I recently had the opportunity to hear from Chadd Kenney about Pure Storage’s Cloud Data Services announcement and thought it worthwhile covering here. But before I get into that, Pure have done a little re-branding recently. You’ll now hear them referring to Cloud Data Infrastructure (their on-premises instances of FlashArray, FlashBlade, FlashStack) and Cloud Data Management (being their Pure1 instances).

The Announcement

So what is “Cloud Data Services”? It’s comprised of:

• Cloud Block Store for AWS;
• StorReduce; and
• CloudSnap for AWS.

According to Kenney, “[t]he right strategy is and not or, but the enterprise is not very cloudy, and the cloud is not very enterprise-y”. If you’ve spent time in any IT organisation, you’ll see that there is, indeed, a “Cloud divide” in play. What we’ve seen in the last 5 – 10 years is a marked difference in application architectures, consumption and management, and even storage offerings.

[image courtesy of Pure Storage]

Cloud Block Store

The first part of the puzzle is probably the most interesting for those of us struggling to move traditional application stacks to a public cloud solution.

[image courtesy of Pure Storage]

According to Pure, Cloud Block Store offers:

• High reliability, efficiency, and performance;
• Hybrid mobility and protection; and
• Seamless APIs on-premises and cloud.

Kenney likens building a Purity solution on AWS to the approach Pure took in the early days of their existence, when they took off the shelf components and used optimised software to make them enterprise-ready. Now they’re doing the same thing with AWS, and addressing a number of the shortcomings of the underlying infrastructure through the application of the Purity architecture.

Features

So why would you want to run virtual Pure controllers on AWS? The idea is that Cloud Block Store:

• Aggregates performance and reliability across many cloud stores;
• Can be deployed HA across two availability zones (using active cluster);
• Is always thin, deduplicated, and compressed;
• Delivers instant space-saving snapshots; and
• Is always encrypted.

Management and Orchestration

If you have previous experience with Purity, you’ll appreciate the management and orchestration experience remains the same.

• Same management, with Pure1 managing on-premises instances and instances in the cloud
• Consistent APIs on-premises and in cloud
• Plugins to AWS and VMware automation
• Open, full-stack orchestration

Use Cases

Pure say that you can use this kind of solution in a number of different scenarios, including DR, backup, and migration in and between clouds. If you want to use ActiveCluster between AWS regions, you might have some trouble with latency, but in those cases other replication options are available.

[image courtesy of Pure Storage]

Not that Cloud Block Store is available in a few different deployment configurations:

• Test/Dev – using a single controller instance (EBS can’t be attached to more than one EC2 instance)
• Production – ActiveCluster (2 controllers, either within or across availability zones)

CloudSnap

Pure tell us that we’ve moved away from “disk to disk to tape” as a data protection philosophy and we now should be looking at “Flash to Flash to Cloud”. CloudSnap allows FlashArray snapshots to be easily sent to Amazon S3. Note that you don’t necessarily need FlashBlade in your environment to make this work.

[image courtesy of Pure Storage]

For the moment, this only being certified on AWS.

StorReduce for AWS

Pure acquired StorReduce a few months ago and now they’re doing something with it. If you’re not familiar with them, “StorReduce is an object storage deduplication engine, designed to enable simple backup, rapid recovery, cost-effective retention, and powerful data re-use in the Amazon cloud”. You can leverage any array, or existing backup software – it doesn’t need to be a Pure FlashArray.

Features

According to Pure, you get a lot of benefits with StorReduce, including:

• Object fabric – secure, enterprise ready, highly durable cloud object storage;
• Efficient – Reduces storage and bandwidth costs by up to 97%, enabling cloud storage to cost-effectively replace disk & tape;
• Fast – Fastest Deduplication engine on the market. 10s of GiB/s or more sustained 24/7;
• Cloud Native – Native S3 interface enabling openness, integration, and data portability. All Data & Metadata stored in object store;
• Single namespace – Stores in a single data hub across your data centre to enable fast local performance and global data protection; and
• Scalability – Software nodes scale linearly to deliver 100s of PBs and 10s of GBs bandwidth.

Thoughts and Further Reading

The title of this post was a little misleading, as Pure have been doing various cloud things for some time. But sometimes I give in to my baser instincts and like to try and be creative. It’s fine. In my mind the Cloud Block Store for AWS piece of the Cloud Data Services announcement is possibly the most interesting one. It seems like a lot of companies are announcing these kinds of virtualised versions of their hardware-based appliances that can run on public cloud infrastructure. Some of them are just encapsulated instances of the original code, modified to deal with a VM-like environment, whilst others take better advantage of the public cloud architecture.

So why are so many of the “traditional” vendors producing these kinds of solutions? Well, the folks at AWS are pretty smart, but it’s a generally well understood fact that the enterprise moves at enterprise pace. To that end, they may not be terribly well positioned to spend a lot of time and effort to refactor their applications to a more cloud-friendly architecture. But that doesn’t mean that the CxOs haven’t already been convinced that they don’t need their own infrastructure anymore. So the operations folks are being pushed to migrate out of their DCs and into public cloud provider infrastructure. The problem is that, if you’ve spent a few minutes looking at what the likes of AWS and GCP offer, you’ll see that they’re not really doing things in the same way that their on-premises comrades are. AWS expects you to replicate your data at an application level, for example, because those EC2 instances will sometimes just up and disappear.

So how do you get around the problem of forcing workloads into public cloud without a lot of the safeguards associated with on-premises deployments? You leverage something like Pure’s Cloud Block Store. It overcomes a lot of the issues associated with just running EC2 on EBS, and has the additional benefit of giving your operations folks a consistent management and orchestration experience. Additionally, you can still do things like run ActiveCluster between and within Availability Zones, so your mission critical internal kitchen roster application can stay up and running when an EC2 instance goes bye bye. You’ll pay a bit less or more than you would with normal EBS, but you’ll get some other features too.

I’ve argued before that if enterprises are really serious about getting into public cloud, they should be looking to work towards refactoring their applications. But I also understand that the reality of enterprise application development means that this type of approach is not always possible. After all, enterprises are (generally) in the business of making money. If you come to them and can’t show exactly how they’ save money by moving to public cloud (and let’s face it, it’s not always an easy argument), then you’ll find it even harder to convince them to undertake significant software engineering efforts simply because the public cloud folks like to do things a certain way. I’m rambling a bit, but my point is that these types of solutions solve a problem that we all wish didn’t exist but it does.

Justin did a great write-up here that I recommend reading. Note that both Cloud Block Store and StorReduce are in Beta with planned general availability in 2019.