Pure Storage & Microsoft collaborate to enhance VMware migration to Azure

Pure Storage’s extended collaboration with Microsoft enables seamless adoption of Cloud Solutions and unlocks advanced storage capabilities for VMware workloads on Azure.

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

Gartner forecasts that in 2023, worldwide public cloud spending will grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion, up from $490.3 billion in 2022^[1]. 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, organizations 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.

“This expanded partnership between Pure Storage and Microsoft creates a significant milestone, ushering in a new age of cloud migration, and ultimately driving faster, more cost effective adoption of cloud services. Pure Cloud Block Store™ for Azure VMware Solution is just the beginning. By optimizing performance and cost at scale, we look forward to unlocking the number of mission-critical use cases that we can serve in the coming years,” commented Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer, Pure Storage.

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

• Optimize AVS Costs. With Pure Storage’s compression and deduplication technology, organizations can achieve a high data reduction ratio on VMware workloads in Azure. Combined with Pure Storage’s 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. Pure Storage will continue to innovate and leverage the best technology available in Azure. By integrating Azure’s latest storage solution, Premium SSD v2 disk, in partnership with the Azure Storage team, Pure Storage 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. Organizations 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 Pure Storage Safemode® Ransomware Data Protection: Pure Storage delivers an always-on, policy-driven snapshot creation and protection mechanism called Safemode which provides the ability to leverage Pure Storage 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: Organizations 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: Pure Storage’s 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, organizations can more easily track, manage, deploy, and provide consistent multi-cloud governance for their data.

“Our commitment to advancing Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, and the Microsoft Azure platform more broadly, with best-of-breed partnerships with vendors like Pure Storage underscores our mission to meet customers where they are today, particularly in a new world of business where speed, simplicity, and cost efficiency are critical. We’re thrilled to continue working through the next phases of our partnership to provide a fast path to the cloud with Pure Storage,” said Jurgen Willis, Vice President, Azure Specialized Workloads and Storage, Microsoft.

“VMware Cloud provides consistent and modern infrastructure for all applications, across any cloud, with low TCO. We’re pleased that Pure Storage is joining the Azure VMware Solution partner ecosystem. With Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution, existing VMware and Pure Storage on-prem customers can now migrate and modernize to Azure VMware Solution while preserving their investments in VMware and Pure Storage processes, skills, and enterprise capabilities,” said Narayan Bharadwaj, Vice President, Cloud Solutions, VMware.

^[1] Gartner. (2022, October 31). Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-user spending to reach nearly $600 billion in 2023.