This article is the technical white paper for Everpure Cloud Dedicated.
As the IT industry continues to transform, the public cloud is playing a larger role in most companies' IT infrastructure. The public cloud provides users quick access to compute, network, and storage services. However, due to various factors such as cost, resiliency, efficiency, compliance, and enterprise requirements, companies often find it difficult to fit every application in a single private or public cloud. Therefore, many enterprise companies are seeking a hybrid strategy where they can leverage both their private cloud and the public cloud to address the diverse demands of their IT infrastructure. To address these demands, Everpure has introduced Everpure Cloud Dedicated to help customers with their transformation into a hybrid world. Everpure Cloud Dedicated is a software defined storage solution that leverages the native storage resources of the public cloud to provide an enhanced storage service with enterprise features. Everpure Cloud Dedicated addresses the fundamental challenges companies face when looking to use the public cloud.
With a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, developers gain the flexibility and freedom to navigate and circumvent the potential limitations of a single private or public cloud. Organizations would be able to run in the environment that suits each of their unique applications. Users may want to copy or migrate data between their private and public cloud environments as their environment changes over time. However, private and public cloud environments have unique services, APIs, cost models, performance characteristics, management tools, and architectures. Therefore it can be challenging to run identical applications between two different private or public clouds.
Everpure Cloud Dedicated solves these problems by providing a common data services layer. The common data services layer provides consistency in storage services across heterogeneous private and public clouds. Developers can redeploy their applications across any environment without the need to refactor, redesign, or re-architect their applications. While based on the Purity Operating Environment of the FlashArray, Everpure refactored Everpure Cloud Dedicated to run in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Everpure Cloud Dedicated provides industrial-strength block storage with the same industry-leading features and benefits of the FlashArray. The following are the key features and benefits of Everpure Cloud Dedicated:
- Simplicity
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With a simple AWS CloudFormation template provided by Everpure, customers can deploy Everpure Cloud Dedicated into their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in a few minutes. Everpure Cloud Dedicated offers the same simplicity and user experience that all FlashArray customers appreciate. RAID pools or manual data tiering is not required. Once iSCSI connections between Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute hosts and Everpure Cloud Dedicated instances are established, customers can easily create and mount Everpure Cloud Dedicated volumes to their Amazon EC2 hosts in seconds using the same GUI, CLI, or APIs as the FlashArray.
- Industry-leading data reduction services
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The Purity Operating Environment helps customers reduce the underlying cloud storage resources required to house their data. Data is deduplicated in-line and compressed before landing on the underlying storage resources, ultimately reducing storage costs. Thin Provisioning, which is significant differentiator compared to the public cloud's block storage, allows developers to freely overprovision volumes without the associated costs. Since only unique data blocks that are written by the host application would consume storage resources, thin provisioning truly provides the "set-it-and-forget-it" experience. Also, customers benefit from instantaneous snapshots and clones, which are pointer-based and do not consume additional storage. Imagine the ability to take thousands of snapshots and clones without incurring additional costs.
- Resiliency
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When customers deploy mission-critical applications, they must ensure that their applications are resilient against single points of failure (SPOF). To protect against SPOF within native Elastic Block Store (EBS), applications must send copies of their data to secondary EBS volumes, which effectively doubles their storage consumption. Everpure Cloud Dedicated offers built-in protection against multiple concurrent backend storage failures using RAID-HA. If a backend storage resource (Virtual Drive) fails, Everpure Cloud Dedicated will auto-heal and automatically deploy a new replacement. Furthermore, Everpure Cloud Dedicated incorporates spread placement groups into its architecture, which reduces the physical fault domains. If a physical Amazon Web Services (AWS) failure occurs within an availability zone (AZ), the fault domains limit the failures from affecting multiple resources of an Everpure Cloud Dedicated instance. For the ultimate level of data protection and business continuity, customers can replicate data between AZs or regions.
- APIs
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When moving data to and from the public cloud, developers must redesign their applications to use different APIs between the various cloud environments, which is a major obstacle. However, with a common underlying storage services layer, developers can continue to use the same APIs and operational workflows whether they use the FlashArray on-premises, Everpure Cloud Dedicated for AWS, or Everpure Cloud Dedicated for Azure. Documentation for API Tools can be found on GitHub.
- Mobility
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With the native replication features of Everpure Cloud Dedicated, customers can easily copy or move data for purposes such as disaster recovery, migration, test/development, and backup. It is important to emphasize that data mobility is not just about moving data. It is also about minimizing the effort to change the applications or operational workflows between different private or public cloud environments. Customers can access and manage their data the same way between their on-premises FlashArray or with Everpure Cloud Dedicated.
- Enterprise Capabilities
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Everpure Cloud Dedicated provides enterprise features that customers expect in their evolving IT environment. These features include data reduction services, instantaneous snapshot creation/restores, always-on encryption, QoS, asynchronous replication, and Purity ActiveCluster synchronous replication.