Pure Storage, an IT company known for its advanced data storage technology and services, has unveiled an extended strategic partnership with Microsoft, aimed at accelerating the adoption of enterprise cloud solutions. This collaboration entails a multi-year initiative encompassing product development and market strategies. The partnership leverages Microsoft’s Azure platform to integrate Pure Storage’s industry-leading storage capabilities, particularly utilizing Azure’s new Premium SSD v2 technology. This integration extends to the Azure VMware Solution (AVS) in Preview.
According to Gartner’s predictions, global public cloud expenditures are projected to surge by 20.7% in 2023, reaching a total of $591.8 billion. As businesses increasingly embrace cloud infrastructure, there is a growing desire to transition VMware environments, which rely heavily on block-based storage, to the cloud. However, this transition poses challenges such as inconsistent storage management compared to on-premises setups, as well as the need to independently scale compute and storage to accommodate data growth.
The expanded collaboration between Pure Storage and Microsoft addresses these obstacles. By integrating Pure Cloud Block Store with Azure VMware Solution, enterprises gain access to Pure Storage’s robust feature set. This integration enables smoother deployments, offering the flexibility to accurately adjust and scale storage and compute resources in response to varying workload demands. Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage, views this partnership as a significant milestone that paves the way for efficient cloud adoption and the successful migration of mission-critical use cases in the future.
Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution, now available in Preview across 16 Azure regions globally, presents several advantages to customers:
– Cost Optimization for AVS: Pure Storage’s compression and deduplication technologies result in substantial data reduction for VMware workloads on Azure. The separation of block storage costs from compute costs leads to significant savings for storage-intensive workloads.
– Incorporating Azure’s Innovation: By integrating Azure’s latest storage solution, Premium SSD v2, in partnership with Azure Storage, Pure Storage enhances cost-effectiveness without sacrificing performance. These cost savings extend to AVS users.
– Streamlined Cloud Migrations: Organizations can seamlessly migrate applications to the cloud without compromising capabilities, with the flexibility to independently scale storage and compute as needed.
– Ransomware Data Protection: Pure Storage’s Safemode offers policy-driven snapshot protection against ransomware attacks, ensuring instant restoration of protected data sets. This protection, available for on-premises VMware environments, is now extended to Azure VMware Solution and Pure Cloud Block Store.
– Flexible Disaster Recovery: Purity’s data protection features like zero-RPO ActiveCluster, near-zero RPO ActiveDR, and Purity CloudSnap enable efficient data recovery strategies in different scenarios.
– Optimized Disaster Recovery: High availability and cloud replication capabilities from Pure Storage enable cost-effective disaster recovery targets on AVS, adaptable to changing needs.
– Unified Storage Strategy: Employing the same data management platform across on-premises and cloud environments allows for consistent multi-cloud governance and streamlined data management.
Microsoft’s commitment to enhancing Azure VMware Solution and the broader Azure platform through strategic collaborations like Pure Storage underscores its dedication to meeting customer needs in an evolving business landscape. This partnership aims to provide a rapid path to the cloud while preserving existing investments in VMware and Pure Storage processes and capabilities. VMware also acknowledges the partnership, highlighting that the collaboration empowers customers to migrate and modernize their VMware and Pure Storage setups to Azure VMware Solution seamlessly.
