Announcing Pure Storage Cloud Public Preview

This post is co-authored by Cody Hosterman (@codyhosterman), Sr. Director of Product Management - Pure Storage and Karl Rautenstrauch (@karautenMSFT).

Today Pure Storage released Pure Storage Cloud, an Azure Native ISV Service, into Public Preview. Pure Storage Cloud is a co-development effort that brings an Azure Native experience to provisioning, purchasing, and managing a Pure Storage service on Azure. Learn more about Azure Native ISV services here.

Pure Storage Cloud purchasing and provisioning experience:

Pure Storage Cloud management experience:

Pure Storage Cloud offers the same experience and powerful Pure Storage capabilities available in an on-premise appliance in a fully managed storage service on Azure – and you can integrate Pure Storage Cloud with Azure VMware Solution! The best-in-class Pure Storage user and support experience are preserved meaning existing Pure Storage customers already know how to manage their deployment in Azure. 

Pure Storage Cloud supports integrations with vVols and the vSphere client so customers can use familiar VMware tooling for granular VM storage control and faster, more efficient storage operations. It also offers independent scaling of storage and compute, so customers can use AVS resources more efficiently. 

Pure Storage Cloud is the first and only vVols storage provider for any public cloud VMware offering. vVols (Virtual Volumes) are a VMware storage framework that improves the granularity and flexibility of storage management in VMware environments. Unlike traditional VMFS-based storage, which relies on LUNs and datastores, vVols abstracts the storage layer into smaller, virtualized units tied to individual VMs. By doing so, vVols offers:  

• Granular VM storage control: Each VM gets its own virtual volume, allowing per-VM snapshots, policies, and performance management. 

• Faster, more efficient storage operations: Unlike VMFS, vVols eliminates LUN-based constraints and inefficiencies. 

• Seamless VMware integration: Pure Storage Cloud automatically installs a management plugin into the vSphere Client, enabling VMware admins to manage storage directly with familiar tools. 

Pure Storage Cloud also delivers the following advantages: 

• No customer-managed hardware: Pure Storage Cloud doesn’t require any special hardware and runs on top of Azure standard IaaS resources, leveraging Azure’s strong scale and availability options. 

• Secure private network integration: Pure Storage Cloud is available from your virtual network via private, high-performance access to storage. 

• Native integration with vSphere: The Pure Storage Cloud service automatically installs into the vSphere Client plugin, allowing full storage management from a single interface. 

The Public Preview requires signup via the “Contact Me” link and you can get more information by contacting azurenative@purestorage.com.  During Public Preview, please contact Pure Storage at support@purestorage.com should any issues arise. Pure Storage will then coordinate with Microsoft to resolve the issue. However, if the issue directly impacts your AVS SDDC outside of the storage layer, please open a support ticket through the Azure portal as you normally would. Note that during the public preview phase, running production workloads is not supported.

Expect more details at GA later this year. In the meantime, you can view a demo of the service in action below and we encourage you to sign up for the Public Preview. We are excited to bring Pure’s service to Azure customers!