I am very excited about this new development in cloud storage via Pure storage. Cloud Block Store is Pure’s own Purity OS running in AWS.
This is a huge development because it will allow companies to leverage abilities that have been unavailable in native AWS. Space saving features such as deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning will help keep costs down.
Yes, you heard right; Pure Block Store can support VMware Cloud on AWS. By presetting iSCSI volumes which can be presented up to the VM in VMC on AWS. More importantly, if you currently are a VMware shop today and have Pure Storage in your environment this will make hybrid cloud and cost efficiency with hybrid cloud easier than ever.
5 Use cases for Pure Block Store:
- Disaster Recovery: Purity//Protect is a bidirectional replication facility to replicate data to and from the cloud. If you have applications running in the cloud you can create a policy to replicate back on-premises. If you run apps on-premises, you can replicate locally, remotely to other FlashArray™, FlashBlade™ or NFS targets OR to the cloud. You can even do both at once.
- Migration to/from the Cloud: Having the same common data layer allows your data and applications to be transferred across cloud via our bidirectional replication and CloudSnap.
- Backup to the Cloud: CloudSnap™ makes a backup utility to back up your FlashArray at the array, volume, or VM level. CloudSnap is based on our portable snapshot technology which encapsulates metadata and enables the ability to restore any portable snapshot to any FlashArray on-premises or to Cloud Block Stores in the public cloud.
- High Availability Cloud-to-Cloud: For Apps that are cloud native, you can leverage ActiveCluster within or across availability zones for business continuity. This is an awesome addition for existing enterprise applications and even more so for web scale applications, as resilience doesn’t need to be developed or re-architected, it is already in the foundation.
- Data Protection / Backup: CloudSnap provides simple, built-in, local and cloud data protection, backup, and even migration. CloudSnap moves snapshots directly to S3 in AWS for low cost storage. These snapshots can be restored back on-premises to a FlashArray or to Cloud Block Store in AWS. You can even back up a volume from a FlashArray to S3 in AWS, delete it off the FlashArray to alleviate space constraints, then restore it back in the cloud or on-premises when you need it back. It is metadata-aware and only sends back the incremental data that is needed.
Finally, I am excited to see a company like Pure with their capacity efficiency saving landing in AWS. This will allow better use of storage resources in the cloud in the future and cutting down on overall cost of EC2 instances for storage. I am especially excited to see the VMware Cloud on AWS developments as I only expect those integrations to grow in the future.