The News: Pure Storage launches Pure Protect disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), an addon offering that is sold directly by Pure and priced per terabyte. Pure also enhanced its Data Resilience Score, a function of its Pure1 Data Protection Assessment, and its Zero Data Loss Guarantee. Additional details are available in the press release from Pure Storage.
Pure Storage Launches Pure Protect DRaaS To Simplify Disaster Recovery
Analyst Take: The need for data resiliency has been amplified at the ranks of executive leadership by the all too real threat of data loss and extended business downtime due to cyberattacks. Although a comprehensive strategy for data protection includes backup and operational recovery as a necessary safeguard, replication-based disaster recovery (DR), when implemented with proper security controls, plays an important role from the standpoint of minimizing data loss and downtime. The problem is that obtaining DR has historically been an issue in certain instances due to its cost and complexity, as well as the staff required to purchase, implement, and manage a secondary recovery site. Controlling these costs and operational complexities is more important than ever before, given how constrained for time IT operations teams are today and how quickly they are expected to respond to cyber threats.
With this in mind, storage infrastructure and backup software vendors alike are making investments related to cyber resiliency. Pure Storage is no exception. Its most recent portfolio updates include, notably, the introduction of Pure Protect DRaaS. The new addon, consumption-based services replicates on-premises VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs) to the public cloud environment as native Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances. Multiple restore points can be created to ensure a clean copy for recovery. These instances can then be converted back into vSphere VMs as needed for on-premises operations to resume. Because the solution uses VMware’s vSphere Storage application programming interfaces (APIs) for Data Protection (VADP), the storage source is democratized; non-Pure Storage infrastructure is supported.
Although the customer provides the AWS account and is responsible for setting up policies and groups as needed, Pure handles the complexity of provisioning the landing zone and orchestrating recovery operations. As a result, operations are streamlined for not only recovery operations but also use case testing. The ability for the customer to bring their own AWS account allows them to use AWS credits that they might have already needed to purchase per their contract with AWS.
As an inaugural release, current use cases are limited, but Pure has announced plans to add support for vSphere-to-vSphere replication in the future. Additionally, in conversation with The Futurum Group, the company noted plans to add support for cloud block storage for performance and deduplication benefits alongside the ability to support changed block tracking (CBT).
Pure Protect DRaaS slots into a company’s broader data resilience play.
The service will complement notable existing Pure capabilities including Pure’s ActiveDR and ActiveCluster synchronous replication capabilities, which primarily help critical, high-transaction workloads to withstand hardware failure. The service also complements Pure’s support for immutable snapshots. From the standpoint of minimizing data loss and accelerating recovery, Pure offers Ransomware Anomaly Detection, which identifies deviations from baseline steady state operations on Pure arrays and helps IT operations to more quickly identify the last known good recovery point available.
In addition to launching Pure Protect DRaaS, the company enhanced its Data Resiliency Score capability for increased visibility into customers’ utilization of key cyber resiliency capabilities from Pure and third-party backup software vendor partners. Pure takes a competitive step closer to partners such as Commvault and Veeam with the DRaaS announcement, especially following the acquisition of Portworx and its backup capabilities for Kubernetes environments in 2020. The DRaaS offering is in its early days and directed at a point use case, however, and the market for Kubernetes backup remains nascent, although growing. As customers have long-established backup deployments with a long tail of adoption, covering an important use case distinct to DR, it will be important for Pure to continue to work alongside these partners with delineation of where it adds value from the standpoint of data resilience.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Pure Storage Revenue Beats Expectations, as Gen AI Adds to Growth
Pure Storage Brings Purely Block Storage to Azure/VMware Cloud
Pure Storage Q1 FY 2024 Results: Subscription and All-Flash Breakthroughs Boost Performance
Author Information
With a focus on data security, protection, and management, Krista has a particular focus on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments. She brings approximately 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data protection practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
