Pure Storage has announced an impressive partnership with Azure for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) storage and compute in the cloud.
Pure, Equinix and Microsoft Azure will deliver cloud-adjacent storage using Pure’s FlashBlade in Equinix datacentres with a low-latency connection to Azure. This is for EDA, HPC and other highly parallel workloads such as software build and testing, and data can be staged and ready for cloud use at any time and in any location geographically.
Mujtaba Hamid, head of product, modeling & simulation, Azure at Microsoft, said in a statement: “Microsoft is pleased to work with Pure Storage on the first-ever connected-cloud solution for EDA workloads, enabling customers to speed up semiconductor design flows using Microsoft Azure.”
Amy Fowler, VP, strategy and solutions, FlashBlade Business Unit at Pure Storage, said: “By coupling FlashBlade with Azure, EDA customers are able to use the practically unlimited compute ability of the public cloud for next-generation product development while maintaining full control over data governance and security.”
Pure did say during its latest quarterly results announcement and earnings call that it had started selling to hyperscalers. This Azure deal will strengthen its hyperscaler storage credentials.
Equinix already offers Pure-as-a-Service to its customers with its datacentres hosting Pure storage gear. NetApp helped pioneer the idea of fast, cloud-adjacent storage back in July 2014 with NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Azure. This had NetApp FAS arrays in Equinix datacentres, and applications running in Azure access these FAS boxes via a dedicated connection to the NetApp storage by Azure ExpressRoute connections.
Similarly, FlashBlade at Equinix with Azure for EDA employs FlashBlade in an Equinix datacentre with a low-latency connection to Azure. Pure says customers retain full control of their data, and use FlashBlade’s Purity operating system with built-in security and data-management features. They can also access multiple clouds without data migration.
Pure lost its CRO Dominick Delfino to Nutanix earlier this month, replacing him with the internally promoted Dan Fitzsimons. This Azure deck gives Fitzsimons lots on which to build.
