Pure Storage, Snowflake partner for on-premises data warehousing

Pure Storage and data-warehouse developer Snowflake have partnered to bring Snowflake’s cloud-based data-warehousing technology on-premises.

Under the new relationship, the Snowflake Data Cloud compute engine will be run on Pure Storage’s FlashBlade file- and object-storage array. Pure has another line of storage devices, called FlashArray, but those serve a different purpose, notes Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage.

“I look at FlashArray as our scale-up platform, and FlashBlade as our scale out platform,” he said. “We tend to see FlashArray applied much more to transactional database-type workloads, like OLTP, trading databases, billing databases, where you have high update rates, and 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’ve got a lot of analysis, a lot of read-type workloads,” he said.

With the combination of Pure hardware and Snowflake software, customers will be able to analyze multiple data sources while keeping their data local, and they will be able to perform multiple analyses on the same data.

Lee notes customer benefits of the strategy, including reduced complexity less time to move data directly to the cloud. Cloud service providers like AWS and Microsoft charge not only for the amount of data stored on their services but the amount of data that moves back and forth between their storage services. With a sizable data warehouse, that can add up quickly.

Secondly, keeping things on premises saves the trouble and cost of keeping multiple data sets in sync and up-to-date, not to mention the potential risk of data exposure when it is being moved back and forth between the data center and the CSP. Maintaining two data warehouses of the same data, on-prem and in the cloud, can be a real headache to keep it all in sync and secure.

Then there’s the regulatory argument. “There’s absolutely a regulatory and compliance reasons as well, that’s for sure. So for a lot of customers, either for security, regulatory, or data sovereignty reasons … this is an ideal solution for them,” said Lee.

Snowflake  struck a similar deal with Dell earlier this month.

The Pure/Snowflake integration is in preview, but Snowflake said it will talk about it at length next month during its user conference. It will likely be generally available in the second half of the year, according to Lee.