Cloud Storage: What is Pure Storage Cloud Block Store?
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What is Pure Storage Cloud Block Store?
Pure Storage Cloud Block Store is an enterprise-grade, software-defined cloud architecture that combines industry-leading storage with enterprise data services. Cloud Block Store provides cloud-native resources, such as data protection and mobility services, which deliver optimized cloud experiences that continuously improve over time.
Pure Cloud Block Store enables your organization to run mission-critical applications on the cloud. It also empowers cloud storage for web-scale applications and provides a unified infrastructure across all your various cloud environments.
How does Pure Cloud Block Store work?
Pure Cloud Block Store is comprised of two Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that act as controllers. These instances are responsible for processing data and providing services like data reduction, encryption, snapshots and replication.
The initial deployment relies on seven instances known as Virtual Drives, which copy and store data onto Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Cloud Block Store instances can then be upgraded with extra capacity by adding seven Virtual Drives per upgrade. These are performed by Pure Storage Support in an automated manner, which removes the responsibility from your IT teams.
What are the benefits of Pure Cloud Block Store?
Pure Storage Cloud Block Store seamlessly integrates with Pure's on-premises cloud data infrastructure to help you deliver a true hybrid architecture. As a result, you can develop, migrate and run applications across your hybrid environments, recover hosted or on-premises workloads in the cloud, and achieve high availability and reliability levels.
Critical benefits of Pure Cloud Block Store include:
Enhanced cloud storage: Pure Cloud Block Store provides you with enterprise-grade resiliency for your cloud applications. This includes industry-leading predictable and reliable performance, thin, deduplicated and compressed data, and highly secure storage.
Simplified cloud data migration: Pure Storage Cloud Block Store ensures you enjoy seamless data mobility between your various cloud environments or from on-premises to the cloud. It integrates with solutions like AWS Migration Services and Azure Migrate and Site Recovery to simplify reliable data migration and replication. This provides the agility required to easily migrate container workloads and virtual machines to and from the cloud.
Accelerated automation and development: Pure Cloud Block Store gives you a jumpstart on cloud workflow and storage automation. It ensures instant clones and snapshots that save space and accelerate the spinning up development testing (DevTest) environments. As a result, it can dramatically the time it takes to get software to market and reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Develops once, run anywhere: These accelerated development capabilities enable you to create and test on AWS cloud storage and quickly deploy mission-critical applications on-premises. This is possible by running the same application programming interfaces (APIs), automation and orchestration in all locations.
Bi-directional mobility: Pure simplifies the process of bi-directional replication, which ensures that once data is recovered, it can be migrated back to your cloud or on-premises repositories.
High-speed disaster recovery (DR): Pure's solution enables the replication of cloud and on-premises data to AWS cloud for DR. This allows you to protect snapshots in Amazon S3 and restore it in Cloud Block Store and leverage AWS cloud storage for DR.
Highest possible availability: Pure enables you to deliver the highest possible availability for applications on the public cloud. Cloud Block Store enables the use of Pure's ActiveCluster solution, which provides high availability for mission-critical applications.
Cost-efficiency: Pure's solution enables you to lower costs with industry-leading data reduction and provisioning capabilities.
How does Pure Storage Cloud Block Store work in practice?
Every public cloud solution offers its own unique challenges and functionality. This could include challenges with optimizing availability, issues with data compression and deduplication, struggling with provisioning, and a range of other performance factors. That's because managing a modern cloud data environment can be highly complex.
However, Pure Storage Block Store has been developed to simplify this process. The solution can be deployed in many ways and for various use cases, such as application migration, enhanced data management and mobility, and high availability.
Common use cases of Pure Storage Cloud Block Store in practice include:
Simple storage management: Complexity often gets in the way of your teams doing their jobs effectively. Pure Cloud Block Store provides you with simple but consistent data storage and replication management, freeing your teams to focus on doing their jobs and driving value to the business. Pure's engineering removes the need to understand the various elements of flash storage and controllers and provides them with the latest and greatest cloud storage features.
Optimized cloud spending: Pure's solution enables you to reallocate storage spending to cloud services that improve your business. Features like thin provisioning and 100 percent efficient clones and snapshots are crucial to reducing your storage footprint and optimizing your cloud spending. You're then able to reinvest that spending into more valuable public cloud resources, such as applications and development.
Hybrid DR: Pure Cloud Block Store enables you to efficiently replicate data to the public cloud and failback and recover to your data center. This enhances the mobility of data from on-premises into the public cloud, maintains compression and deduplication, and provides you with greater levels of flexibility. For example, it enables you to use your network more efficiently and reduce egress costs between different availability zones and regions.
Cloud Snap: A key benefit of using DR with the public cloud is not paying for resources you don't use. Pure brings you this same benefit to your cloud architecture through Cloud Snap, which replicates FlashArray or Cloud Block Store snapshots into solutions like Azure, Amazon S3 or an NFS server. This ensures cost-effective, long-term retention and enables the native movement of snapshots to the cloud for backup and compliance.
Lift and shift migration: Changing DR and implementing it into cloud architectures has traditionally been difficult and time-consuming. But Pure simplifies this move and improves the process by replicating data to the public cloud and running production on Cloud Block Store.
DevTest: Clones and snapshots tend to be costly or have limited availability in Azure. Pure enables you to create hundreds of thousands of them at almost zero cost and without consuming vast amounts of data capacity.
How WWT helps with Pure Cloud Block Store
WWT combines Pure Storage and AWS partner offerings in an innovative ecosystem of physical and virtualized labs for technology solutions. This showcases the benefits of Pure Cloud Block Store and educates you on how to deploy and integrate the cloud architecture to enjoy the best digital business outcomes.
Discover the value of the Pure Storage and WWT partnership in our Cloud Block Store Labs session.