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Snowflake, a data-warehousing company, and Pure Storage have teamed up to offer Snowflake’s cloud-based data-warehousing solution on-premises.
The Snowflake Data Cloud computation engine will be operated on Pure Storage’s FlashBlade file and object storage array as part of the new partnership. Pure Storage also offers a FlashArray range of storage devices, but they serve a distinct purpose, according to Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage.
He described FlashArray as “our scale-up platform” and FlashBlade as “our scale-out platform.” “We tend to see FlashArray applied to transactional database-type workloads, such as OLTP, trading databases, billing databases, where you have high update rates,” he said. “We tend to see FlashBlade applied to data warehouses or analytics types of environments where you don’t have a ton of transactional change, but you have a lot of analysis, a lot of read-type workloads.”
Customers will be able to examine numerous data sources while keeping their data local, and they will be able to execute multiple analyses on the same data, thanks to the combination of Pure hardware and Snowflake software.
Customer benefits of the plan, according to Lee, include decreased complexity and faster data migration to the cloud. AWS and Microsoft, for example, charge not only for the quantity of data stored on their systems but also for the amount of data that goes back and forth between them. With a large data warehouse, this can soon add up.
Second, having things on-premises eliminates the hassle and expense of keeping several data sets in sync and up-to-date, as well as the danger of data exposure when data is transported back and forth between the data center and the CSP. Keeping two data warehouses with the same data, one on-premises and one in the cloud, in sync and secure may be a real pain.
Then there’s the issue of regulation. “There are definitely regulatory and compliance reasons, to be sure.” “This is a perfect answer for a lot of businesses, whether for security, regulatory, or data sovereignty concerns,” Lee added.
Snowflake and Dell reached a similar agreement earlier this month.
Although the Pure/Snowflake integration is in beta, Snowflake stated it will discuss it in depth at its user conference next month. According to Lee, it will most likely be widely available in the second part of the year.
