Pure Storage Announces Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution

Pure Storage has announced a new block feature of its Cloud Block Store (CBS) designed for Azure VMware Service.

CBS now provides block storage for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) that functions just like on-site block storage from Pure. It means VMware clusters in AVS can be configured using LUNs and get all the regular block storage mechanisms just like a physical cluster in a datacentre.

VMware storage in AVS has so far been limited to vSAN configurations that require a lot of instance CPU or external storage that mostly connects via NFS. Both of these options have been lacking for enterprises that want to move workloads to VMware on Azure but keep them functioning similar to on-site iterations. Not having to change very much about how you already run VMware is a major reason for choosing Azure VMware Solution as a target.

Pure said they spent a lot of time with customers checking on what they were trying to do before building this new feature. A big challenge was cost, especially for databases and other data-heavy workloads, but another was the lack of functionality like rapid cloning, VAAI operations, and immutable snapshots for ransomware protection. Operators have become used to the features available with on-site deployments and having to give them up when moving to the cloud would often make Azure VMware Solution unviable.

Pure took advantage of the recently released Premium SSD v2 software in Azure, which is significantly cheaper than Ultra SSD. Because of how CBS is structured, Pure could upgrade the CBS controllers from the D-series to the E-series VM instance type and improve performance, even on the cheaper Premium SSD v2 layer.

“We’re two to three times cheaper than our previous platform and about 30% more performant,” said Cody Hosterman, Senior Director of Product Management at Pure Storage. When coupled with storage that has all the same data services that enterprise customers are familiar with, it’s much easier to adopt VMware on Azure and operate it like just another cluster.

CBS can pull this off because of the way it’s built. CBS treats low-level cloud resources like another sort of hardware. The Purity operating environment end-users see is the same code that runs on physical FlashArray and FlashBlade. Just as the software on physical arrays has some low-level adaptations to the actual hardware, so too does CBS adapt to the type of cloud it’s on.

Comfort of the Familiar

There are other ways to solve this challenge, but they’re not especially attractive to a lot of enterprise customers. One method is to use cloud instances to run software-defined storage backed by a cloud storage service. This is essentially how vSAN works in the cloud. It gets expensive because you’re paying for extra compute instances to provide the storage layer. This approach tends to suit larger clusters with fairly uniform storage requirements, not the particular demands of a few key databases.

A second option is to have your own physical array near the cloud and connect to it via iSCSI tunnelled through ExpressRoute. This can work well, but it does require giving up some of the cloudiness that you were looking for by moving to the cloud in the first place, like the elasticity of on-demand resources and rapid provisioning to different regions.

The way Pure’s Cloud Block Store is designed, it functions like a storage array in the cloud but without the overheads introduced by abstracting cloud instances with software-defined storage. There’s nothing inherently wrong with software-defined storage options—they function just fine—it’s just that for some use cases, like the databases and data-heavy dev/test or analytics workloads we’re discussing here, they’re just too expensive to justify.

Moving existing VMware workloads into Azure has proved tricky for enterprises. They often need to give up the data services they’re used to, like fast clones of databases for rapid development environment provisioning, or pay a lot more for block storage that chews up CPU instance allocations.

While it’s possible to rebuild things to better match the way cloud wants systems to work, that’s a lot of extra, risky work for organisations that want a close replica of their production environment to run DR. Yes, they could move to more cloud-native approaches, but they invested a lot in operations on VMware and rebuilding it all just to end up back in roughly the same place isn’t attractive. IT projects tend to run late and go over budget, so there’s no guarantee of success with a more complex approach.

For a lot of enterprise customers, a vendor backed option like Cloud Block Store might do enough, at a good enough price, to enable a project to go ahead. The more complex work of refactoring applications to use a cloud operating model can be left to another day, for the apps that really need it.

Pure Cloud Block Storage for Azure VMware Solution is available in preview in 16 Azure regions globally.