Pure Storage Empowers VMware Optimization to Reduce Costs and Enhance Efficiency

By Matt Bradford, director, technical marketing, digital experience team. Pure Storage, Inc.

The Virtualization Assessment in Pure1 provides the deep insights customers need to rethink their VMware strategy, streamline operations, and reduce costs.

Pure Storage is known for its storage platform, but its impact goes far beyond just storage. With our new Virtualization Assessment in Pure1, we’re helping customers discover significant cost savings in their VMware environments. By leveraging our expertise in storage and virtualization, we’re able to deliver insights that will help streamline your virtual infrastructure and reduce VMware licensing costs.

Disruption and uncertainty are challenging IT leaders to rethink their current application architecture. IT leaders face mounting pressure to manage infrastructure expenses while still meeting the demands of modern workloads.

Pure1 has always been at the forefront of delivering powerful insights through its unified SaaS management platform. Six years ago, Pure1 expanded its capabilities with VM Analytics, providing customers with visibility into their VMware environments. This feature offers rich visuals that map the entire storage path from virtual disks all the way back to the storage array. With this extra insight, Pure1 became a powerful tool for identifying bottlenecks, noisy neighbors, and performance spikes. Troubleshooting virtual machine workloads becomes a lot less challenging with Pure1.

Figure 1: Topology view of VMware environment from virtual disk to array in VM Analytics
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With the mounting pressure to manage new VMware costs, many organizations are looking for ways to manage and optimize their VMware environments as effectively as possible. However, a significant number of customers lack the necessary governance and observability tools, which provide critical data points necessary to determine their long-term virtualization strategies. Without these tools, identifying inefficiencies, optimizing workloads, and controlling costs can be a daunting task.

This gap often leaves organizations with over- or underutilized resources, inefficient license usage, and an inability to fully capitalize on their VMware investments. This is where Pure1’s Virtualization Assessment comes into play. By providing deep insights, Pure1 equips customers with the data they need to rethink their VMware strategy, streamline operations, and ultimately reduce costs.

Figure 2: Virtualization assessment overview and cost savings
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Building upon the rich data available through VM Analytics, we’re excited to introduce a new Virtualization Assessment designed to help customers optimize their virtual environments and reduce VMware licensing costs. This assessment leverages VM Analytics data to deliver a comprehensive view from vCenters, to clusters, to virtual machines, arming you with the information you need to rethink your virtualization strategy.

For example:

• Cost optimization: With the telemetry data provided by VM Analytics, Pure1 delivers cost optimization insights based on computer (CPU, memory) utilization. For instance, in a 16-node cluster where three hosts are consistently underutilized and running at 15%, Pure1 will recommend consolidating the cluster’s workloads across fewer hosts, highlighting the cost savings associated with reducing the number of licensed cores/hosts.
• Capacity planning: Pure1 provides resource utilization insights based on capacity, consistent overutilization, and historic growth trends. For example, a VMFS datastore nearing 90% utilization or a week-over-week growth trend can be identified and managed proactively.
• Performance tuning: Pure1 offers performance recommendations for VMs when it detects storage congestion due to latency or high IOPs. This might include suggestions such as migrating to vVols or adopting NVMe/TCP. Additionally, it provides VM right-sizing insights when a VM is consistently CPU bound for a sustained period.

Figure 3: Cluster utilization in virtualization assessment
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VMware consolidation remains a significant hurdle due to a lack of visibility into their virtual environments. With the Pure1 Virtualization Assessment, customers of all sizes can now extend beyond performance and capacity utilization to cluster optimization and workload placement. By identifying underutilized hosts and right-sizing resources, Pure1 helps customers rationalize their licensing costs, freeing up budget for other critical initiatives. This not only improves total cost of ownership but also enhances your return on investment.

Pure1’s new Virtualization Assessment is more than just a tool; it’s your compass for navigating the complexities of modern virtualization. By providing granular insights, Pure Storage is helping you optimize your environment, reduce costs, and align your VMware strategy with your business goals. Are you ready to see how Pure Storage can help you? Existing customers can dive into Pure1’s Virtualization Assessment and start saving!

Resources:
Log in to Pure1 to get started
Buyer’s Guide to Modern Virtualization (registration required, 14 pages)