Pure Storage is opening a new front in the cloud edge storage market, with data centre operator Equinix offering Pure-as-a-Service to its customers.
Equinix has fitted out 18 data centres with Pure Storage hardware and software and is handling delivery through Equinix Metal. Customers can subscribe to Pure’s file, block, object and Pure’s Portworx Kubernetes storage services.
Jack Hogan, Pure VP of Technology Strategy, said: “Enterprises want full control over their environment, but they don’t want to operate their own data centres or be forced to fit into traditional cloud models – they want a cloud model that fits their business. By partnering with Equinix, we are eliminating management complexity and delivering the flexibility and controls that put organisations in charge of what their technology platforms can do for them.”
In effect Equinix, Pure and other Equinix partners are providing a virtual data centre, Platform Equinix, with public cloud-like economics.
The underlying technology for Equinix Pure-aaS includes Pure’s FlashArray//X and //C and FlashBlade Arrays and, as the diagram above shows, Portworx storage. There is replication to a second hub and connectivity to Pure’s Cloud Block Store and Portworx in the three main public clouds: AWS, Azure and GCP. ISPs can offer Pure storage services using these Equinix Metal centres.
Pure and Equinix have highlighted three use cases for the service:
- Hybrid cloud and Data Recovery as a Service for virtual environments – on-premises VMs can be moved to the hosted Pure-Equinix environment using FlashArray
- High-performance, near-edge cloud storage using FlashBlade for file and object workloads
- Hybrid and edge cloud native container storage using Portworx, and claimed to be faster than the public cloud.
This Pure Equinix deal provides competition for Zadara’s service offering managed on-premises and public clouds storage arrays.
The Pure-Equinix partnership differs from the Seagate Lyve Cloud Equinix object storage arrangement announced last week. The latter is Seagate-operated and available in only one US Equinix centre, with a target of four centre availability by the end of 2021.
Nu-Metal
Equinix is a bare metal as a service, which sees Equinix set up the interconnect plumbing and provide billing for compute, network and storage services. Equinix Metal portfolio which will include a range of services beyond Pure -aaS.
Metal is based on technology acquired via the 2020 takeover of Packet. Equinix is using Supermicro and Dell X86 servers. Also, 128-core Altra Arm servers from Ampere are on the way. The Dell servers are available through Dell’s APEX subscription plan, with Equinix offering Dell Bare Metal as a Service.
Metal also includes Cohesity’s Helios data platform software and the Mirantis Container Cloud has Equinix Metal as a supported provider. Equinix is offering managed servers, storage arrays and data management software as services.
