Pure Storage announced the first generally available external block storage for Microsoft’s Azure VMware Solution to improve total cost of ownership (TCO) for VMware workloads in Azure. For customers with storage-intensive VMware workloads, Pure Cloud Block Store provides the flexibility to match their Azure VMware Solution compute needs with their storage capacity needs – optimising their spend in the cloud.
Industry significance:
As cloud adoption accelerates, enterprises aspire to migrate all or portions of their VMware environments – the majority of which consume block-based storage – to the cloud but are met by challenges of inconsistent storage layer management in comparison to their on-premises deployment, and an unmet need to scale compute and storage independently to match data growth.
Microsoft’s Azure VMware Solution allows customers to move or extend VMware-based workloads from on-premises data centers to Azure. Yet, some existing storage-intensive VMware workloads can be cost prohibitive to move.
Pure Storage’s solution helps bridge this gap, allowing customers to optimise their storage footprint and spend on Azure VMware Solution, unblocking VMware migrations to Azure, and bringing the on-premises VMware experience that customers have relied on for decades to the public cloud.
News Highlights:
Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution provides customers with the following benefits:
Better Efficiency and Cost Optimisation in the Cloud: Pure Cloud Block Store decouples storage and compute resources, allowing customers to scale storage capacity independently of compute nodes. Pure Storage also brings sophisticated data reduction with deduplication, compression, and pattern removal to the cloud. That, along with thin provisioning, ensures efficient, optimised storage.
One Pure Storage customer, a leading US-based beverage manufacturer, projects they will optimise their costs by 50% with Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution. And it will enable them to deploy a complete disaster recovery solution for their on-premises VMware workloads.
Unblocking VMware Migrations to Azure VMware Solution: With the ability to decouple storage and compute resources, customers can move VMware workloads to Azure VMware Solution that may have been cost-prohibitive to migrate in the past. This allows them to take advantage of the benefits of Azure VMware Solution, without overextending costs.
Another Pure Strorage customer is planning to use Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution to move VMware workloads with over 500TiB of storage to Azure. They chose this joint solution because it will accelerate their migration plans while effectively managing costs. They estimate approximately 50% savings once these workloads are migrated.
Enabling Hybrid Deployments and Data Mobility: Customers can realise true data mobility and create a hybrid VMware deployment when they use Pure Storage both on premises and on Azure. Pure Storage customers can leverage their Evergreen//One subscription to relocate capacity from on-premises FlashArray systems to Pure Cloud Block Store in Azure as needed.
A national healthcare organisation chose Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution for disaster recovery. Being an existing Pure Storage customer, they knew they would get the same features from using FlashArray on premises. Using Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution will allow them to replicate the data while reducing the necessary number of compute nodes until needed for a disaster recovery event. This solution will provide them truly on-demand, scalable disaster recovery.