First Look at the Technical Preview of Pure Storage Cloud Block Store for Microsoft™ Azure

As you start to build your hybrid- or multi- cloud environment differences in storage capabilities across various private and public clouds become more and more prominent, hindering easy data and application mobility. Pure Storage Cloud Block Store is aimed at bridging the differences between you private and public cloud environments providing consistent data services, automation and APIs to give your apps and data seamless hybrid cloud mobility.

We are introducing the Technical Preview for Cloud Block Store for Azure. Cloud Block Store for Azure is Pure’s software running natively in the cloud. By extending Purity software to Azure cloud, CBS brings all the goodness that Pure customers have come to love Pure for – reliability, high data reduction ratios, instant space-saving snapshots and ActiveCluster capabilities. Think of this as a virtual FlashArray in the Azure Cloud. 

Below are all of the features of Cloud Block Store for Azure and you will notice that they are the same that you get with FlashArray.

Below is a view of the Cloud Block Store for Microsoft Azure HTML5 interface and a on-premise FlashArray. As you can see the interfaces are identical providing a consistent experience across cloud and on-premise deployments.

Cloud Block Store for Azure Management GUI

On-premise FlashArray Management GUI

With Pure on-premises and on Azure cloud, customers will be able to unlock new hybrid cloud use cases. In addition to Cloud Block Store for Azure we have announced the general availability of CloudSnap for Azure at Pure//Accelerate which opens up the ability to offload snapshots to the cloud. CloudSnap for Azure can help if a situation occurs that will cause extended downtime on-premises, restore the latest snapshot to CBS, power up VMs and your applications are available in minutes to hours depending on the dataset size. True data mobility. 

Below are additional uses cases that fit the hybrid or multi-cloud model.

Using our Technical Preview we worked on a scenario of using asynchronous replication from an on-premises FlashArray to CBS for Azure. Since the replication is snapshot-based they are space efficient and replication point-in-time consistent copies of one or more FlashArray volumes. The replication is supported in either direction, so a workload running in Azure can be replicated on-premises and easily migrated to the platform, or cloud, of choice as business needs change. CBS for Azure enables multi-cloud, since replication can be to and from CBS for AWS, as well as an on-premises FlashArray.

In this demonstration video we show a SQL Server database is asynchronous replicated to CBS for Azure.

In addition to performing all of these operations manually using the web management GUI everything can be automated using REST APIs, Python and Windows PowerShell. 

SIGN-UP!

The Cloud Block Store for Azure beta program is now open for registration. Sign up here to be a part of the CBS for Azure beta program.

Thanks — Barkz 

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