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 services. That's where Pure Storage adds value.

"If I think of a customer that's running a petabyte of data on EBS or Azure disk, you apply these capabilities to it and that petabyte turns into 200 terabytes or even less in some cases," Kogan says. "Then you see the massive reduction that leads to their total cost."

He cites a European multi-national consumer packaged goods food and beverage business which was spending $35 million a year on Azure block storage. A consulting firm brought in Pure Storage looking for savings. Using Pure Storage Cloud, it cut the block storage bill to $11 million. That covered both the Azure infrastructure and Pure Storage Cloud software licensing. 

It's certainly possible to fine tune storage spend with the hyperscalers by using the right instance sizes and types, and not over-provisioning. Kogan says: "Our standard data reduction ratio is four to one. So I would consider those cost savings in the 10 to 25 percent level. We're talking about orders of magnitude savings, in some cases four or five times."

Although the hyperscalers see a lower cloud storage spend, customers invest the saved cash in the hyperscalers’ higher value AI services, increasing their overall commitment to the cloud supplier. So all parties benefit.

Come one, come all

There's little or no multi-vendor competition in the cloud space, as there is with the on-premises storage business, he adds: "It's completely green-field, and they're running Azure Managed Disk or Amazon Elastic Block Store. We're coming in sitting on top of that. So we're not ripping and replacing anything. We're basically optimizing in-place on what they already have, and that's supported by those cloud vendors.

Pure Storage can help customers with multi-vendor on-premises storage environments with their migration to Pure Storage Cloud. Its professional services team can assist, and it also has partnerships with technology vendors like Cirrus Data or River Meadow. "Ultimately in just about every large deal we do, migrations are scoped into it," he says.

However, these migrations are far from the only business that Pure Storage is picking up. Completely new customers with no on-premises Pure arrays but large block estates in the cloud are also asking for Pure Storage Cloud.

"I don't think we really expected that when we first built Pure Storage Cloud, viewing it as a hybrid companion to our on-premises offering," says Kogan. "Little did we expect that cloud would be a first entry point for customers, especially large customers."

Whether you're coming to Pure Storage from an on-premises environment or the cloud, the beauty of this abstracted, cloud-agnostic system is that it supports a variety of models.

"What we've created in the vision we have for customers and what we see is they're going to be hybrid," concludes Kogan. "They're going to be multi-site, and so our Pure Storage Cloud supports them across those, but it doesn't make the site silos. It makes it one interconnected virtual storage cloud."

Sponsored by Pure Storage.