Pure Storage Announces Hybrid Cloud Data Services

Pure Storage is in rebranding mode as it evolves its offers from private-cloud infrastructure to the public cloud, namely AWS. The vendor on Monday announced three cloud data services: Cloud Block Store, CloudSnap and StorReduce. (Pure Storage acquired StorReduce, vendor of a cloud-first, software-defined storage solution for managing large scale unstructured data, in August.)

The new suite of cloud offerings run natively on AWS and allow businesses to invest in a single storage architecture that unifies application deployments on-premises and in the public cloud.

Pure Storage’s Chadd Kenney

“Everyone at this point thinks that hybrid cloud is where this thing will evolve to. We think the next stage of that evolution is actually hybrid applications,” Chadd Kenney, vice president product and solutions, told Channel Futures. “Hybrid applications leverage multiple clouds and all of the good parts of each of them.”

He contends that hybrid applications require an “and,” being able to be on-premises/hosted, in a SaaS offering, or in the cloud, rather than one or another.

Pure Storage created its new strategy around: build your cloud, run anywhere and protect everywhere.

“Build your cloud” is where Pure Storage has played until now — the private-cloud space; “run anywhere” takes that experience and bridges it from the private to the public cloud; and “protect everywhere” is a new way of looking at protecting data across the public cloud and on premises.

“We realized that data was breaking the hybrid model down. [That’s] because without common data services it becomes very difficult to bridge the gap,” said Kenney. “However, with common data services, you get the same application compatibility, meaning businesses can move enterprise applications into the cloud.”

Here’s a further breakdown of the new hybrid cloud data services that allow Pure Storage software to run natively in AWS:

• Cloud Block Store for AWS: Industrial-strength block storage that runs natively in the AWS cloud. Designed to enable mission-critical applications to run seamlessly, Cloud Block Store enables hybrid mobility and adds new storage services to web-scale applications.

“We optimize this for high reliability, efficiency and performance, giving people the ability to do hybrid mobility and at the same time giving protection from on-premises to the public cloud, all while giving you the same APIs,” said Kenney.

• CloudSnap for AWS: Cloud-based data protection built right into Pure FlashArray. The company says CloudSnap allows FlashArray snapshots to be sent easily to AWS S3 storage, which enables cost-effective protection in the cloud along with flexible recovery both on premises or in the cloud.

Kenney says the FlashArray snapshot target could be a local FlashBlade or Amazon AWS S3 target.

• StorReduce: Cloud-native deduplication technology is designed to enable fast, simple, cost-effective cloud backup to AWS S3 storage, in conjunction with on-premises flash for fast recovery. It adds deduplication on top of object storage, allowing businesses to replace purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA) with flash for fast recovery, and tape with AWS3 object storage for offsite data retention. This new backup architecture – flash to flash to cloud – modernizes backup and recovery processes using flash, the public cloud, and enables flexible reuse of backup data with AWS.

CloudSnap is available now. Cloud Block Store is in limited public beta with general availability planned for mid-2019. StorReduce is entering limited public beta with general availability planned for the first half of next year, the company said.