Block storage lets users leave data in one place and leverage it in multiple places at once.

Todd R. Weiss

March 1, 2019

3 Min Read
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Rackspace and Pure Storage are partnering to offer a high-performance block storage to customers by bringing together their respective strengths in cloud infrastructure and enterprise storage.

Built for mission-critical workloads including e-commerce, databases, disaster recovery, artificial intelligence, internet of things, machine learning and more, the Ultra-Fast Performance Rackspace Block Storage service will provide fast storage access, hybrid-cloud connectivity and low latency as businesses continue to add to their cloud investments. The block storage offering aims to help customers migrate and optimize their hybrid-cloud environments, while providing deep data security for users.

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Rackspace’s Prashanth Chandrasekar

“In the past three quarters, customers have been asking for things like this, and have even mentioned using Pure Storage sometimes, because customers have done their research already,” Prashanth Chandrasekar, senior vice president and general manager of managed public clouds at Rackspace, told Channel Futures. “Everything we do is based on demand from customers.”

The partnership between the companies is a good fit because Pure Storage is a disruptive storage provider, while Rackspace works to be disruptive in the cloud services space, said Chandrasekar.

“Throughout the entire hybrid cloud transformation process, customers are going from one cloud to another, migrating workloads and data and infrastructure,” he said. “More and more what we notice is the worry they have about migration costs.”

That’s where the new block-storage product and the collaboration between Rackspace and Pure Storage can help, he explained.

“Customers want to have a common data pool to help them move from one form factor to another, from on-premises to the cloud,” said Chandrasekar. “That’s how customers will benefit because they don’t have to move their data anymore.”

Instead, customers can leave it in one place and leverage it for any need in the cloud or on premises, simplifying their infrastructure requirements and making things much more efficient.

“That’s important because that’s one of the main reasons that customers find it difficult to migrate to or transform workloads to the cloud,” he said. “It’s a fairly involved process.”

Essentially, the two companies hope that the new service can provide a foundation for easier hybrid mobility for customers, he explained.

“This collaboration will help with all of this,” he said. “That’s the long-term vision for the partnership.”

Jack Hogan, the vice president of technology strategy for all-flash-based block storage vendor Pure Storage, told Channel Futures that the partnership between the companies will serve customers of both organizations through Rackspace’s substantial channel-partner network.

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Pure Storage’s Jack Hogan

“They’re delivering a service to our customer base and to their customer base where we each see a demand here,” said Hogan. “Customers have been asking for this to allow them to get out of managing their data centers so they can focus on their businesses.”

The partnership will allow Pure Storage to extend block-storage capabilities to Rackspace managed hosting customers who are seeking these kinds of capabilities, said Hogan.

“We’re absolutely seeing demand from our customers who want to get out of managing their data centers. This now allows a whole new capability that we can bring to our customers.”

Block storage allows each storage volume to be treated as an independent disk drive and controlled by an external server operating system. The block devices can be mounted by a guest operating system as if it were a physical disk, with the most common examples being SAN, iSCSI and local disks.

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About the Author(s)

Todd R. Weiss

Todd R. Weiss is an award-winning technology journalist who covers open source and Linux, cloud service providers, cloud computing, virtualization, containers and microservices, mobile devices, security, enterprise applications, enterprise IT, software development and QA, IoT and more. He has worked previously as a staff writer for Computerworld and eWEEK.com, covering a wide variety of IT beats. He spends his spare time working on a book about an unheralded member of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves, watching classic Humphrey Bogart movies and collecting toy taxis from around the world.

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