Microsoft has signed a co-selling agreement with Silk, the company formerly called Kaminario, which says this is the first such block storage deal in the Azure cloud.
Part of the Silk Cloud Data Platform, Silk’s VisionOS storage array software is presented as a smart, resilient and invisible software layer that sits between a public cloud infrastructure and databases such as Oracle and SQL Server.
The software speeds database performance without change to applications or the databases, with 99.9999 per cent resiliency and no single point of failure, the company claims. Silk’s software can also move data between zones and regions to ensure its availability.
Dani Golan, Silk’s CEO, said in a press statement: “The orchestration and optimisation power of Silk coupled with Azure will enable customers to achieve faster performance, far better resiliency, and more flexibility and agility.”
Block work
Azure offers four kinds of native block storage, called Azure Managed Disks:
- Ultra Disk Storage – high performance SSD with configurable performance for the lowest latency and consistent high IOPS/throughput.
- Premium SSD – high performance storage for I/O intensive workloads with significantly high throughput.
- Standard SSD – a low-cost offering optimised for test and entry-level production workloads requiring consistent latency.
- Standard HDD – disk-drive based for dev/test and other infrequent access workloads.
Ultra Disk Storage, the highest performance tier, delivers up to 160,000 IOPS, and 300MB/sec to 2GB/sec throughput. Silk said its software running on Azure can achieve 1 million IOPS and 20GB/sec read bandwidth. That’s 6.25 times more IOPS and 10x greater bandwidth.
Channel flannel
There are two kinds of Azure co-sell status, Co-sell Ready (access to Microsoft field sellers) and Co-sell Incentivised (access to field sellers who are paid for selling the product/service plus marketing help). Silk has achieved Co-sell Incentivised status.
VisionOS also supports AWS and Google Cloud Platform, so we might look forward to similar deals with Amazon and Google.
