The purpose of any cloud migration is to make it seamless, with out disrupting operations or incurring prohibitive prices. A paramount consideration is the strategic motion of workloads to the cloud at a tempo that aligns with organizational timelines. The problem lies within the quest for agility with out compromising stability.

Enter the Microsoft Azure VMware Solution (AVS), an providing designed to ease the ache of cloud migration. AVS gives a well-recognized infrastructure stack, integrating compute, reminiscence, community, and vSAN storage. By preserving utility structure and adopting a consumption-based pricing mannequin, Microsoft AVS stands out for its means to make sure easy workload migration whereas minimizing enterprise disruptions.

Crucially, AVS empowers companies to harness cloud-native companies sooner or later with out requiring advanced utility refactoring, particularly for VMware workloads. This orchestration is underpinned by operational consistency throughout present and new functions, making a steadiness between legacy techniques and progressive approaches.

In a pleasant transfer, Pure Storage introduced in the present day that it’s bringing its Pure Cloud Block Store providing to Microsoft AVS. The providing is in public preview now.

Bringing Enterprise Block Storage to the Cloud

Replicating a constant exterior block storage structure within the cloud is a problem, one which makes cloud migrations needlessly advanced. Pure Storage addresses this complexity with its Pure Cloud Block Store (CBS) resolution, which provides a scalable storage resolution for cloud deployments with no corresponding scale-out of compute assets. It’s a streamlined method that accelerates the return on funding when transitioning on-premises workloads to the cloud.

CBS brings Pure’s Purity Operating System, the identical software program that runs its on-prem storage arrays, to the cloud. This permits cloud customers to reap the identical advantages present in conventional on-prem SANs of their cloud atmosphere. Pure Storage’s Cloud Block Store is on the market in the present day on Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s AWS.

A important factor of Pure’s Cloud Block Storage is its method to information discount. CBS makes use of the identical thin-provisioning, compression, and deduplication applied sciences current in Pure’s on-prem choices to cut back the quantity of information saved on flash within the cloud. This is a large profit in a cloud atmosphere the place customers are charged by the byte to retailer and switch information. Pure Storage’s compression know-how reduces cloud prices, together with serving to organizations scale back often-expensive ingress and egress charges.

Beyond the information discount efficiencies, Pure CBS for Azure delivers the options usually related to an enterprise block storage resolution. This contains skinny provisioning, instantaneous snapshots and clones, always-on data-at-rest encryption, snapshot scheduling, steady replication, energetic/energetic replication, QoS, Pure’s SafeMode know-how, and offload to Azure blob storage.

Introducing Pure Cloud Block Store for Microsoft AVS

Pure Storage is bringing CBS to Microsoft AVS, permitting customers to provision storage as wanted to totally use an Azure AVS deployment with out having to scale out compute assets. Microsoft and Pure Storage collaborated to deliver the answer to market, making some adjustments to Pure’s present CBS for Azure providing alongside the way in which.

Pure’s present CBS for Azure makes use of Azure’s “Ultra Disk Storage” cases. Ultra Disk Storage cases are Azure’s top-tier block storage providing, designed to offer storage for I/O intensive workloads (resembling SAP HANA). It’s high-performance but additionally the highest-priced block storage providing on the platform.

Pure and Microsoft labored collectively to permit CBS to make the most of a lower-cost storage tier, Azure’s Premium SSD v2 storage sort. On paper, this could ship half the efficiency of the Ultra Disk Storage tier, however Pure has managed to allow the lower-cost possibility with out sacrificing the efficiency. Pure claims that the brand new resolution improves cost-efficiency by 200%-300%. Making it extra compelling are enhancements to the underlying compute cases that end in as much as a 30% enchancment in throughput and IOPs.

Analyst’s Take

Pure Storage’s Cloud Block Store is a compelling resolution for almost any cloud migration effort. Its new providing for AVS makes cloud migration even simpler for IT directors, who can now use VMware’s suite of migration instruments to maneuver workloads to AVS. Pure Storage arrays already permit replication to CBS, so Pure’s on-prem clients can simply migrate their information.

The means to right-size storage, leverage acquainted migration instruments, and faucet into sturdy information safety options makes the journey to Azure VMware Solution extra streamlined than ever earlier than. Pure’s complete method, together with its information discount capabilities, accelerates the migration’s ROI, bringing enterprise storage capabilities to the general public cloud. That’s a compelling story as organizations more and more embrace the cloud.

Disclosure: Steve McDowell is an business analyst, and NAND Research an business analyst agency, that engages in, or has engaged in, analysis, evaluation, and advisory companies with many know-how firms, which can embody these talked about on this article. Mr. McDowell doesn’t maintain any fairness positions with any firm talked about on this article.

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