Gridpro, a Swedish cloud management software vendor, has integrated Pure Storage’s unified file and object FlashBlade array with Azure stack.
Gridpro is the developer of EvOps, a software technology that plugs various product and services into Azure Stack Hub. EvOps integrates FlashBlade management into Azure Stack Hub and provisions file systems and object store account through EvOps workflows.
The integration represents the first time Pure Storage and Azure Stack Hub are physically working side-by-side in the data centre,” Pure Storage engineer director Brian Gold said in a blog post.
He suggests three use cases for an Azure Stack Hub/FlashBlade combo: storing and processing analytics data; backup and restore of snapshotted Azure Stack Hub virtual machine instances; and large-capacity, fast access object storage. These use cases could be found in edge data centres with local processing and storage requirements, and also meet data locality needs.
Pure’s FlashBlade integration with Azure Stack Hub mirrors the company’s support of AWS Outposts and Pure supports the hybrid cloud concept.
Azure Stack Hub backgrounder
Azure Stack Hub is a converged or hyperconverged IT system running an on-premises version of the Azure public cloud that can be hooked up to the Azure public cloud. It is built from a Scale Unit, using four to 16 servers from a Microsoft hardware partner.
The system is set up by a Microsoft Solution Provider partner. And networking and storage hardware can be incorporated, fusing network and storage resource providers. Such resource providers are web services that form the foundation for all Azure Stack Hub IaaS and PaaS capabilities.
The Azure public cloud supports file storage (SMB File shares), unlike Azure Stack Hub. This limitation can be overcome with FlashBlade, which presents both file and object services.
Azure Stack Hub supports blob (object), queue, and table (NoSQL data) storage services plus Azure Key Vault account management. Azure Storage can store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, like documents and media files with Azure Blobs, and structured NoSQL-based data with Azure Tables.
