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.Join Everpure Cloud at Pure Accelerate 2026
If you're coming to Pure Accelerate, make time for the Everpure™ Cloud sessions. This year's lineup brings together breakout sessions, flash talks, and a community meetup focused on modern cloud storage across Azure and AWS, workload design, hybrid cloud strategy, and practical ways to improve cost efficiency and operational simplicity. Whether you're evaluating how to support Azure VMs at scale, looking for better patterns for hybrid workloads, or trying to bring more predictability to cloud storage costs, these sessions are designed to help you move from strategy to execution. Why attend the Everpure Cloud sessions? Cloud teams are under pressure to do more than just migrate. They need to control costs, simplify operations, and build architectures that can adapt as business needs change. At Pure Accelerate, the Everpure Cloud sessions will focus on exactly those conversations, with content spanning architecture, scale, FinOps, storage operations, and real-world workload guidance. This is a strong opportunity to hear how Everpure Cloud supports modern cloud environments across Azure, AWS, and hybrid use cases, while giving infrastructure teams more flexibility in how they scale and manage storage. Featured Everpure Cloud sessions at Pure Accelerate Breakout sessions Modern Azure Storage with Everpure Cloud: Architecture, Scale & FinOps — Thursday, June 18, 1:45–2:30 PM PT. Configuring Workloads for Everpure Cloud: Architectures, Patterns, and Gotchas — Thursday, June 18, 1:45–2:30 PM PT. Maximizing Hybrid SQL Server 2025 on Azure with Everpure Cloud — Wednesday, June 17, 2:45–3:30 PM PT. These breakout sessions are ideal for attendees who want a deeper look at architecture decisions, workload best practices, and ways to align cloud storage performance with cost and scale requirements. Flash talks Everpure Cloud Azure Native for Azure VMs in 15 Minutes — Thursday, June 18, 2:45–3:05 PM PT. Accelerating Storage Operations with Everpure Cloud — Thursday, June 18, 3:15–3:35 PM PT. Evolving Everpure Cloud Value: A Smarter Hybrid Cloud Approach for Healthcare— Thursday, June 18, 12:30–12:50 PM PT. Public Cloud Experience, Private Cloud Economics— Thursday, June 18, 12:00–12:20 PM PT. If you want high-value takeaways in a shorter format, these flash talks are a great way to quickly explore how Everpure Cloud can help streamline operations, support Azure VM environments, and improve the economics of cloud storage. Community session Community Meetup: You're Moving to the Cloud: Now What? — Wednesday, June 17, 5:30–6:30 PM PT. This meetup is a great fit for anyone looking to exchange ideas with peers, hear different perspectives on cloud adoption, and join a broader conversation around the challenges and opportunities that come with moving to the cloud. Meet the Everpure cloud team at booth If you're in Las Vegas for Pure Accelerate, stop by the Everpure Cloud showcase booth to continue the conversation in person and to learn how organizations are reducing storage costs, simplifying operations, and scaling hybrid cloud environments more efficiently. Learn more To explore the Everpure Cloud portfolio in more detail, visit the Everpure Cloud webpage. For deeper technical guidance, check out these Knowledge Portal resources: Everpure Cloud Dedicated for Azure documentation Everpure Cloud Dedicated for AWS documentation Everpure Cloud Azure Native documentation Add Everpure Cloud to Your Pure Accelerate Agenda If cloud cost optimization, operational simplicity, and scalable storage architectures are priorities for your team, be sure to add these sessions to your Pure Accelerate schedule. We look forward to seeing you there. Ready to join us in Las Vegas? Register now for Pure Accelerate 2026 and start building your agenda. We look forward to seeing you there.PSC Dedicated on Azure - 6.10.x so far
In this post, I though to do a quick look back at the 6.10.x PSC Dedicated on Azure, as we've seen quite a few interesting features be added. Let's start with NVMe-Based Backend. Prior to the 6.10.0 release, Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated for Azure used an SCSI-based backend to connect Managed Disks (both SSDs and NVRAM) to its controller VMs. Starting with 6.10.0, PSC Dedicated SKUs with Premium V2 SSDs will leverage NVMe-based access for Managed Disks. NVMe is a high-speed storage protocol that enables direct communication with storage devices over the PCIe bus. Compared to SCSI, NVMe brings improvements potentially resulting in lower latency, higher IOPS, and reduced CPU utilization. To begin using the NVMe backend, upgrade the array to Purity version 6.10.0. As part of this upgrade, the existing SCSI-based controller VM is automatically replaced with an equivalent NVMe-enabled VM. This transition is fully automated and transparent, no manual steps or redeployment is required, and there are no changes to the user interface or management workflows. The cost of the array also remains unchanged. NVMe becomes the only supported backend protocol moving onward (6.10.0+), there is no option to revert back to SCSI. Let's also look at the backend Performance Characteristics to better understand the change here. The backend performance - meaning the IOPS and throughput between the controller VM and the attached managed disks - is primarily determined by the VM size. This is because Azure imposes VM-level caps on both backend IOPS and throughput. These limits apply regardless of the number of attached disks. The maximum achievable backend IOPS for the primary controller is based on the lower of: The IOPS cap defined by Azure for the VM SKU The combined IOPS of all attached SSDs (Azure Managed Disks) Individual PSC Dedicated SSD Managed Disk performance was selected and configured as to saturate the controller VM backend limits, i.e.: Maximum VM backend IOPS / # of SSD disks = each SSD IOPS Azure also enforces a VM-level backend bandwidth limit, which is a combined cap across both read and write operations. This means that even with multiple high-throughput disks, the total achievable bandwidth cannot exceed what the VM SKU allows. With the switch to NVMe protocol, Azure increases these backend IOPS and bandwidth caps of compatible VMs are raised. This includes the ones used as PSC Dedicated Controllers (for MP2R2 SKUs) VM Size Backend type Max Backend IOPS Max Backend R/W Throughput (MBps) Frontend Network Bandwidth (Mbps) V10MP2R2 NVMe 88,400 2,300 12,500 V10MP2R2 SCSI 64,800 1,370 12,500 V20MP2R2 NVMe 174,200 4,800 16,000 V20MP2R2 SCSI 129,700 2,740 16,000 Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/ebdsv5-ebsv5-series From the table above it is clear both IOPS and Bandwidth are seeing significant improvement, positively influencing certain workloads. Increase in backend IOPS is expected to bring benefits in a mixed read/write workload with small IO sizes. Increase in backend bandwidth can be beneficial for non-reducible mixed read/write workloads with high array utilisation. However, keep in mind the managed disk configuration (both SSD and NVRAM) remains the same. This ensures the overall cost remains unchanged with this switch. Also, while the NVMe backend may contribute to an increased storage performance capabilities, other limits (such as frontend network bandwidth and IOPS) still apply. To further extend the performance potential of PSC Dedicated outside of backend limits, in 6.10.2, we've seen an introduction of a brand new SKU, the Azure V50MP2R2. For the new SKU, Azure D128ds v6 virtual machines (VM) were used as controller VMs, along with Premium SSD v2 managed disks. VMs in this class provide up to 6.75 GBps of network egress for read/replication traffic and significantly higher back‑end IOPS and bandwidth for managed disk connectivity. The NVMe back‑end is used by default on the SKU and similarly to current V10 and V20 models, it supports both customer driven non-disruptive Purity upgrades and Controller Scaling (e.g. it is possible to non-disruptively scale to the V50MP2R2 from lower MP2R2 SKUs). At launch, the V50 is available in the following regions: Central US East US East US 2 South Central US Canada Central Canada East Last but not least, 6.10.3 aims to address Azure maintenance or brief infrastructure events, during which the array can experience short-lived increases in I/O latency to backend managed disks. These spikes may be transient yet noticeable by hosts and applications. To harden array behavior against these conditions, PSC Dedicated 6.10.3 on Azure comes with a newly configured set of array-level tunables. These adjust how controllers interpret delayed I/O, coordinate takeovers, and manage internal leases so the array prefers riding out transient backend conditions rather than initiating a controller failover.Pure Cloud Block Store is now Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated (PSC Dedicated)
Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated: Name Change, Same Enterprise-Grade Experience Pure Storage Cloud is an enterprise-grade block storage delivered as a service in the public cloud. It extends the data services and evergreen architecture of the Purity operating system and can be deployed in: Azure as a fully managed native service or a customer-managed service integrated with Azure VMware Solution (AVS) AWS as a customer-managed service integrated with Elastic VMware Service (EVS) What’s New? Pure Cloud Block Store, the customer-managed service, is being renamed Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated (PSC Dedicated). This change reflects its integration into the Pure Storage Cloud family and alignment with the Enterprise Data Cloud strategy. What’s Not Changing? Everything That Matters Your experience, performance, and features remain the same. Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated continues to provide: Enterprise Data Services: Purity software in Azure and AWS, with data reduction, thin provisioning, and snapshots. Cost Efficiency: Optimized storage usage and reduced footprint through data reduction. Reliability & Resilience: Built-in redundancy, high availability, and cyber resilience. Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Mobility: Consistent APIs and replication across FlashArrays and PSC Dedicated for migration, DR, and data mobility. Disaster Recovery & Backup: Asynchronous and near-synchronous replication, plus snapshots for cost-effective backup and rapid recovery. VMware Workload Support: Enterprise-grade storage for VMware in AVS and EVS environments. Why This Matters The shift from Pure Cloud Block Store to Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated unifies offerings under the Pure Storage Cloud umbrella while advancing the broader Enterprise Data Cloud strategy.Accelerate Breakout Replay: Seamless VMware Workloads in AWS with Elastic VMware Service and Pure Cloud Block Store™
Discover how EVS & Pure Cloud Block Store™ bring VMware to the cloud with operational consistency and new workload opportunities. Speakers: Pavel Kovar Ron Wedel, AWS https://www.purestorage.com/video/webinars/seamless-vmware-workloads-in-aws-with-elastic/6375806872112.htmlAccelerate Breakout Replay: From Data Center to Azure: Seamless VMware Migrations Unleashed with Pure Storage Cloud
Learn how Pure Storage Azure-native service simplifies AVS migration with elastic storage, unified management, and FinOps-friendly scaling. Speakers: Vaclav Jirovsky Husam Hilal, MSFT Joe Ervolino, Dupaco https://www.purestorage.com/video/webinars/from-data-center-to-azure-seamless-vmware-migrations-unleashed/6375801044112.htmlPurely Cloud Podcast - CBS on Azure Technical Deep Dive
Together with vjirovsky we hosted a podcast episode where we discussed CBS on Azure architecture and best practices. Have a listen here: https://soundcloud.com/user-917746545/purely-cloud-guest-series-cbs-on-azure-technical-deep-dive-and-deployment-best-practicesUse CBS as persistent storage on AKS via Portworx CSI driver
Hi all, with the recent version of Portworx CSI driver (v25.4.0) you can mount a persistent block volume on CBS into your containers on Kubernetes and utilize all features and benefits of CBS. Sharing my recent blog post, how to set it up on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): https://blog.vjirovsky.cz/portworx-csi-with-aks-with-cbs/CBS 6.8.7 released
This version brings several updates to Cloud Block Store on both AWS and Azure. Automatic Capacity Upgrade for CBS on Azure enables customers to automatically increase total CBS capacity by adding additional storage to the array when total used storage capacity reaches the threshold of 80%. Along with the Automatic Capacity Upgrade, we released Selectable Initial Capacity, which allows customers to choose the array capacity during initial deployment. Starting from this release it’s possible to configure NVMe-TCP connection between CBS on AWS and AWS Linux based native VMs. NVMe-TCP is seen as the modern successor to iSCSI for block storage, particularly for workloads demanding high performance. Both CBS AWS and CBS Azure now support over-the-wire encryption capability for arrays that are replicating using synchronous connections, adding to the existing support for encrypted asynchronous replication. For more details, please refer to Purity Release Notes.Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution | Public Preview Announcement
Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution has officially entered a Public Preview phase! Check out the launch blog posts: Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution: A Closer Look Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution | Microsoft Community Hub
