Pure Storage and Microsoft expand partnership

Author: Isha Jain

Pure Storage has announced an expanded, multi-year strategic product and go-to-market partnership with Microsoft, that brings its storage capabilities to native Microsoft Azure services by leveraging its new Premium SSD v2 and introducing them to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) in Preview. 

Now in Preview in 16 Azure regions globally, Pure Cloud Block Store for AVS enables customers to:

• Optimise AVS costs: With Pure Storage’s compression and deduplication technology, organisations can achieve a high data reduction ratio on VMware workloads in Azure. Combined with its ability to decouple block storage costs from compute costs, customers can achieve sizable savings off their baselines for storage heavy workloads.
• Take advantage of evergreen innovation in Azure: The company will continue to innovate and leverage the best technology available in Azure. By integrating Premium SSD v2 disk, in partnership with the Azure Storage team, it is helping mutual customers achieve up to one-third of the infrastructure cost than Pure’s previous platform without sacrificing performance or capabilities. These savings can now be extended to AVS customers.
• Accelerate and de-risk cloud migrations: Organisations can migrate their applications to the cloud without any capability trade-offs, with the ability to scale storage and compute independently based on need.
• Leverage Safemode ransomware data protection: It also delivers an always-on, policy driven snapshot creation and protection mechanism called Safemode, which provides the ability to leverage its snapshots to instantly restore protected data sets. Customers enjoy and rely on this protection with their on-premises VMware environments with FlashArray, and can now also leverage this functionality with Azure VMware Solution and Pure Cloud Block Store.
• Implement flexible disaster recovery: Organisations can take advantage of data protection capabilities in Purity such as zero-RPO ActiveCluster, near zero RPO ActiveDR, and Purity CloudSnap to ensure the right data is protected in the right way, to the right place, at the right time.
• Right-sizing disaster recovery: Its high availability and cloud replication capabilities enable disaster recovery targets on AVS that can be configured with minimal compute and storage that can scale on-demand. This brings additional cost savings to the customer’s disaster recovery strategy.
• Simplify and unify storage strategy: By using the same data management platform both on-premises and in the cloud, organisations can more easily track, manage, deploy, and provide consistent multi-cloud governance for their data. 

Industry significance:

Gartner forecasts that in 2023, worldwide public cloud spending will grow 20.7% to total $591.8bn, up from $490.3bn in 2022. 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.  

The expanded partnership between Pure Storage and Microsoft eliminates this barrier. By integrating Pure Cloud Block Store with Azure VMware Solution, organisations gain access to Pure’s robust feature set, as well as the ability to de-risk deployments while perfectly right-sizing and scaling storage and compute independently as workload demands change.