azure, now called Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated, was an IaaS

 offering. "Now we have moved into full SaaS with the Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native," adds Kogan.

Pure Storage on AWS remains an IaaS offering. Kogan points out that Pure's relationships with the two

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) evolve at different rates.

Pure has announced Object storage protocols as a coming addition to its on-premises FlashArray offering.

This is also a possibility for Pure Storage Cloud, says Kogan. "We have that ability to ultimately add those,"

he explains. "I think it's really just finding the right use case and the time and need to do that." The growth

 in customer data volumes, along with AI's need to interrogate object data, are both potential drivers for that.

Pure's on-premises FlashArray replication-based data movement facilities also work in the cloud. Customers

 can replicate data between Azure and AWS, migrate from them, and have multi-site configurations, Kogan

 points out. Customers could even set up a hybrid synchronized environment covering the on-premises

systems and the two clouds if needed.

Cloud-based data movement looks just like moving a dataset between two on-premises FlashArrays. "That's

the beauty of the Pure Fusion control plane that operates the entire Enterprise Data Cloud," says Kogan.

"Every array is just an endpoint. So you could have your endpoint in the cloud. You can have your endpoint

on premises. You can set policies for data mobility, performance, data protection, whatever that may be, that

 will apply equally to the cloud as it does on-premises."

Security considerations

There are strong data security arrangements with the Pure Storage Cloud. Malware detection capabilities

are built into its Pure1 SaaS-based storage management system. If monitored data reduction ratios suddenly

 start dropping then malware encryption could be starting. The system would alert the security team while

 also contacting security tools like Varonis.

Most customers use immutable snapshot copies. Any malware hitting an on-premises site, AWS, or Azure is

restricted as each site is firewalled off from the others. Pure Storage Cloud instances also benefit from existing

 security and threat-scanning deals with Cohesity, Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik and others, providing known

good data copy identification. Customers can stand up a clean room in the cloud as part of their recovery

 process.

Drivers for adoption

VMware migration is a strong driver for Pure Storage Cloud adoption. The disruption arising from Broadcom's

 VMware acquisition has caused many customers to seek alternatives. Pure Storage is seeing customers

migrate VMware from datacenters to the cloud, or running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

"There could be a longer-term migration strategy of getting out of the datacenter first, lifting and shifting

the application, and then modernizing with cloud-native VM or Kubernetes or another alternative," Kogan says.

Pure integrates natively with the Azure VMware Solution and Elastic VMware Service in AWS (Amazon EVS).

VMware migration destinations can include the Nutanix environment running on Pure Storage, as well as

Azure Local and AWS Outposts; Pure has control plane integration with all three.

Saving costs in the cloud

The other driver is cloud cost reduction/FinOps. This wasn't initially what Pure Storage designed the product

for, but it's becoming a significant factor.

During the Covid pandemic some customers moved to the cloud and then found costs uncomfortably high.

They were spending orders of magnitude more on just the basics of networking, compute and storage than

they thought they would.

CSPs like AWS and Azure have data egress fees, and these are a constraint. Pure Storage can mitigate those

 too, using compression and deduplication.

"One benefit of the new fully-managed service in Azure is that you have network egress-free access from

the Azure cloud into your tenants, just like the first-party service that Azure provides," Kogan adds.

Capacity-saving features such as deduplication, thin provisioning and efficient snapshots aren't a native

feature of AWS and Azure cloud block storage serv