Pure Storage, Equinix team for new bare-metal offerings

Flash-array vendor Pure Storage and data-center provider Equinix have teamed to deliver Pure Storage on Equinix Metal, a joint offering the companies claim can deliver physical infrastructure at software speed.

The platform provides enterprises with embedded storage and on-demand availability of network and compute services, typical of the cloud. The solution is designed to support a range of storage use cases and is provided by both vendors under a single contract.

Bare-metal hosting is a smaller market than the more popular infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud offering, because, like its name implies, all you get is hardware: cores, memory, storage, and networking. You provide the operating environment.

It’s popular in “lift and shift” scenarios where a company takes an on-premises environment and moves everything—OS, apps, datato the bare-metal cloud and operates it there, unchanged from on-premises. It’s a great way to migrate apps out of your data center without modifying them for —the elastic nature of the cloud.

That’s the point of Pure Storage on Equinix Metal. It provides dedicated, single-tenant servers and high-performance storage that can be provisioned to customers with cloud-like ease and speed. It eliminates upfront capex investment for hardware and ongoing operational costs and risks.

“Enterprises want full control over their environment, but they don’t want to operate their own data centers or be forced to fit into traditional cloud models–they want a cloud model that fits their business. By partnering with Equinix, we are eliminating management complexity and delivering the flexibility and controls that put organizations in charge of what their technology platforms can do for them,” said Jack Hogan, vice president of technology strategy for Pure Storage, in a statement.

While it’s on a bare-metal service, Pure Storage on Equinix Metal comes with several storage offerings. They include:

• Hybrid cloud and data-recovery-as-a-service for virtual environments: Customers can extend, protect, or migrate on premises, self-managed virtual machine (VM) environments to a hosted environment powered by FlashArray, with flexibility and options for a multi-cloud VM-based environment or a full VM-based cloud.
• High-performance, near-edge cloud storage: By combining the FlashBlade unified fast file and object platform with Equinix Metal, diverse unstructured data workloads can be consolidated onto a highly scalable platform with multi-dimensional performance.
• Hybrid and edge cloud native container storage: With its Portworx Kubernetes Storage Platform, Pure Storage customers can amplify their hybrid- and multi-cloud strategy by deploying a full Kubernetes environment capable of running mission-critical applications on a bare metal.

Pure Storage on Equinix Metal is available in 18 global Equinix Metal metros.