Storage is the bedrock of our modern digital world. Now that most people carry around a micro datacenter in their pocket everywhere they go, storage has become critical to our everyday lives. Personal photos, music streaming services, IoT endpoints, and social media are just a handful of examples of how modern life has resulted in explosive data storage growth.
Storage Consumption
Enterprise technology has also seen a sharp rise in storage consumption. Datacenters have always relied on storage as a critical component to support business workloads. The cost of storage hardware has decreased dramatically, making it a lot easier to justify having data as a commodity. Cloud storage adoption has only accelerated this growth, with the ability to provision inexpensive storage on the fly and pay for only what you consume.
With this evolution in digital technology and modern applications, storage vendors are forced to pivot to stay relevant. There are so many different storage types and corresponding use cases that legacy business models may not be viable for much longer. Hybrid cloud is a reality for most enterprises at this stage of the game, and storage requirements need to enable easy and scalable solutions across private and public cloud environments.
AWS Integration
Pure Storage has been front and center in embracing the hybrid cloud world, most notably within the AWS platform. Pure is an AWS Service Ready Partner and an Advanced Technology Partner. This means that Pure Storage products are generally available for use in AWS and have demonstrated the successful integration of their products with the AWS ecosystem.
The cornerstone of Pure Storage’s integration with AWS is evident with its Cloud Block Store product. Pure Cloud Block Store utilizes underlying AWS native services to deliver a storage platform consistent with what Pure customers’ trust in their private cloud environments. One of the most significant benefits over native AWS storage is the storage efficiency inherent in the Pure platform. The efficient thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression provided by Cloud Block Store mean less storage consumption, which in the cloud world means lower storage costs. Pure cloud data management enables a unified hybrid cloud storage experience, integrating Cloud Block Store with the rest of the Pure platform. This allows for consistent APIs, automation, and data migrations regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
AWS Outposts
Pure has also made a more recent splash in being AWS Outposts ready for both FlashArray and FlashBlade. AWS Outposts is a service that brings the AWS platform on-prem via proprietary managed hardware. This service from AWS shows both its commitment to hybrid cloud and its realization that hybrid cloud adoption has a healthy future. That means traditional storage vendors have new ways to provide value with existing products. FlashArray (classic block storage) and FlashBlade (performance-focused file and object storage) are vital products that have defined Pure Storage’s rise as a storage power player. Integration with AWS Outposts brings a designation similar to the one that came during the converged infrastructure days with UCS via FlashStack, but for a new and exciting hybrid cloud platform managed by AWS.
Conclusion
Cloud storage is a highly competitive market, with traditional vendors lining up against public cloud behemoths and cloud-native startups to stake their claim in the storage landscape.
Storage also comes in many different flavors as workloads continue to evolve from traditional stacks to modern applications. Pure Storage has several product offerings that can compete in their own right across most common use cases. It will be interesting to see how well Pure can take all of these different offerings and potentially plant a flag as the leading hybrid cloud storage vendor. Making hybrid cloud storage more straightforward and attractive to consume is an excellent start down that path.
