Take Data Management to the next level with Silk Software-Defined Azure Storage

Note: This article is co-authored by our partner Silk.

In today’s data-driven world, every enterprise is under pressure to make smarter decisions faster. Whether you're running production databases, training machine learning models, running advanced analytics, or building customer-facing applications, your data needs to be more agile, secure, and readily accessible than ever before.

That’s where Silk’s software-defined cloud storage platform on Microsoft Azure comes into play — bringing performance, resiliency, and intelligence to data management across the cloud. With the recent addition of Silk Echo, you can now supercharge your Copy Data Management (CDM) strategy to ensure your data isn’t just protected, it’s available instantly for any purpose — a true strategic asset.

Transforming Azure IaaS with Silk's Platform

Microsoft Azure offers a rich ecosystem of services to support every stage of your cloud journey, and when paired with Silk, customers gain a game-changing storage and data-services layer purpose-built for performance-intensive workloads.

Silk’s software-defined storage platform runs on Azure infrastructure as a high-performance data layer between Azure compute and native storage. It works by orchestrating redundant sets of resources, as close to the DB compute as possible. Aggregating and accelerating the native capabilities of Azure, enabling databases to reach the maximum physical limits of the underlying hardware. Silk makes use of the excellent L-series of storage optimized VMs and NVME media, ensuring the data is always quickly available and able to withstand multiple failures using erasure coding. 

Silk is designed to address common challenges customers face when migrating relational databases — such as SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 — to the cloud:

• Performance Bottlenecks: On-prem workloads often rely on ultra-low latency, high-throughput storage systems with features that are difficult to replicate in the cloud.
• Data Copy Sprawl: Multiple non-production environments (dev, test, QA, analytics) mean many redundant data copies, leading to storage inefficiencies.
• Operational Overhead: Managing snapshots, backups, and refreshes across environments consumes time and resources.

Silk changes the game with:

• Extreme performance in the Azure cloud. Up to 34GB/s of throughput from a single VM.
• The combination of Silk and Azure provide a unique cost/performance balance, through the combination of a very low latency software defined cloud storage platform and sharing of Azure resources.
• Inline data deduplication and compression for optimized resource utilization.
• Autonomous, fully integrated, non-disruptive, zero cost snapshots and clones for effortless environment refreshes.
• Multi-zone resilience and no single point of failure.

This makes it easier than ever to lift and shift critical applications to Azure, with the confidence of consistent performance, uptime, and flexibility.

Elevating CDM with Silk Echo for AI

While Silk’s core platform solves performance and efficiency challenges, Silk Echo for AI introduces an intelligent, AI-powered layer that revolutionizes how organizations manage and leverage their data across the enterprise.

At its core, Silk Echo for AI offers next generation Copy Data Management capabilities that empower IT teams to accelerate digital initiatives, reduce costs, and maximize the value of every data copy.

Key Benefits of Silk Echo for AI

1. Smarter Data Copying and Cloning
   Silk Echo leverages AI to understand data access patterns and recommends the optimal strategy for creating and managing data copies. Instead of manually managing snapshots, you can automate the entire workflow — ensuring the right data is in the right place at the right time.
2. Instant, Space-Efficient Clones
   Using Silk’s advanced snapshot and cloning engine, Echo creates fully functional clones in seconds, consuming minimal additional storage resources. Teams can spin up dev/test environments instantly, accelerating release cycles and experimentation.
3. Cross-Environment Data Consistency
   Echo ensures consistency across copies — whether you're cloning for testing, backup, or analytics — and with AI-driven monitoring, it can detect drift between environments and recommend synchronizations.
4. Policy-Based Lifecycle Management
   Define policies for how long data copies should live, when to refresh them, and who has access. Echo automates the enforcement of these policies, reducing human error and ensuring compliance.
5. Optimized Resource Consumption
   Silk Echo minimizes redundant data storage through smart deduplication, compression, and AI-driven provisioning — resulting in cost savings of 50% or more across large-scale environments.
6. Enablement for AI/ML Workflows
   For data science teams, Silk Echo provides curated, up-to-date data clones without impacting production environments — essential for model training, experimentation, and validation.

Real-World Use Case: Streamlining Dev/Test and AI Pipelines

Consider Sentara Health, a healthcare provider migrating their EHR and SQL Server workloads to Azure. Before Silk, environment refreshes were time-consuming, often taking days or even weeks. With Silk Echo for AI, the same tasks will be completed in minutes.
Now, development teams have self-service access to fresh clones of production data — enabling faster iteration and better testing outcomes. Meanwhile, their data science team leverages Echo’s snapshot automation to feed AI models with real-time, production-grade data clones without risking downtime or data corruption.
All of this runs seamlessly on Azure, with Silk ensuring high performance and resilience at every step.

Joint Value of Silk and Microsoft

Together, Silk and Microsoft are unlocking a new level of agility and intelligence for enterprise data management:

• Data-as-a-Service: Give every team — DevOps, DataOps, AI/ML — access to the data they need, when they need it. Free snapshots democratize data so up-to-date copies can be made quickly for any team member who can benefit from it.
• AI-Ready Database Infrastructure: Your infrastructure evolves from a reactive model which is addressing problems as they arise (i.e. triggering responses on alerts), to a predictive model that utilizes AI/ML to forecast issues and mitigate them before they occur by learning patterns of behavior. Silk enables real-time AI inferencing, for business-critical agents that require access to up-to-date operational data.
• Reduced Costs, Improved ROI: Storage optimization, reduced manual overhead, and faster time to value — backed by Azure’s scalability and Silk’s performance.
• Accelerated Cloud Migrations: Achieve the enhanced scalability and flexibility of a cloud migration for your Tier 1 databases without refactoring.

Get Started

Ready to take your data management strategy to the next level? Explore how Silk’s software-defined storage and Silk Echo for AI can accelerate your transformation on Microsoft Azure. Whether you're modernizing legacy systems, building AI-driven applications, or simply trying to get more value from your cloud investments, Silk and Microsoft are here to help. 

By embracing the power of Silk’s software-defined storage and Silk Echo, organizations can finally make their data in the cloud work smarter, not harder.

Contact Alliances@silk.us for a deeper dive on Silk!