Increase Your Agility in Azure: 3 Seamless Customer-driven Pure Cloud Block Store Upgrades

The public cloud continues to transform the way businesses manage their IT infrastructure, offering agility, scalability, and operational simplicity that traditional on-premises data centers can’t always match. With cloud-based storage, organizations can quickly deploy new environments, pay as you go, and take advantage of continuous innovation—all without waiting for hardware deliveries or complex installations.

Pure Storage^® Pure Cloud Block Store™ on Azure is designed to bring enterprise-grade storage capabilities to the cloud, providing the same resilience, efficiency, and ease of management that customers expect from Pure Storage, but with the added benefits unique to the public cloud. While some functionalities—such as Purity upgrades—are consistent across both on-premises FlashArray™ and Pure Cloud Block Store, other key features, like capacity and controller upgrades, showcase the true advantages of a cloud-native approach within the Pure Storage ecosystem.

In this blog, we’ll walk through some of the unique capabilities demonstrated in our latest technical demo video, highlighting how Pure Cloud Block Store on Azure enables seamless upgrades without the limitations of physical hardware. Best of all, everything shown in the next three sections is available to customers to execute. 

Customer-initiated Purity Upgrades:  Control on Your Terms

For years, Pure Storage customers have relied on our industry-leading Purity operating environment to deliver innovative data services, efficiency, and performance. Now, Pure Cloud Block Store users have even greater control over their storage environment with the ability to perform Purity upgrades on their own schedule.

Need the latest features or performance enhancements? You no longer have to wait for Pure Storage Support to initiate the upgrade—though if you prefer, our team is absolutely still available to assist. This added flexibility ensures that customers can quickly adopt new capabilities while maintaining the stability and reliability of their storage.

Part 1 of the technical demo video below walks you through the steps needed to set up the array for upgrade and then perform the actual upgrade itself.

Capacity Upgrades: More Options for Cost-optimized Growth

One of the advantages of the cloud is the ability to scale dynamically, but not all workloads require high-performance configurations. To provide more flexibility, we’ve expanded the available capacity points for our V10 Pure Cloud Block Store SKU, allowing customers to choose larger capacity options without necessarily increasing performance—and without overpaying for resources they don’t need. Note that this capability also extends to our V20 SKU as well.

All Pure Cloud Block Store arrays are deployed at the lowest capacity point by default, helping customers minimize cloud spend from day one. When more storage is needed, customers can seamlessly upgrade to any supported capacity point—without having to move up incrementally. This flexibility ensures that organizations can scale efficiently, paying only for the capacity they need.

Seamless Controller Upgrades: Move to Higher Performance with Zero Disruption

A new advantage of Pure Cloud Block Store on Azure over on-premises storage is the ability to perform controller upgrades on demand, without waiting for new hardware. In an on-premises environment, upgrading or migrating to a new storage device requires ordering and installing new controllers, which involves lead times for procurement and deployment.

With the release of Purity 6.8.3, Pure Cloud Block Store now offers on-demand controller upgrades, allowing customers to move from a V10 SKU to a V20 SKU whenever they need more performance. Upgrades are supported within the same Azure Managed Disk family (Premium SSD v2 and Ultra SSD). This new capability eliminates the need to redeploy or migrate data, making it easier than ever to scale storage performance in the cloud. This flexibility marks a significant milestone, giving Pure Cloud Block Store users the ability to scale both capacity and performance on demand while maximizing cloud efficiency.

Summary: Expanding Features, Storage, and Performance with Pure Cloud Block Store

The latest enhancements to Pure Cloud Block Store on Azure reinforce our commitment to delivering a cloud storage experience that is as seamless and powerful as our on-premises offerings—while leveraging the agility and scalability of the public cloud. From customer-driven Purity upgrades to flexible capacity and non-disruptive performance scaling, Pure Cloud Block Store empowers organizations to take full advantage of cloud infrastructure without compromise.

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