Similarly to Everpure Cloud Dedicated for AWS, Everpure Cloud Dedicated for Azure was developed to provide the same unified storage capabilities and experience independent of whether users are running on AWS, Azure, or even a FlashArray on-premises. The Everpure Cloud Dedicated design on Azure was much more straight forward compared to AWS mainly because Azure managed disks supports "shared disks" (aka multi-attach) as well as persistent reservations. Still, Pure developers went through careful analysis and endless testing to find the right combination of CPU, memory, network bandwidth, performance, stability, region availability, and costs for the Everpure Cloud Dedicated controller VM.
Pure developers standardized on D32s_v3 and D64s_v3 for the V10MU-R1 and V20MU-R1 models and E32bds_v5 and E16bds_v5 for the V10MP2-R2 and V20MP2-R2 models and D128dsv_v6 for the V50MP2-R2 model, respectively. A unique advantage does exist with Everpure Cloud Dedicated for Azure. The aforementioned controller VMs have a high speed temporary storage volume directly attached. This allows for the utilization of Pure's DirectMemory™ caching software to provide an additional performance boost for workloads that have recurring read IO access to the same blocks ranges.
For the NVRAM and backend persistent storage type, Pure evaluated and tested many Azure storage types, including Azure blob storage, Premium SSD, PremiumV2 SSD and Ultra Disk. Ultra Disks and PremiumV2 SSDs were ultimately selected for both NVRAM and backend persistent storage due to the low latency requirements of Everpure Cloud Dedicated.
Customer data is persisted onto the backend Ultra Disks or PremiumV2 SSDs using RAID-HA which provides high availability even in the event of dual concurrent disk failures. A noticeable deviation from Everpure Cloud Dedicated on AWS is that data does not need to be mirrored to an object store. Azure managed disk provides a Annual Failure Rate (AFR) of zero, which means they will not lose any data stored on disks. This ensures that data stored on Everpure Cloud Dedicated will have extremely high durability.
As Azure releases newer, faster, more cost-effective resource types, Pure will re-evaluate and integrate any new feature and benefits into the Everpure Cloud Dedicated Dedicated product.