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The capabilities and benefits of cloud computing are beyond dispute. Cloud computing is transforming the way organizations of all kinds stay agile and competitive, accelerating innovation. Each type of cloud — whether private, public, hybrid or multicloud — presents its own strengths and disadvantages depending on the company's workload and application needs.

At first glance, moving to the public cloud may seem like the easiest, one-stop solution. Although the public cloud is push-button simple to implement and operate, it's also a la carte. It often can create complexities for organizations as they embark on the journey to application preparedness for cloud shift and can get quite costly without all the proper considerations. 

On the other hand, an on-prem cloud provides the benefits of reliability, security and cost-effective operation. Yet planning, deploying and maintaining a sensible, secure on-prem data center requires considerable in-house expertise and capital expense (CapEx).

Public, private or a blend of both – what's the right solution for your organization?

Our partner Pure Storage offers "your cloud, your way" — an array of unique capabilities in private, public and hybrid cloud models that best suit each organization's requirements. Some organizations would like the benefits of cloud in a flexible service model that doesn't necessarily require the investment of building or maintaining an on-prem data center. Their ideal cloud would be there when they need it and give them the flexibility to increase or reduce what they are consuming as needed.

Pure Storage has a solution for the cloud user. Available for public cloud, on-prem or in co-location, Pure-as-a-Service™ (PaaS) delivers a cloud-like experience that's easy to initiate and ramp up, with instant access to additional on-demand capacity as needed. One subscription contract covers all selected services and can be easily increased or reduced on demand.

To ease customer concerns regarding maintenance, Pure and WWT work with customers on storage hardware implementation. Pure Storage assumes the responsibility of ownership of the hardware through the life of the contract. In this consumption-based service model, customers are billed only for the capacity that's actually used, providing flexibility and cost savings. In this way, cloud is treated as an operational expense (OpEx).

Whether customers need block, file or object storage, Pure's Storage as a Service (STaaS) offering enables customers to leverage any or all of Pure's feature-rich components in a flexible, cloud-like consumption model — and is always Evergreen. 

The PaaS offering gives customers choices. For example, Pure Cloud Block Store™ (CBS) is an innovation that Pure has developed with public cloud providers that enable users to experience the familiar look and feel of the Purity operating environment riding atop the public cloud resources. CBS offers cloud storage efficiency through data compression, thin provisioning and deduplication. This service is designed to support seamless data mobility, resilience and a consistent user experience wherever data resides.

For organizations wishing to reduce business complexity, another advantage of Pure as a Service involves the simplicity of managing a single contract for all storage services, with flexible terms that can adjust according to evolving needs.

Pure eases your ramp to the public cloud.

Some customers want to migrate to a public cloud but are uncertain where to start or how to go about moving data. Pure Storage works closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support innovative hybrid cloud use cases that take advantage of private, edge, Software as a Service (SaaS) and public cloud models all at once.

Pure cloud data services easily allow bi-directional mobility for data and applications while adding enterprise storage capabilities to the AWS cloud. Pure Cloud Block Store™ and Purity CloudSnap™ technology operate atop Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon S3, allowing for backup and disaster recovery, application and data migration and dev/test — all by leveraging AWS cloud. Customers can fulfill modern data and application requirements with Pure Storage FlashBlade unified fast file and object storage for AWS Outposts private and hybrid cloud deployments.

Running a CBS deployment of Pure Storage software in the cloud provides for native replication. Pure's asynchronous replication technology, along with CloudSnap, provides the agility to easily migrate VM and container workloads to and from the AWS cloud. For example, CloudSnap can be used to migrate FlashArray™ data to Amazon S3 and restore the data to Cloud Block Store. Once CBS has the data, you can make it available for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or VMware Cloud on AWS to run workloads in the cloud.

Strategic partnerships maximize cloud-like agility on-prem.

Pure Storage and WWT have aligned with other leaders in cloud-enabling technologies, working together to expand the capabilities of the on-prem cloud while reducing complexity.

VMware: VMware and Pure Storage have collaborated on numerous integrations, including VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Validated Designs and others. Known for its all-flash performance, industry-leading reliability and integrations that span the VMware software-defined data center environment, Pure enables VMware to virtualize even highly critical applications with confidence. Pure has teamed with VMware to help customers derive significant value from their virtual infrastructure and underlying hardware. In the course of their extensive relationship, Pure has been a design partner on countless solutions, providing seamless support for new features and integrations.

Cisco: Pure Storage collaborates with Cisco to provide customers with a satisfying return on investment for their jointly produced FlashStack converged infrastructure design. With FlashStack, Pure Storage leverages integration and testing with Cisco server and Cisco networking technologies, drawing on application use cases to produce transformational converged infrastructures. Pure and Cisco have also co-developed the first third-party integration into Cisco Intersight, a SaaS infrastructure management platform, which provides the ability to manage Pure products. All Pure Storage Flash Array families are certified and tested with Cisco server and networking offerings under different workloads. In addition to the great collaboration between Cisco and Pure, WWT was just named Pure Storage FlashStack partner of the year for 2020! Our deep understanding of both OEM platforms and our ability to integrate, automate and deploy these solutions can help provide customers with a foundation for their private cloud needs.

Portworx: Pure Storage recently acquired this leading Kubernetes data services platform for running mission-critical applications in containers in production. The acquisition enables Pure Storage to offer a subscription-based data services platform for cloud-native applications running in containers across hybrid cloud environments. Pure Storage and WWT employ Portworx technology to accelerate customers' digital transformation with ease, running any cloud-native data service, in any cloud, using any Kubernetes platform. The result is built-in high availability, data protection, data security and hybrid cloud mobility. Together, Pure and Portworx provide a complete set of Kubernetes storage choices, from bare metal or cloud storage with Portworx software-defined storage to fully managed all-flash arrays. This acquisition will drive Pure's expansion into the market for multicloud data services to support Kubernetes and containers.

Together, Pure Storage and WWT can make it your cloud.

It's the ideal melding of expertise:  Pure Storage is recognized industry-wide for its novel cloud and storage solutions — notably, its proven expertise matching unique customer needs with a simple, flexible mix of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions. At the same time, WWT works as the customer's trusted advisor to understand how a cloud solution would best fit their total business picture. 

We can recommend the most sensible migration strategy and execute an efficient, cost-effective deployment. Completing the picture is our ecosystem of leading technology vendors who provide the enabling services and solutions that bring your cloud to life.

To learn more, visit the ATC environment for labs, demos, workshops and other resources that provide first-hand experience and customized cloud solutions from Pure Storage and WWT.

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