Pure Storage makes big hybrid push with Cloud Data Services

Flash storage player Pure Storage has announced a trio of cloud-oriented product enhancements, bundled under the name Pure Storage Cloud Data Services, that aim to allow customers an easy on-ramp to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud working.

They comprise: Cloud Block Store for AWS, which offers Pure Storage capacity in the cloud and brings storage interoperability between on-premise and public cloud deployments; CloudSnap for AWS, is a suite of cloud replication services built into Pure’s FlashArray hardware, and; StorReduce, which brings object storage data deduplication that aims to make the cloud more attractive as as a long-term backup/archive repository.

At first these services are only being offered on AWS – to coincide with that company’s Reinvent event this week – but offerings on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, “won’t be that long”, said chief technology officer Alex McMullan.

Cloud Block Store for AWS – out in beta – will provide, “essentially the same functionality” as Pure’s arrays, said McMullan, although he added, “testing so far does show a performance delta between on-premise arrays and cloud hardware, but that’s to be expected”.

Cloud Block Store will see Pure Storage capacity available from (initially only AWS) cloud marketplaces, with the company’s software running on cloud providers’ hardware.

Targeted workloads include load balancing between customer datacentres and the cloud, organisations that are re-working applications to run in the cloud including via containers.

“In the next year we expect to see customers able to take advantage of cloud arbitrage, with the ability to move workloads between providers,” he said.

Meanwhile, CloudSnap – which is now available – brings replication from Pure Storage deployments to the cloud, with multiple copies, timed copies possible and with data deduplication and compression.

StorReduce is the fruit the acquisition of a company of the same name in August, and brings object store data deduplication that allows data held on Pure Storage arrays to be more cheaply migrated to the cloud.

According to McMullan, this allows “flash-to-flash-to-cloud” as a replacement for disk-to-disk-to-tape, with customers of backup hardware such as Dell EMC’s Data Domain an explicit target.

Pure Storage is able to transition easily to hybrid cloud operations because its products are underpinned by a software stack based on object storage.

“Under the covers Pure is a software company based on an object store,” he said. “That allows Pure Storage to run natively on cloud providers’ hardware. We don’t have to collocate our hardware in the cloud and everything runs in the cloud just as it does on-premise.”

Earlier this year Pure storage put flash in all its hardware with NVMe capability built in also.