Pure Storage on Equinix Metal Plays by the Customer's Rules

While more businesses than ever are outsourcing data storage to cloud providers, there are plenty who have held back, citing concerns around security and privacy, performance, availability, governance and regulatory requirements.

Pure Storage and Equinix think they have the answer. The two companies have formed a mutually beneficial partnership that provides secure, single tenant storage from Pure, managed by the customer, on hardware hosted and managed by Equinix. All of the software and hardware functionality is specified by the customer and dedicated to them. That’s a different value proposition from what you would get with a public cloud provider, which is likely to run storage software on its own white box x86 servers.

Called Pure Storage on Equinix Metal, the solution is based on Equinix’s bare metal as a service offering that up until now included only compute and network delivered on demand, through a web portal in a fully automated fashion. The entire Pure Storage portfolio, including FlashArray, FlashBlade and Portworx, has been integrated into the Equinix Metal platform. Arrays are pre-enrolled and available for immediate, on-demand deployment of shared storage and available for consumption-based purchasing, explained Jack Hogan, Pure Storage’s vice president of technology strategy. Users can log into the Equinix Metal web portal to acquire and immediately start using the hosted, full stack (compute, storage and networking).

“For businesses that know they want a Pure Storage platform, this option gives them the exact capabilities they want as a service, and it looks like they are running it in-house. All they have to do is layer their applications on top and go from there,” said Eric Burgener, a vice president at IDC. “It’s an interesting option for businesses that want to outsource the management of the underlying hardware, and for those with workload requirements that aren’t well met with traditional web-scale public cloud-based infrastructures.”

There are several use cases for this service, including:

With the enterprise-class capability of the Pure storage array, Burgener said companies might be able to solve many of the challenges of storage in the public cloud. If a regulation requires a company to always know where its data is physically located, for example, the company knows exactly which facility it resides on, down to the particular piece of hardware. That’s not true with public cloud storage providers, which might move workloads to different availability zones.

The model is interesting enough, Burgener said, that he expects other storage vendors to pursue similar partnerships.