With Pure Storage’s recently announced extended partnership with Microsoft Azure – You might be thinking “Why on earth would Azure want their customers to reduce their cloud spend?”  What’s in it for Microsoft?

Here’s 5 really good reasons why….

Why would Microsoft want to entertain a partner like Pure Storage who’s Cloud Block Store reduces their revenue from storage per customer?

Well, it only does that if you look at this on face value – if you scratch a bit deeper, there are some really good reasons why this is awesome for Microsoft Azure :

Driving greater adoption, keeping customers and huge hardware efficiency gains

1. AVS (Azure VMware Solution) has some limitations to scale – data heavy workloads will force you in to oversizing your compute clusters. Pure’s Cloud Block Store will let you scale your storage independently of your compute – ideal for high volume, data heavy workloads.
2. Discourage customers from repatriating their data. All the hyperscalers are very aware of trends of large organisations to repatriate data back on-prem.  For various reasons, usually because the costs are out of control, and often due to performance or sovereignty / compliance issues.  Where cost is concerned, if CBS helps customers reduce their storage consumption cost, they are more likely to keep their data in their hyperscalers cloud.
3. Attract new customers and growth – if there are cost barriers for large volume data moves to Azure – then help customers make some decisions with huge efficiencies on the data they ingress, egress, and inter/intra- zone transer.
4. More compute for Azure. If customers can more cost efficiently move data to the hyperscaler, then they may be more likely to consume other Azure services.
5. And here’s the real kicker: Leverage what they have better.  Pure’s leading FlashArray DRR (data Reduction Rate) extends to the cloud with Cloud Block Store.  When FlashArray is deployed on-prem, customers get to store far more data on much less NAND – giving massive cost, space and ESG savings – but in the hyperscaler, this means that for every TiB of storage that Azure buy, maintain, and deploy, they can essentially sell over and over again.  If one customer buys 100TiB of SSD storage capacity in Azure, then that’s a 100TiB sale.  But if customers deploy CBS on that same 100TiB, and only consume 20TiB of it – Microsoft could reasonably sell that same 100TiB at least 5 times over!  Less maintenance, smaller datacentre, less power, better margins.

So you see, CBS is a win-win-win for the customer, Azure and Pure Storage (oh, and the planet too 🌿)

Pures Cloud Block Store (CBS) and Azure VMware Solution (AVS) announcement here:  https://www.purestorage.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/pure-expands-strategic-partnership-with-microsoft.html