Announcing FlashBlade Integration with Azure Stack

As IT organizations move to hybrid-cloud, Pure Storage® for Microsoft Azure Stack brings together two great platforms. The new integration delivers unified fast file and object (UFFO) capabilities to hybrid-cloud architectures.

In partnership with Gridpro software, the integration represents the first time Pure Storage and Azure Stack Hub are physically working side-by-side in the data center. The integration joins the performance and cloud-like simplicity of Pure with the scale and operational power of Azure Stack Hub cloud infrastructure.

This integration can help you solve several challenges related to hybrid-cloud deployments, including:

• Edge applications: Data generated at the edge may need local storage and processing to meet robust latency and connectivity requirements. Consider hospitals running imaging applications or manufacturing lines in remote locations. Both need low-latency access to data and can’t afford downtime due to network outages.
• Data governance: Many organizations have data sovereignty, compliance, or security needs that mandate data can’t leave the country or a secure data center. Pairing Azure Stack Hub and FlashBlade lets you manage large-scale file and object repositories even with strict data-governance requirements.
• Consistent tooling: As more organizations adopt Azure cloud services tools and workflows, the integration provides consistent tools and processes for wherever data resides.

At Pure, we’ve worked with our partners and customers to identify use cases that can benefit from this new offering. For example:

• Modern analytics: Use high data throughput to power GPUs within Azure Stack Hub. FlashBlade provides the all-flash performance, cloud scalability, and operational simplicity needed for modern analytics to handle AI and ML.
• Rapid Restore: Rapidly recover VM instances running in Azure Stack Hub to reduce downtime. Leverage FlashBlade’s unique SafeMode™ snapshot capabilities to mitigate the effects of ransomware attacks.
• Object storage: Meet your storage needs with FlashBlade’s high-performance, scalable platform while using Azure Stack Hub in your data center. Addressing the increased need for cloud-native object storage, you can run these same applications at edge sites.

We’re excited about our continued partnership with Microsoft. At Pure, we’re continuing to create more options for deploying hybrid-cloud architectures. Read more in the Gridpro announcement and watch for more in the future.