1:01:41 Webinar
Ask Us Everything about Everpure Cloud Azure Native for Azure VMs
This month we’re diving into Everpure Cloud Azure Native for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). You’ll learn how it delivers enterprise-grade block storage through a fully managed, Azure-native experience. As organisations look to balance cloud costs, performance, and operational simplicity, infrastructure teams need storage that scales with their workloads without adding complexity.
This webinar first aired on 7 August 2026
The first 5 minute(s) of our recorded Webinars are open; however, if you are enjoying them, we’ll ask for a little information to finish watching.
Click to View Transcript
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another Ask Us Everything, this time about Everpure Cloud and specifically around Azure Native, for Azure VMs. Have a great session planned for you today, and a few different guests who are gonna help us answer your questions because that's what this is all about. That's why we call it Ask Us Everything.
We'd love to call it the phrase that you're more familiar with, but if you didn't know that already, that's actually trademarked by, the platform that normally runs that. So we call it Ask Us Everything. Same idea. So with us today are Nick Scola, David Staman, and Joe Hughes.
Hi gang. How you doing? Doing great. How are you doing, Frank? Fantastic. It's Friday. You know it's a great topic when not just two, but three Everpure experts are needed to answer the questions, so we feel very privileged.
So yeah, with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Joe, David, and Nick to give us sort of a brief rundown on what we're gonna be talking about today, and, you know, to help kind of queue up all the questions that you all may have. I know this is one that has been, interesting to say the least, a space that has had a lot of movement in it.
And I know that part of the focus on the Azure VMs is because of the flux that's been happening around virtualization and how that's kind of combining with the move to the cloud that's happening for a lot of organizations. So, you know, if one of you wants to help kind of set the stage of where we are right now, and especially Everpure Cloud and its, its, its move into the Azure Native space,
feel free to jump on in. Yeah. I think, like, one of the important stuff So I guess we can also sort of, sort of do quick introductions. So David Staman. I've been here at Pure about six and a half years now.
Started off as a solution architect and kind of worked my way up. I now lead our technical strategy for our cloud and virtualization. So I've been in this space for a very long time, and I've been super lucky to work with Nick and Joe here over the past few years around what we're doing and kind of sort of what we're growing in this space.
Excellent. Thanks, David. Nick, you wanna jump in? Nick Scola. So I'm a principal cloud technical specialist here at Everpure. I joined, back in November, so I've been here almost nine months, but I am no stranger to Everpure, formerly, you know, Pure Storage. I was, one of the early customers way back in the day and, you know, one of the things that
really attracted me to, Everpure was the fact that they are branching out into, you know, overall cloud-focused and really looking at more data as opposed to, you know, managing storage, and I think that's really one of the things that I, I'm looking forward to talking to, today. And, you know, with that, I'll hand it over to Joe.
Howdy y'all. Joe Hughes, field solutions architect here at Everpure. I've been here for just over five years now, and, I'm mostly here to run Q&A for the session. Well- Awesome we're happy you're here, Joe.
Either way. Yeah, so I think- So David, yeah, do you wanna, do you wanna give us a little bit of background given that you've been here for a minute and- and, and I love how both of you really emphasize the fact that, you know, it's not an either/or on-prem or cloud- Mm-hmm it's how do IT organizations actually manage all this storage. Yeah, and I think what's important here, so
we've had, our cloud solutions for about five, five and a half years now, maybe a little bit longer. We started in AWS, and then we moved to Azure. And so one of the things we sort of thought about is back in the day it was called Cloud Block Store. We then rebranded that to Pure Storage Cloud, and then obviously with our rebrand, we renamed it to Everpure Cloud.
And so Everpure Cloud Dedicated was what that formal, former product was. But couple years ago, we were approached by Microsoft to kind of create what we call Everpure Cloud Azure Native, and it really was a, a game-changing experience that allowed us to integrate things in a much better way. Azure has something which they call an Azure Native ISV service, or now called an Azure
Native Integration, and what that allows us to do is take partners, like Everpure, to act and operate like a first-party service, but with our services how we've traditionally done it. So it gives customers the ability to deploy via the Marketplace, bill through the Marketplace, consume Marketplace, get support through Azure, all of these things that they do just like their services.
And so customers, while they can use Dedicated and get a self-managed solution, Azure Native is that cloud-like experience that really just greatly simplifies it and gives customers cloud storage, but with all the benefits of Everpure. So our thin provisioning, our deduplication, our compression, our performance, our availability, our savings, right? All of those things that we wanna pass along.
Yeah, and I, I think that's a great point, especially since our approach to cloud from the very beginning, I remember when Cloud Block Store was first announced, gosh, eight years or so ago- coming up on it, was that it was purity, you know, the same OS that's running on your on-prem boxes, running in the cloud. And so the fact that we can now make it even more native and integrated within, a cloud
platform like Azure is, is really cool. Yeah, definitely. And I think, like Nick, he, he said you've been here nine months, right? Is you've, you've gotten tossed into the fire drills. Like, hey, we have this one, and then we have this brand-new thing.
So I think you've had a little bit of experience. I think definitely talking with our customers around all the cool stuff. You don't have, you don't have to worry about all the previous challenges we once had. Well, it, it's funny 'cause- The, the interesting thing to me is that half of our customers are new to Everpure.
Like, I, I was expecting we'd walk in, we've got, you know, tens of thousands of customers, you know, all over the world. I'm just gonna go talk to those folks, and it'll be nice and easy. And instead, you know, I'm having conversations with people that have never heard of us. So it, it, it's really cool to be able to tell them all the great things that, you know,
we've innovated over the years, and some of the things I experienced when I was a customer, right? As, like you mentioned, the data reduction, the snapshots, how we do cloning, you know, all the things that we sometimes almost take for granted. And, they're actually really innovative technologies that we can now bring to cloud customers the same way that we have, you know,
for those on-prem customers for years. Awesome. Well, hey, we actually have a poll that we'd love our audience to, take a look at. So basically we're just asking what your percentage of overall infrastructure and application workloads are currently hosted on Azure VMs.
And then following up with, how concerned are you about Azure storage spend, both of which are areas that we're hearing back from our, our own customers, and a lot of the IT folks that we, we talk to are, are, you know, very interested in both these topics. So love to get everyone We'll leave that up for a minute, let everyone have a chance to take a look at it. And of course, if that cues any questions for
you, prompts any questions, feel free to jump in in the Q&A and, let us know what those might be. Yeah, and I think sort of while that's being pulled up, I think one of the sort of things to think about is, like, when we kind of had our, our storage out front, right? And Kevin, you mentioned eight years ago we, we announced it.
It's really we kind of said, "Hey, we have block storage in the cloud. Come use that." And that doesn't really resonate with customers. But what we've really found out over this time, and again, Nick's embedded in these conversations every day, is we really have two customers that come to us, right? We have customers who have been in the cloud for a while and need help, and traditionally
that's around option two, is we are having too much spend and we are concerned. We need to free up budget. We want to be able to help augment that. What can you do to help me? But at the other side, we have customers who are saying, "Hey, we're looking at our cloud
journey." It used to be a cloud-first mentality, now it's kind of cloud preferred. But I'm investigating whether I'm gonna go hybrid, whether I'm gonna go PaaS, whether I'm gonna go IaaS. Like, ultimately what's, what's best for me, right? Is there really a difference with what storage options I might choose as you go down that path?
Great point. Great point. It's, it's a journey. That's I think that's the key thing that people are finding out. Like we said before, it's not either/or. Mm-hmm. Well, it looks like we've got our firth que-
first question from Heath. Is there any other storage area that Everpure Azure Storage opening to other than Block? Yeah, so you wanna take that one first, Nick? So yeah, I mean, we're looking at all kinds of options when it comes to storage. I think the one that we hear the most about is, you know, obviously file and object, and I, I
hear that probably, every week when speaking to customers. I know the team's been working really hard to, you know, evaluate the best way to deliver that. You know, we do have those capabilities in the data center, and I think it's just a matter of time, before we start delivering those into Azure as well.
But I, I think really the goal is to provide you with a fully, you know, baked solution across all these different protocols that you would typically consume, right? We started out focused on Azure VMware, you know, looking at those, VMware-based workloads in the cloud. Now we're moving on to native Azure VMs and, you know, the goal is eventually to broaden that to other, you know, type platform as a
service offerings as well as, you know, file protocols and that other thing. So Yeah, and I think that's important. Like, one of the really cool things about the Azure native service and the Azure native integration is that when you think about what Azure does is they have what they call resource providers.
And so Azure VMs is a resource provider, Azure Storage is a resource provider, Azure VMware Solution, AKS, et cetera. And so now that Everpure, as our own resource provider, we can now integrate. And so part of where we will go and expand next is really around where our customers want us to go and expand next, but also what we're seeing in the market.
We targeted AVS at the very beginning because that's what was new, that was shiny. Customers were building this hybrid scenario. But right during that time is where we had the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, which really disrupted all that. And so we thought about, what is the next evolution?
Where are customers looking? And that's again with virtual machines. But now as we look into this AI era, and all the other items happening is could AKS be next, right? Could Azure Red Hat OpenShift be next?
Could it be file, right? We're really looking at where the market's gonna drive us because we wanna make sure that we're actually building a solution that customers will consume, and they're the ones that are asking for it. So kind of, Heath, to your question is that if there are specific workloads, we'd love to understand what those are.
Again, if you're a current Pure customer, reach out to your account team and we're more than happy to have conversations. And if you're not, we're also listening as well. We're always here to, to help drive that. Yeah, basically continuing that journey, and I think this is a good example of it, not only
integrating even more tightly with Azure, but then specifically around the VM, service that's offered, mainly because most of our customers, have already been using I mean, virtualiza- virtualization was just a huge, impetus for people moving over to, Pure and Everpure over the years, because of how well our technology, the ease of use, the seamlessness, you know, everything about it made sense.
But of course with, with the business shift that's happened, with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware- It's had everyone taking a look at, okay, what are the other options? And this is just another way that we've tried to stay, you know, responsive to our customer base on where they want to go and where they might not have even necessarily thought of going, but now have more options with that easy button that Everpure has always provided.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the thing. We're, we're seeing so many more customers looking at the cloud as, you know, an option now because of, like you mentioned, the Broadcom acquisition, the, the, the cost of hardware, you know, that we're seeing. You know, there's been the, the NANDpocalypse, right, where- Yeah things don't cost the same
amount that they used to. So I think we're seeing a lot more customers evaluating all their options and whether it's, you know, staying on VMware and, and leveraging AVS or moving to something, like David mentioned, like ARO and using that, Red Hat or OpenShift. There's definitely a lot of, different evaluations being had by our customers, and I, I just appreciate the fact that we, we have a
solution for really a lot of those landing zones that they're trying to get to, you know, regardless of, what platform they're going for. Yeah, I think that's very important. So I guess kind of like, sort of just thinking about a question while we're waiting for some of the other ones to come in, is I know this comes up a lot.
Like, Joe, you, you covered cloud for a bunch before kind of Nick was here too, but I know one question we get asked, right, Azure has their own storage. Why are they looking at other vendors to sort of help augment? Like, are there specific things that really differentiate what Everpure can do versus just traditional Azure storage?
Oh, you're muted, Joe, if you were gonna try and answer. Yeah, I was trying to find my controls real quick. It's, it's been, interesting to have to come back and ex- essentially go back to what were kind of the basics for a lot of us that have been doing this for a long time in the industry to explain, you know, these were the features and the functionality that
came along with having enterprise-grade storage, because that's something that's totally new to cloud, right? Typically, you're gonna have a lot of differing features across every possible storage offering that you have. Not every one, not even every tier in the same storage offering is gonna give you the same
features, and potentially will keep you from upgrading or using, a specific, type of storage in any particular region or for a certain application. So it becomes a lot of overhead to really just try and juggle staying up with everything that comes out, every new offering, every update to an existing offering that you're using to just understand, okay, is the thing that I needed here yet?
Whereas with Everpure and running Purity, like, everything is included. It's all in the box. The only thing you essentially have to do is just do a quick upgrade on the code, which is non-disruptive inside of the environment, to get new features as we release them, right? The only requirement we have for running replication is that you have two arrays, right?
Or two instances of Everpure Cloud. So going back and, and really just trying to break down, yeah, all those things you had to deal with before, all that kind of goes away, and then having to explain to customers why and, and, like, why would Microsoft want us to be making their cloud spend on storage more efficient, you know?
And, and really, it's we want customers to be spending those dollars to consume more Azure services that they're gonna get a lot more functionality and a lot more use case out of than just keep the lights on for infrastructure. That's a great point. Yeah. It's more about the innovation and other things that you can do.
I mean, and that's, that's kind of the part of the easy button that Everpure has always delivered within even on-prem storage was, you know, it, it wasn't just that it was great, fast, you know, flash medium, but the fact that you could fit so much more storage in there, do much more with it, and then kind of have it be set and forget. So now you can be innovating in a lot of other areas.
So at, I, I, I, I think that's a great point that it's just kind of continuing that same journey into the cloud. We do have a couple of, questions I, I'd like to switch over to. Yeah. I think Go, go ahead, David. Yeah. No, I was gonna tie that in. So Lincoln had two great questions, and I'll
kind of tie that in a little bit, right? One of the things was sort of what Nick mentioned around the supplypocalypse, right? And one of the benefits of us is that with our thin provisioning, our deduplication compression, we optimize Azure's own storage of what they provide. So again, they have more available to their customers, so they love us for that.
And so for a lot of customers, they once had to think about, especially if they're familiar with Dedicated, is you almost knew how the sausage was made. We had a dual controller architecture with a bunch of drives, and over time, cloud stuff changes. And this is really the difference between a PaaS service and a SaaS service, is that when
you think about it, back in the day, Premium V2 disks didn't exist, so we built our original architecture based off Ultra SSCs. But once Azure released Premium SSD V2, it actually provided about a 30% to 40% performance bump, or 2X performance bump and about a 30% to 40% drop in underlying price of the underlying storage.
And so that actually was a huge benefit to us. But one of the sort of challenges that we sometimes see with that is that there may not always be an in-place migration, or there might be challenges with customers to be able to adopt that. To Joe's point, they might have had to do a Purity upgrade, which means they need a maintenance window and all of these things to
really understand what's happening, and there might be additional questions that come up with some of the stuff. With the SaaS service, all of this changes. And this sort of leads into the second question, is what are the performance tiers and what is the availability? And that's something that is a lot easier for us to adopt 'cause when it's a managed service,
we have full control. We have our pipelines, we have our automation, we have all of this stuff. And so when we think about it is what it looks like under the covers doesn't really matter. R- the architecture today could be completely different than what's tomorrow because Azure
can come up with new instance types. They can come out with new storage, right? We can do all of these things that customers don't necessarily have to worry about making that changes. We will seam- seamlessly do that migration in the back end, and they might
get some of those benefits. So at least on, like, the overall, availability, stuff And now we're getting more questions, so I'm kind of losing some of them, around, right? That's really that key. And the key thing around the performance tiers is if you're familiar with the old solution, right?
There was, like, a V10, a V20, a V50. You had to think about what model do you need for your specific things. With Pure//E's we're gonna simplify that, is with Azure native there's a slider when you deploy our storage pool. It- today it starts at eight hundred megabytes, and then it goes to two thousand and forty-eight.
That is going to expand in the future. And so you don't really need to think about tiering, is you move that slider and as you go up, we might expand. We might increase performance. We're gonna do one of those things.
And so performance is a lot more flexible of needing to know what you actually need today and provision for that versus what are the capabilities to give you the performance that you might need to use for your workload. So I'll kind of pause there, and I guess Nick or Joe, any, any thoughts on that before we sort of come into, some of the other questions?
I think y- you kinda nailed it, right? It's our goal is to deliver an outcome to our customers, right? It's they, they have a certain level of service that they're trying to hit, and we're gonna do what we need to do on the back end of the service to make sure that they achieve that.
Similar to what we do, you know, with our Evergreen//One service, right? When customers are approaching us in the data center, right? The, the goal is make sure that we have the capabilities to deliver this, and then as we find newer, better ways, let's say, you know, Azure comes out with, you know, new hardware or there's new capabilities, we're going to incorporate those new capabilities same way
that we moved from, you know, Ultra to Premium and V2. It- it's we're gonna continue to innovate over time and, and make the solution better, you know, every step of the way. Yeah, definitely. And so that sort of leads into, like, w- again, one of the other questions, right? Is if we think about, the availability and where do we work, right?
Is today the solution is available within a single availability zone, and so it is zonal. So if you think about some of the stuff like VMSS where it might distribute your VMs between different availability zones, you're still bound by that underlying stuff. But the benefit of a service is that we can always make additional changes, right? Because it's a lot more flexible on how Everpure manages it, we could actually better
and easily more implement CRS storage and pass that along to the customer. They don't really need to think about all the intricacies that might come into it around networking, architecture, security, et cetera, is what they need to know is they might just set a flag that says, "I want this disk to be available across multiple availability zones," and we'll ship that. And so those are ultimately, again, similar to
what platforms we might dive into, is being able to sort of scale and do those makes it easier. The architecture gets a lot more easier because the only architectural decision you have to know is which availability zone is the storage pool deployed into today, and I'm gonna connect my workloads to that one or other ones all at the same time.
I, I think that's a key point, too. It's, you know, we ha- Everpure Cloud is, is really the overall service, right? We do have different offerings underneath Everpure Cloud. So we mentioned earlier that Everpure Cloud Dedicated, that's more of a customer-deployed in your type, in your account solution, right?
Where that's where customers would think about things like, you know, scale sets and how we can get redundancy and all that and which is all available within Dedicated. You know, I think we started that in, like, six ten six or something. But the goal is really do you wanna even have to worry about that? 'Cause we're always trying to make things simpler.
So if you don't have to worry about deploying this into your environment and you can do it in a simpler, easier to use, easier to consume fashion, I think that's where you can start to focus more of your time on those, you know, new initiatives, things like AI and all the other, you know, things that you're being tasked with. Instead of having to worry about managing storage, your storage is gonna manage itself.
Yeah, and I think that sort of leads into sort of, like, some of the next two questions really around applications and migrations is obviously with an Azure native solution, we're probably more targeting some of the Azure native storage versus on-prem, right? While both are applicable. And so similar to Dedicated and even Purity, we offer a wide breadth of ways to migrate.
And so in some cases, depending on the application you have, you might use it two ways. What we've seen with some customers is that, for example, if it's a database server, which is one of our larger workloads, is they may not actually just move the data. They might deploy a new VM and update SQL or something on that, but all they'll do is
they'll just do a backup of a database and then restore it onto their volumes because that's part of their traditional workflow. But if not, right, I think, Nick, we have other third-party vendors we work with that seamlessly integrate- Oh, yeah and can do that without any type of downtime, right? There, there's many ways to migrate, right?
It really is gonna come down to the underlying application that you're trying to migrate, right? So, you know, I mentioned AVS before. That's could be as simple as a storage vMotion, right? That you don't really have to go through and, configure a migration. We've seen third-party tools like Cirrus Data that we work very closely with to, um- Mm-hmm
do application-level, you know, um- Or sorry, block level migrations of the data from one place to another. It, it really will come down. But like the example about SQL, right? It could be I'm just gonna spin up a new server and put it into an availability group
and do a controlled, you know, switchover. All those options are gonna be available to you. And I think part of what my team does is really focus on coming up with solutions to what your challenges are and really understanding, you know, what are the workloads you're trying to move, and you're typically gonna do them in, in waves anyway,
so we wanna really map all that out along with our professional services team to, you know, help you do this in the most effective way possible while minimizing downtime to your end customers. Yeah. I think that's key. I think, like And the big thing is we sort of covered this earlier, right? The cloud is this ever-changing space, and
what once was is no longer, and that kind of leads into the next question from Lincoln around application supportability. And this is one of those things that's, that's really hard because while even Azure and AWS have their underlying hardware, software vendors change over time, and what once was supported may not be today.
And so if you think about certain applications such as S- SAP, there's a bunch of different configurations that you can run. So you can run SAP HANA, which is like NFS and NBME over TCP. You can do, SAP on Oracle and SAP on SQL. And in some of those, right, they don't have necessarily full control, but there's other
vendor things. And so in some cases, right, they might have had challenges with one particular vendor or things, and they fundamentally said, "This is no longer supported." So we might, again, have some customers running on it. We can go through it. And so this is where we are working with a lot
more of the integrations to make sure that we can truly go through and drive this. So if you think about, for example, the Azure Native Service, we can work with Azure Native integration. So for example, if they have their Azure Native SQL, we can trul- truly look at that detail and say, "Yes, we are fully supporting this environment end to end, and we know for
versions one through three that we can do this." But where you sometimes have third-party services, right, they might have their own changes or shifts. And I think, like, Jo- or Nick, you, again, you came from other vendor backgrounds, right? This isn't necessarily something that's cloud specific, is you might upgrade, an application version and all of a sudden what was once supported may not actually be supported, right?
Right. I think that's the other piece of it, is like, you know, checking all the boxes to make sure I can even go forward with an upgrade and, you know, it, it really starts to become a, we'll say a tangled web, right, when you, when you have to look, check out all the different, support sites, make sure everything looks good. But, you know, our goal is always is to try to simplify that, you know, wherever possible.
And I think from a, an application standpoint, I know there's conversations happening with, you know, a, a bunch of different providers of, you know, cloud solutions. Some of them we work really closely with in the data center, so the conversation happens pretty naturally there. But I think a lot of our development and engineering is driven by what our customers
need and what they require. So if there's specific applications that you need, support for, you know, please make sure to let us know and we'll escalate those within our, our engineering teams. Yeah. And I think- That's a great point. Yeah. No, go ahead, Kevin.
No, I, I was just gonna remind all of our audience that we have a poll open. We'd love to get a few more answers before, from you b- before we share the results with everyone. And back to David, please. Keep going. Yeah. So when we kinda think about this as, as
obviously with Meir, we kind of see your question there around dedicated. One of the things with Azure Native is you don't really need to think about those architectural decisions. Like, we've greatly simplified that. So I know Joe's gonna answer a question, but in the end, we want you to
be able to consume this. And as easy it is to create a volume, that's how easy it is to create a storage pool. But we also, again, at some point wanna get feature, complete feature parity of what we can do. And so to the point around what features and capabilities, is we GA'd Azure Native for AVS back in August.
And again, we've seen huge amount of success there. Customers love that, especially compared to dedicated. Perfect timing for this. Ask us everything, AUE. I was about to say the other term, so, hopefully it won't get pulled off. But we have the ability to really cater to a completely different audience, right?
Is when you think about it, it truly is the capabilities that we can deliver in an Azure Native format. So if you happen to choose a snapshot of a disk, right, you're not necessarily taking a Microsoft snapshot, you're taking ours. And so there's sort of two approaches of what we're targeting. When we release this, we kind of, again, are gonna evolutionize the product of what we can
do today versus what we can do tomorrow. But today, a lot of what we're focusing on first is the Azure Native integration side of integration with Azure Resource Manager. But what we're also doing alongside that is that because it's a co-engineered solution, there's things that we can expose, and then there's things that Microsoft can then expose.
And so sort of getting around that, we're also gonna deliver the flexibility to have a kind of like a hybrid approach for customers where they can actually manage it a traditional array Or sorry, the traditional way in cloud, but also we'll be able to expose potentially a platform console that actually gives them direct access to, our, our API so they can consume things and do it the exact same way.
So just because that feature and capability may not be familiar and completely the native service, there still bil- will be ways to assume that. So again, snapshots here are right around the corner. And we'll be able to get those out and running and again, in some cases, previews with our customers as well. Great.
Okay, I think we're having last call on that poll again, and then we'll be able to put up the, the results and share them with everyone Well, so I guess one other flexible kind of thing about is, really appreciate that. And I think, Nick, one of the big ways, and again, customers think about is, I don't know how many people This actually might have been a good poll question, is how many people are
actually going to the Azure portal and clicking Create, Next, Next, Next, Deploy, right? Is when it comes to automation, right, like, can this be driven via Terraform or REST, or what are the ways that customers can ultimately do that? I mean, yeah.
No, so I, I think that really comes down to the fact that, like, we can support customers regardless of where they are in the journey to cloud, right? And we talk to Y- you know, we, we mentioned kind of the changing landscape of just IT in general, right? This is a kind of a, a spot I don't think many of us have ever been in before where you have
changes coming because of company decisions, you have changes coming because of, you know, market conditions, and a lot of people are being forced into migrations where they probably wouldn't have done it if situation was different, right? If they could just keep renewing, they'd probably stay in the data center and do things the way they wanted to, but that's not always available.
So we see customers that are brand new to cloud, that they might actually appreciate the click-through, you know, way of deployment or the, the simplified way of doing it. But then we also, on the other end of the spectrum, we have these customers that have been born in the cloud. They've All they've done is GitOps and, you know, we wanna make sure that we can support all of our customers regardless of where they
are in the journey. And I think, you know, Joe made a comment earlier about Fusion, right? That's another area where we're trying to take everything and make it as policy-driven and simplified as possible. So if you want to automate your entire environment and leverage Everpure as part of that process, you know, we're here to support you re- you know, regardless of what your
deployment method is. And you mentioned Terraform and Arm and, you know, all those different Bicep. There, there are all ways that we can, deploy our environments today and, and get you up and running. Awesome. We're, we're getting at all the right questions.
Right? And, and speaking of, you know, where people are on their journey, we have the poll results up, if everyone can see it. So it looks like, you know, half of you are, at 25% or less and just starting out, still mostly on-prem, and then, good chunks of folks who are either a lot further along or ju- haven't even really started their journey.
Right. You know, it, it's funny 'cause there's So I started My background, like, I've been in virtualization for way too long. You can see the gray in my beard, right? It, it's been kind of an evolution over time, and I mentioned I was one of the early adopters of, at the time, Pure Storage.
I love the simplicity. I didn't wanna be a storage person. I didn't really care about storage and, you know, not, not to say I don't still, but I look at it more from what is the storage enabling me to do, right? And if you're just moving into the cloud and it's something that might be new, do you want to have to go and learn a completely new way to deploy things, right?
Or does the familiarity help you? Because as we mentioned earlier, this is all built on Purity and kind of what we've built over the m- many years here, right? A lot of those same processes that, you know, you're using can, and obviously in the future when we release direct API and things like that, you're gonna have the ability to do a
lot of the same exact practices, the same scripting, the same, you know, deployment recoveries. All those options that, you know, Joe's sitting in the lab building, you know, scripts for. You're gonna have access to all that and be able to continue it. You know, we actually had a customer where
they migrated into the cloud because, you know, new CIO said, "We're, we're moving. Let's go." And they moved into the cloud, and they had been a longtime customer of ours in the data center. They were taking advantage of data reduction. They were taking advantage of some of the, the snapshot and cloning capabilities and, and things like that.
And as soon as they moved, they lost all that because they had comparable ways of doing it in the cloud, but it wasn't the same. And as soon as they saw the option to leverage us, their data reduction came back. They were now able to take what they were spending, you know, instead of PiB worth of data, now we're in the hundreds of tibs.
The ability to do their, their snapshots and clones and, and obviously this was dedicated not as native, but the same process and the same concepts are gonna apply. But they were able to now take all those scripts that they had spent years refining and, and making their own work again in the cloud, and I think that's really what we wanna help you do, is if we can take at least one aspect of that cloud migration journey and make it
easier for you, that's what we wanna do. We wanna make this as, as simple as possible and just help you focus on the things that are more important to your business and, you know, instead of having to worry about, like, the nerd knobs to touch and, and things like that. Yeah, I think that's key, right?
And Nick, you kind of mentioned, right, is looking at the, the storage side, right? Is w- you don't wanna worry about managing storage, right? And I think that's the whole reason why we, we, we rebranded, right? It's all about the data and making sure that you're not having to worry about managing your storage. It's the whole kind of like pets versus cattle
conversation, and I think that truly is what sets us apart, which is why today when we kind of we used to go say, it's like, "Hey, you can manage your storage the exact same way you do in the cloud that you are on-prem." And that sort of leads to the conversation around, like, kind of that first poll, right? Is where are you in your journey?
In some cases, you might have a dedicated cloud team and they say, "We don't want to manage our storage in the cloud the same way on-prem 'cause we don't even manage it on-prem." So that's perfect for, like, the full Arm integration and Arm approach. But you might have a hybrid customer, again, there was about 20% of those, where they're saying, "Hey, we're looking at this." And so they might wanna take it, and I saw this
question earlier from somebody else, is they might wanna be able to replicate their on-premises replication or their on-premises FlashArray to Everpure cloud and replicate that for DR. That was a, a very early win that we saw a lot. And I think, like, this whole conversation, right, is especially for the 50% of people who are just starting out- One of the things I know, Nick, you hear and I've heard plenty of
time is we've talked to customers, and said kind of like, "Hey, what are you planning on doing? Do you want to have a conversation about this?" And in some cases, we hear from customers, "Well, we're starting our journey to the cloud. We're migrating all of our applications. Once we get there, we'll then reach out to you." And in my cases, that's like, what?
Too late, because you've already done that migration. Why do it twice? You now have to re-migrate again. Right. Why do it twice? Why do I want to do it twice? You know, and y- y- you hit the nail on the head. It's like- Yeah the, sometimes And I think the other piece of this is, you know, I kind of
touched on it a little earlier, some folks don't know that this is an option that's available. And, you know, really, that, I think that's the other piece of this. It's like if you knew that you had this available at your fingertips to be able to leverage this right from the start, you know, it, it's like, well, do I want to spend $10,000 for my car or do
I want to spend $7,000? And if I have the option to spend $7,000 and I'm getting, you know, the same or even better capabilities within that vehicle, I'm gonna do it. And that's the same thing here. It's, you know, sometimes folks are like, "Well, the cloud button's easy and I can just
use a managed disk, and that, that's really simple for me." And, yeah, it is, but then as you start to like worry about things like performance and how do I get more IOPS or bandwidth on a specific workload, you know, now you have to start really tweaking. And the thing I've noticed over the years is that any time I had to make a change to get more performance or to get new capabilities, it usually came with a cost.
And the goal f- what we're trying to deliver with this solution is really give you the capabilities to have everything you want, have better performance, have simplicity, but also reduce your cost at the same time, you know, and then take it to the next level like we were talking about earlier with the, the migrations, the mobility between clouds, on-prem, et cetera, giving you DR.
All that's really what our focus is, is we want you to manage your applications and your data, not your storage. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it, it really is, you know, the continuation of the easy journey that we've tried to,
institute, you know, around storage. Started with there were appliances that started abstracting storage. We took it to the next level of not only introducing flash, but having the OS do so much of the work. And the fact that we've now extended that, I love that you touched on Fusion and the integrated control plane.
There's no reason why that can't extend from your on-premises estate to your cloud estate as well, and make sure that it's all treated the same way, that there's much more automation and, you know, that easy thinking about data, not thinking about storage. Right. And I think, Nick, you've got a great perspective on that because just like our audience, you were a consumer of this at one point.
Yes, I definitely And I, I will say this, and Joe was too, and I think David was also right? Like, it, this, I, I don't like try to embellish this. It can be career-changing. Like, you can literally change the trajectory of your career. Any time you ha- like, you have a migration or you have a, a new technology
like AI come out, right? Like, this is the time where you can really start to evaluate, like, w- like, what do you want to be when you grow up, right? Like, do I want to continue managing blocks and bytes of storage, or do I want to focus on the bigger picture? And I think now- Yeah you have a lot of tools
at your fingertips where you can start to focus on, you know, other areas. And, and really, like I said, we want to enable you to learn new things, right? If you're going from data center to cloud, like, it's not just, all right, what do they, what does Microsoft call, you know, their storage disk? What, like, how do I know the difference between the types of disks, right?
But it's a completely different operating model, right? Like we mentioned, automation and GitOps and things like that. Like, the way that you do tasks in the cloud can vary greatly from like a VMware-type environment, where, you know, you may be used to certain tools and now those tools are gonna change. And, you know, how do you change with them?
And I think that's the, the big part here, is if you have the capabilities and you have the desire, like, this is the time where you can actually go and You know, not to go a little off-topic, but, like, you can learn all new skill sets and, and really we can help unlock that. And that's not even talking about some of the other integrations that we have with, you know,
other pieces within Everpure. Yeah, great point. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's automating out the nerd knobs. That was another good one that one of you threw out there. Go ahead, David. No, I think that's definitely key.
I, I would say is just sort of thinking about other stuff is, I'll say, I'm trying to think of how to sort of tee these up, right? The first one would be, I guess, Nick, how, how does this really compare from like a, a billing construct, right? Is, does this, customers buy this through the marketplace?
Do they get commit? Does it go against Mac? Like, what's the thoughts on the solution there? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. So, you know, th- this is a, a marketplace only. So this is, as you mentioned, it's a first-party ISV service, right?
We're partnered with Microsoft on this. You are gonna consume it directly through the Mar- Azure Marketplace. How you consume it, you know, as you mentioned, it's, it's pretty straightforward, right? It's how much storage do I want, how fast do I want it to go, and what account do I want it in, and go. Like, you're, you're basically off and running.
The deployment is really straightforward as well, and I think, you know, we didn't really touch on that, but it comes to the fact accept the offer. Once you've gone through and you've accepted the offer, you're gonna create a storage pool. You know, think of that as your kind of virtual array. I have a storage pool, and then I carve it up.
Now, the piece that blew my mind, and, and this is really where I thought this is, this is a really great product, is once you've created your storage pool, the next step is really, you know, carving up that pool into volumes and assigning them to workloads. Well, we've made that piece super easy. So once you've created the volume, we're leveraging Azure VM extensions to just say,
"Hey, I want to deploy this volume onto that machine over there," and it goes and actually deploys everything for you and connects it up. So the actual process of getting that volume connected to the, the workload is seamless, and I've You know, David's done a few demos for me and I've seen, like, you know, how, how easy it can be to go through that, that process and, like- I think especially for
customers that are coming from the dedicated solution, the-- that provided a ton of opportunity, ton of capabilities for our customers, but there was still a, a management component piece of it, right? Where I had to plan out upgrades. I had to, you know, really not manage the solution, 'cause it kinda does that itself, 'cause it's a managed application, but I had to be aware of what was happening.
This takes all that away. It's just one more layer that we're taking off your plate, and now it's really how much storage do I want and where do I want it, and how do I pay for it? And the point is is it's all through the marketplace, and you actually have the ability to burn down your max if you have them.
And a lot of times when you're going through these cloud journeys, you're gonna come to an agreement to say, "Hey, Microsoft, I'm gonna spend X amount." This will actually count towards that spend, and then you can take the dollars and spend them on, you know, more fun stuff that you can go and learn new toys. So Does that answer your question, David?
Yes. Yes and yes. Excellent. All right. Well, we have a- another question, this time from Rodrigo around quality of service and making sure that, I'm assuming this is kind of the, the, the noisy neighbor scenario and, having runaway VMs.
One of you wanna tackle that? Yeah. So this is one of the, the core capabilities of EverPeer, right? Is we have the ability to have an always-on QoS, but we can also apply limits and routes to customers. So one of the things we actually did implement in the Azure native service is that when you
create a volume group So if you're familiar with EverPeer, a volume group is almost the equivalent of a host object. It's what houses all of the volumes and what you m- ultimately mount to your virtual machine. With volume groups, you actually can apply a QoS limit of bandwidth or IOPS to that individual volume group, which means that if
you happen to, say, have non-prod or prod, you can actually apply those limits to make sure that that one particular machine doesn't overtake anything else. But even one of the benefits of Peer is that we always prioritize front-end IO. And if you happen to have two competing applications that are writing similar data, we actually coalesce that on our back end, so it may not actually be the same challenge you
might have with legacy storage. We actually have the ability to sort of optimize that. Great. Great. Are there any limitations as to where this is available? I know that, this, this, this is fairly recent for us.
So are we rolling it out on a, on a, a trial basis, or how's that all working? Yeah, that's a great one, right? So, oh, I'll let you take that one. I was gonna say it, it's popping up like wildfire, basically. All We have, we have a list on our support site with all the supported regions right now, but I think we're hearing more requests from the field.
Like, I get requests all the time, and I'm filing what we call our, you know, internal, engineering requests. And the, the goal is to basically stand up regions as soon as our customers need them. And the I think, what, David, takes about four weeks or so, something like that, to get a new region set up. Yeah. So if there is a region that we do not
support today that you need, you know, please let us know, and we'll do our best to get that supported, you know, within about a month's timeframe. Yeah, and I think really what that ties into, a lot of it is ultimately based off customer demand and also what Microsoft has. So one of the things that we first stood up is when we first launched the service, we were
available in a subset of regions in the US, and it was mainly because multi-party and marketplace wasn't actually transactable in other countries. Over the past few weeks and months, they've continued to expand international reach, so we've expanded. So when we first started, we were in three of the core US regions, East, West, and I think it was Central.
We've now expanded to every zonal region in the US. We'll be expanding to other non-zonal regions based off customer demands, but we've also expanded to three European regions, as well as one region in Asia. But ultimately is we will go where customers need to. But obviously we don't wanna Similar to the services, we don't wanna create a service that
no one's gonna consume. We wanna make sure that we're going where the customer demands. Yep. Good. Makes sense. All right. Good Lord, have we answered all the questions? That, that can't be all of them. Come on, guys.
I know. Guys and gals, let's go. And it looks like, yeah, there's- I, I guess, you know, the other thing to note too is we kind of touched on a high level how, you know, we pay for this, how we consume it, but, the process for actually deploying it, you know, there's typically not, typically not services really required for it.
I think you could spend more time focused on the migration parts of it, right? And I think instead of having to worry about how do I get this stood up in my environment, it's the standing up of the array and, and the or the, the service and the s- configuring of the workloads is really simple and really easy. Then you can actually focus more on those applications and, and really making sure that
you can do it in a way where there's no disruption to the end users, and that becomes the focus as opposed to You know, I, I think back to all the storage migrations I had to do back in the day, and, like, that could be six months out of my year. Like, that-- those days are gone. This is literally I could have an environment stood up within a few hours and already have
data, you know, on it and, and data reducing and, and going through all my, my processes there, so Yeah, and I think one of the things that sort of ties into that is really just around services, right? Is if you think about dedicated and stuff, and even other stuff, there's implementation and time it takes. And so we've seen engagements can take weeks,
months, right, depending on the scale. And so, like, one of the questions we ask, right, is, "Hey, we're looking through your solution brief. We don't see any deployment professional services for Azure Native. Like, why is that?" And in reality, it's customer deployed, right,
it's customer managed. It's you don't need to have all types of- Everpure knowledge for it to be able to do it. It's simple to deploy, which now means that you can take that and invest that in other places, right? Whether it's for your migration services or whether it's ultimately for something else.
It just greatly simplifies that. Basically, just provide us a network to serve the data up on and you're off and running. Before we get to this next, oh, now they're just coming in. But, real quickly, there was one that we answered in text that I wanted to make sure that we touched on, and it was around where can people actually kinda
kick the tires on this? And I know that, David, you had mentioned that there's a demo on our YouTube. Yeah. But I also wanted to point out that there will There's a whole resource kit that everyone will be getting as a result of, you know, being with us here today. So that's another way that you can, you can follow up on that.
But if you have anything else- Yeah feel free. Yeah. So no. So one of the benefits of this also being a, a managed service is we can handle all of it. So one of the, the challenges with all of our old infrastructure is we could cover the license, but your customers were still responsible for the underlying cost.
And so now with our service, we can do free 30-day trials for customers. So if anyone's interested in not just watching the demos, but kicking the tires off, we will send a link where you can kinda sign up. We'll reach out to you. We'll qualify it, make sure that's gonna be a good fit for you, and then allow you to get full access to the solution for 30 days at, at
absolutely no cost. And so that will allow you to identify, again, similar to Lincoln's question, could this work with my AKS environment? Could this work with my Azure Red Hat OpenShift, right? Does it work with VMs? What Does it work with ABS?
And, and ultimately, how do we, we drive that? Yeah. So the next question from Heath is really around DR. So right now, when you think about DR, there's a couple different ways. So part of it would be utilizing either Everpure's native replication or also then taking advantage of third-party replication on
top of it. So if you happen to be using, say, any vendor on-prem and you're going to Azure VMware solution and using Azure Native, is a lot of customers in that case might be utilizing third-party solutions. They could be using HCX. They could be using Veeam, Zerto, Commvault, Rubrik, et cetera.
And so in that case, our replication isn't necessarily engaged, so that would be fully integrated. But for customers who are looking at more of a, a native replication, those are things that we ultimately will support and drive. But also what we're also looking at is if you think about the overall portfolio of what we
have here at Pure, is we're not just a storage company anymore. We acquired 1touch, and that's now Everpure Data Intelligence. We have what we used to call Pure Protect, which was our repli- our cyber, product. It's now Everpure Resilience, I think. Throughout the name change. Yeah. That one was a recent one.
Yeah. And so as we start looking at the full integration, we'll actually be able to much better start driving services that can be included as, I don't wanna call them add-ons, but benefits where you can actually gain all the benefits of having all of these really cool things, but potentially consuming a single service and getting those benefits.
All right. Here's another one from Rodrigo. The It's, it's Since it's running on Azure infrastructure and Azure resources continue to be consumed, So I think- Ah, yes. Yeah. Licensing costs. Go for it. So basically, if you think about it, there's, there's two different approaches, right?
So the former Cloud Block Store, now known as Everpure Cloud Dedicated, there was a licensing component for the software, and then there was an infrastructure cost, meaning like the cost to run the controllers, the underlying managed disks, et cetera. We've basically taken the two of them and combined them. So you don't have to worry about deploying any of the infrastructure anymore.
When you purchase through the marketplace, that is going to cover the entire service, the licensing, the infrastructure, everything is gonna be included with that. It's really gonna be built on a more of a how much capacity do I need, how much bandwidth and, you know, you're kinda off and running at that point, and then it's one line item on your bill. So instead of having to spend for those
different components and then have, you know, one bill going to Everpure, one going to Microsoft, it's all gonna be right through the marketplace on, on, you know, one bill. Yeah. And I think, the second sort of part of that is around real-world deployments. What have we seen from data reduction, right?
And one of the things that's been good is really understanding your data. And so in some cases, our, some of our very early on customers were using it for test dev and analytics. So they were actually taking a data set and cloning it a whole bunch of times, and we're seeing absurd amount of data reduction. When we look at real-world scenario is part of this is around consolidation, is the more data
you'll have in a single storage pool, the better data reduction you'll get because we globally deduplicate that. But it's also more workload driven, is if you're storing, for example, videos or files or images, those are compressed, encrypted, right? You may not get a lot of benefits.
Same thing with SQL. If you're running an encrypted database, you're not gonna see any benefits. And so our platform has native encryption right at rest on it. We do it two ways. And so there's a lot of stuff. So the same-- The right answer is the data reduction you would expect of a FlashArray
on-prem is mostly what you would expect in the cloud. On average, bro, with the numbers, it's actually fairly high. I think on-prem, we say four or five to one. In some cases, we've seen higher. Testers with a hundred percent SQL environments, we're seeing about nine to one.
So we're actually seeing quite a bit of success on data reduction as well as, um- Brain fart. As long as you're not running encrypted data, you will see substantial- Right data reduction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we used to tout a, you know, blanket sort of, hey, your VM is gonna get, you know, a 9:1 or 8:1 or sometimes, you know,
much higher. But it all comes down to what is that data actually inside the VM that's being managed, right? If it's image data, it's just It's already compressed. We can't deduplication it- Right that much more. But in that test dev environment, yeah, I mean, it's astronomical because it's a lot of copies
of the same data, and we're able to do that global deduplication. Yeah. And I, I think that's the one that I hear every day is I got a database, I need to create a clone, I need to refresh- Right production data down to, you know, dev stage, UAT, et cetera. That one comes up with every single customer. And I think that's the beauty here is the fact that, you know, when we take a, a s- and
obviously kind of going back and forth between the offerings, but, like, when I take a snapshot and clone it and, you know, refresh that data down to another environment, if that environment is still in the same storage pool, I'm gonna take advantage of data reduction, right? And, and- Yeah you can A- and I think there was a question about, like, you know, VNet and, and how that can kind of correlate here, right?
It all comes down to your architecture. And a lot of times we hear, you know, we wanna have micro-segmentation, we wanna have, you know, multiple VNets, we wanna have, you know, down to the, you know, application level separation of my resources, right? That may not be the best way to go.
And honestly, like, part of the advantages here is that you can take a, I don't wanna say more of a traditional approach, but, like, if I were to consolidate my resources, now I could take advantage of data reduction at, you know, a wider range. So I can have multiple applications that may have similar data. Everything is still separated on our side, but from a global deduplication perspective, you know
you're gonna get better rates than if I were to set up different storage pools across each one of these VNets. You know, there, there's pros and cons to both approaches, but I think that's part of the conversation that we're gonna wanna have with you is, you know, how, how you're architected, how your applications work, what they talk to, what the business processes
are around this as well. Because the more we understand about that, the easier it is to architect a solution, you know, based on what we're doing here. Yeah. And I think, that also sort of ties in, right, is one of the challenges with Dedicated was that we had four different interfaces with four different services, and you ha- needed to
know do I need one subnet or four subnets, and what policies are in each. Right. With this is you create one subnet, you delegate it to our service, we place the actual networking in your tenant, and you do not have to worry about all of those challenges. So it is greatly simplified, is we not, aren't just bringing the service to storage, but
we're bringing the service to everything else. And I think we got one more minute left, so, um- Yeah this has definitely been a fun one. Um- Time flies time flew. I know. Right? Time for lunch. Well, I was just gonna say, so yeah, we definitely put the native in Azure Native-
Yeah in this case, right. And, and that, links back to our last question there, which was, you know, just again repeating the fact that this is different than it used to be where, it was really up to the user to be getting the, the cloud infrastructure as well as whatever Everpure or Pure at the time was providing, and now it's just one
marketplace service, one bill, everything all included. Yeah. Any final thoughts then for our audience? No, I think this was fun. Definitely knowledgeable. And again, it, it never stops here. If you have any questions as well, you can always email us at
azurenative@, everpuredata.com. I know Ashley's been dropping all the stuff in chat. You can join us on the Everpure community. And again, if you always want to, we're all, we're all available on LinkedIn and social, so feel free to reach out to us.
We'd love to answer any additional questions that people may come up, as well. Yeah, this has been great. Thank you for the, the interaction, the questions. You know, always love it when, there, there's no dead silence, and y- you guys have keeping this rolling. So thank you so much.
The only silence was when we were trying to sort through the questions- Exactly. And, and figure out which next one we were gonna, we were gonna do. Well, I, I hope everyone brings that exact same energy. Joe, I don't wanna leave you out, if you've got any final, words for our audience. You've been toiling in the background, and we appreciate it.
No, honestly, just, just glad to have this much interactivity. It's, it's rare to see- Right this many questions that come in. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I hope everyone brings that same energy to our next very, very special Ask Us Everything where we are going to have our co-founder, John Cos Callgrove, answer all your questions.
And I cannot even imagine the heat that's gonna be coming off of the Zoom Q&A at that point, and the number of folks who are gonna, be online for that one because, you know, normally you only get a shot at this maybe at, at, at, Accelerate, and here we'll, we'll bring it to you live, you know, outside of the Accelerate calendar. So, please do register for that.
We've got it in chat there, and of course on our Everpure community you can always find recaps, rebroadcasts of all of these Ask Us Everythings, including Regi- for the, the, any of the n- other, other ones that we have in the series. Well, I definitely wanna thank a fantastic panel. David, Nick, and Joe, thank you so much.
Thank you to all who attended today and, for all your great, great, insightful questions. Hopefully we were able to answer 'em. Please keep the conversation going in the Everpure community. As, David said, if there's any other, questions that we didn't get to or that come to you later, the community is the perfect place to, put those, not only to get 'em
answered by these experts, but also by your peers. So with that, thank you all so much and can't wait to see you all with Cos next time. Bye-bye. Have a good one, everybody. Thanks, all.
Kevin Rickson
Product Marketing Director, Everpure
Nick Scuola
Principal Cloud Technical Specialist, Everpure
David Stamen
Technical Strategy Director, Everpure
Joe Houghes
Consulting Field Solutions Architect, Everpure
Got questions about reducing storage costs and improving efficiency? Get answers.
This month we’re diving into Everpure Cloud Azure Native for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). You’ll learn how it delivers enterprise-grade block storage through a fully managed, Azure-native experience. As organisations look to balance cloud costs, performance, and operational simplicity, infrastructure teams need storage that scales with their workloads without adding complexity.
You’ll get an overview of how Everpure Cloud Azure Native enables you to:
- Reduce cloud storage costs up to 40% with efficient consumption and pay-for-what-you-use pricing
- Scale performance up or down without disruptive infrastructure changes.
- Improve operational efficiency with faster provisioning and streamlined snapshot management.
- Combine the native Azure experience with enterprise-grade storage services and support.
We Also Recommend...
Personalize for Me
My Updates
No updates at this time.