Tag: CBS

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Continuing to drive Evergreen Storage in Azure

One of our goals with Purity (our operating software on Pure Cloud Block Store which also of course runs on FlashArray) is to deliver the Evergreen Storage model to the cloud. This means we continue to innovate our platform with no changes to how you create, deploy, or manage the front end. Denser. Faster. More efficient. Cheaper. Better. More features. You subscribe to our storage–and it only gets better from there. There is no “sunk cost” on that subscription. In the case of the public cloud, we continue to analyze the available infrastructure and see how we can incorporate it into CBS to achieve one or more of those enhancements. Our engineering team becomes your cloud storage expert. We analyze, test, make our product better, and you get the impact.

Last year, a new storage tier in Azure became available in the form of Premium SSD v2. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-azure-premium-ssd-v2-disk-storage/

This is a new tier of storage, nestled between the existing Ultra SSD and Premium SSD (v1). When v2 became available, our engineering team dug in. I/O profiling, workload assessments, CPU interactions, and more. How does it behave? How can we take advantage of it? Does it make sense for us? After awhile, we found through all of the optimization we made in Purity and the general ways of how Purity works, we could incorporate it. Our early efforts in the use of commodity SSDs at Pure and then the transition to direct flash modules have only continued to pay off in ways unrelated to hardware flash.

This week, we released our next update to Pure Cloud Block Store in Azure. This new version, 6.4.7, includes support for Premium SSDv2 as well as new VM controller types in the E-series. What does this mean?

This new version is 2-3x more cost efficient to run than our previous version (which was already saving customers money).

It is also up to 30% faster in terms of IOPS and throughput.

It even has improved latency consistency due to some engineering work to take advantage of the newer Intel processors in the new Azure VM controller type we chose.

The product only gets better: Faster AND Cheaper. Our goal is to allow you to spend your budget in more strategic ways in the cloud–no more should storage be a top line item in your bill. Spend that money to transform your business.

So if you are looking to optimize your storage costs, look no further. With this latest version, we improve that ROI even more. Premium SSDv2 drops our operating costs by 2-3, while thin provisioning and data reduction further drops the spend on storage (average data reduction still hovers around 5 to 1), compounding the cost benefit. If you move directly to premium SSDv2, you can improve your costs, but if you move to CBS using Premium SSDv2 you can improve them far more.

Plus you get:

Don’t forget Pure Cloud Block Store can be entirely run and managed by Pure Fusion–allowing you to customize and manage your CBS (and/or FlashArray) fleet via the policy-driven, storage-as-code platform.

What excites me about all of this? We are just barely getting started.

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Optimize your Cloud Storage Bill

Most of us try to optimize how we personally spend money–and a common way is to examine your overall operating expenditures and figure out how you can reduce it. How much do I spend on groceries? Can I buy cheaper groceries? Can I buy less? What streaming services do I pay for? Should I cancel all of them? Some of them? Drop down on the tiers? Etc.

This is where we find money in our budget. We certainly try increase our income, but at the same time a surefire and impactful way to improve “cash at hand” is to reduce, in some way, what we spend. With the goal of not returning that money to our employer of course, but to invest it in some more impactful way to improve our life or our future. Maybe buying something cool, investing in retirement, taking a trip, whatever. Even if you do increase your income, making these changes just allow you to have even more money to spend in more impactful ways.

Cloud costs are no different. Budgets don’t always increase–an easier path to do more is to make better use of the money you do have to spend. This is essentially a universal truth.

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Can Pure make cloud storage better?

Cloud Block Store is now GA! About a year ago, we announced our intentions–to bring Purity (the OS for the FlashArray) to AWS. I wrote a post about it here:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/2018/11/announcing-pure-storage-cloud-block-store-for-aws/

In the past 10 months I have been pretty focused on learning AWS. Not just how to use it, but more importantly, how others are using it. It has been a fun ride–definitely already incorporated some of my learnings into my solution work for on-premises integration and have some cool stuff coming. A lot of my work has been of course on using it, how to deploy EC2, how to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS, managing S3, CloudFormations, IAM, SSM, using the billions of other services in AWS. But much of my focus has been on listening to what people have seen, learned, and want to do with public cloud. AWS and the like have had a decent amount of runway now, so there have certainly been some lessons learned.

Continue reading “Can Pure make cloud storage better?”