Ask Us Everything Recap: Bringing Enterprise Storage Simplicity to Azure
What happens when you take the enterprise storage capabilities IT teams rely on and deliver them as a fully managed, Azure-native experience?
That question was at the heart of our latest Ask Us Everything, focused on Everpure Cloud Azure Native for Azure VMs. And judging by the questions from attendees, storage admins and cloud practitioners are thinking beyond simply moving workloads to Azure. They’re asking how to get there without trading familiar enterprise capabilities for higher costs, more operational overhead, or another collection of storage tiers to manage.
Everpure experts David Stamen, Nick Scuola, and Joe Houghes dug into those questions—and the conversation surfaced several useful takeaways.
“Azure already has storage. What makes Everpure different?”
Cloud storage can mean navigating different offerings, tiers, feature sets, and regional availability. Joe contrasted that with the enterprise storage model Everpure customers know: capabilities delivered consistently through the Purity OS, rather than requiring administrators to continually determine which storage option provides which feature.
Everpure Cloud for Azure Native brings capabilities including thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, performance, and availability into an experience designed to operate natively as an Azure service. Customers can deploy and consume it through Azure Marketplace, and get benefits they’re used to with their on-prem Everpure, all without managing the underlying storage infrastructure themselves.
That distinction matters: IT gets enterprise-grade block storage, without turning cloud storage into another infrastructure management project.
“How do I balance performance with cost?”
Attendees naturally wanted to know about performance tiers—and the answer illustrated the service’s approach to simplicity.
Instead of selecting among traditional on-prem array models or architecting around underlying infrastructure, customers simply choose the performance they need. The experts described a slider-based model for adjusting storage-pool performance, with Everpure handling everything behind the service.
That abstraction becomes particularly valuable as Azure evolves. The panel discussed how underlying Azure storage improvements have previously delivered both performance gains and lower infrastructure costs. With a managed service, Everpure can incorporate infrastructure changes behind the scenes, rather than requiring customers to redesign their environments every time the cloud platform changes.
As Nick summarized, the objective is the outcome: deliver the service level that customers need, while Everpure handles how it gets delivered.
“Can cloud storage actually help reduce our Azure spend?”
Cost was a recurring theme. We polled attendees, and half responded that they were “very concerned” about their Azure storage spend.
One important lever that can help lower costs is data reduction. Thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression can reduce the physical capacity required, although results depend heavily on workload and data type. The experts noted that the majority of traditional application data benefit greatly from data reduction capabilities built into Everpure Cloud, while already-compressed or encrypted data naturally offer less reduction.
The consumption model is simplified, too. Everpure Cloud for Azure Native combines the service and underlying infrastructure into a Marketplace purchase rather than separating software licensing from Azure infrastructure costs. Customers simply choose how much capacity and performance they need, and then receive it as one service and one bill.
“Does this simplify my storage management job?”
Perhaps the most important answer of the session: Yes!
The experts described storage deployments that can be stood up in hours rather than turning implementation into a weeks- or months-long project. For example: once a storage pool is created, volumes can be connected to workloads using Azure VM extensions, simplifying the process of getting storage in front of an application.
For experienced storage practitioners, that may be the biggest shift. Everpure Cloud for Azure Native isn’t about recreating every storage-management task in Azure. It’s about abstracting more of those tasks away so teams can concentrate on all their other work: applications, data, migrations, automation, and new initiatives.
Or, as Nick put it during the session: the goal is to help free up customers to manage their applications and data—not their storage.
That’s a cloud operating model storage admins can get behind.
Check out this and all our other Ask Us Everything sessions. And, keep the conversation going by jumping into the Everpure Community.
