Pure Storage is partnering with Microsoft to bring its block storage technology to native Microsoft Azure services.

The new multiyear product and go-to-market partnership will leverage Azure’s new Premium SSD v2 and will introduce Azure VMware Solution (AVS) in preview.

Pure Storage argues that as public cloud adoption accelerates, enterprises want to migrate all or part of their VMware environments to the cloud. Most of these environments consume block-based storage. However, they face inconsistent storage layer management in comparison to their on-premise deployments. It also pointed to an unmet need to scale compute and storage independently to match data growth.

The Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution eliminates this barrier, the company said. As such, Geoff Greenlaw, Pure Storage’s VP, EMEA channel sales, said the partnership will deliver “a lot of opportunities” for Pure’s partners.

He said there is no shortage of customers that want to use AVS to make their VMware deployments hybrid or move full-scale to the cloud. But they face a number of challenges. These are caused by both a lack of enterprise-grade features and a resource imbalance between storage and compute.

Pure Storage’s Geoff Greenlaw

“The volume of Pure customers running VMware globally is very high,” he said. “Until now, many customers have been unable to deploy VMware in the cloud because of external storage challenges. About 70% of VMware deployments on-premises are block. In order to move from file to block, most customers are in a position requiring them to refactor their applications. As a result, the vast majority of the market is stuck on-premises.

“Pure Storage will be the first block storage solution in any VMware Cloud,” he added. “As a result, Azure VMware Solution is now the only VMware cloud that supports block storage.”

Block Storage Opportunities for Partners Around Cost Reduction

Greenlaw added that customers can achieve up to a 10-times cost reduction. This is due to the decoupling of storage and compute and superior data reduction ratio (DRR), in addition to critical copy data management capabilities and built-in ransomware features.

“This partnership creates opportunities for our partners to have meaningful, deeper engagements with their customers. But more importantly, [they] increase their margin opportunity with Pure, Microsoft and VMware working together.”

Pure Storage is targeting a mix of traditional resellers that are active in Azure and VMware and actively pushing AVS. They now have a solution to address the two primary barriers of moving from VMware on-premise to the cloud: cost and lack of features, said Greenlaw. The exec said Pure is also targeting systems integrators who have migration practices.

See the slideshow above to see the features included in the Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution.