Build a Secure Sovereign Cloud with Microsoft and Everpure

At Everpure, we’re seeing two major trends shaping next-generation data centers. The first is obviously AI, but specifically, sovereign private cloud transformations to enable inference and agentic applications in a model where critical data is secured locally in order to meet regulatory, governance, and security requirements. The second is the disruption in the virtualization market, where IT teams are being forced to rapidly shift infrastructure strategies to avoid soaring costs, architectural complexity, and rigid vendor bundles along with further lock-in. With those two trends in mind, we at Everpure are excited to partner even more closely with Microsoft and announce the general availability of a game-changing joint solution: Everpure™ FlashArray™ support for Microsoft Azure Local.

Delivering scale and reliability to sovereign clouds

Azure Local targets regulated, disconnected, and sovereignty-sensitive deployments. Pairing it with external storage preserves data locality while enhancing security.

• Sovereign cloud ready: Ideally suited for industries with strict data residency laws, this solution keeps sensitive data within national borders while still integrating with Azure’s security and governance stack. Azure delivers on over 100 governmental and industrial compliance and regulatory frameworks across the globe. 
• Disconnected operations: Azure Local supports fully disconnected operations. In these environments, customers can run cloud services with an entirely on-premises control plane, allowing systems to operate securely and independently without reliance on external network access. Everpure allows simple scaling of data storage and industry-leading reliability for disconnected operations that support mission-critical workloads, edge scenarios, and sensitive environments where regulatory, security, or resilience requirements necessitate isolation, while still benefiting from Microsoft-validated infrastructure, updates, and lifecycle management processes.
• Built-in resilience: The solution comes bundled with built-in cyber resilience, encryption, and immutable SafeMode™ Snapshots.
• Rapid recovery: FlashArray can often restore multi-terabyte databases in seconds, offering a significant advantage over the longer rehydration times often associated with software-defined storage.

What this means for your data center 

Here are the benefits this solution brings to your data center:

• Turbocharged performance: By offloading data services to FlashArray, you eliminate the HCI CPU tax. This reclaims server power, allowing you to massively consolidate your VMs while enjoying the predictable, sub-millisecond latency that mission-critical applications demand.
• Unified, familiar management: There’s no steep learning curve for this solution, as it uses familiar Windows and Hyper-V management methods. Azure Local replaces legacy consoles, allowing you to manage your on-premises and cloud resources seamlessly from the Azure portal. At the same time, you keep the full operational control and ease of use of Everpure.
• Evergreen^® innovation: Say farewell to disruptive, costly forklift upgrades forever. Our Evergreen subscription model ensures your storage is always modern, with both hardware and software updates that are non-disruptive.  
• Unmatched data efficiency: Everpure industry-leading data reduction technologies—including deduplication, compression, and pattern removal—significantly reduce the effective cost of storing data. This means less physical capacity is required, lowering power, cooling, and space needs within your data center and maximizing the return on your storage investment for Azure Local workloads.

What is Microsoft Azure Local?

Azure Local is Microsoft’s on-premises extension of Azure—a managed service that runs Azure infrastructure and services inside a customer’s data center or edge location, ensuring data remains on premises. It’s based on Windows Server Core Hyper-V and delivered as Azure-managed hardware and allows organizations to run Azure VMs, containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), VDI with Azure Virtual Desktop, and Azure services locally while staying connected to the Azure control plane for unified management, billing, and updates. 

Using Azure Local enabled by Azure Arc, users can operate workloads across on-premises and cloud-connected environments with a unified control plane, enabling data residency, low-latency processing, and operational autonomy where required. This hybrid model is particularly well-suited for regulated industries and public sector organizations that must balance innovation and scalability with localized control and regulatory alignment.

Azure Migrate from VMware to Azure Local enables customers to seamlessly move VMware virtual machines into their Azure Local infrastructure. This agentless migration path keeps data flows local, minimizes downtime, and simplifies onboarding with a cloud-consistent experience.

Solution design 

Traditional hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is excellent for general-purpose applications, but when it comes to storage-heavy, low-latency, or mission-critical workloads, it can hit a wall. Because traditional HCI bundles compute and storage into a single node, you can’t scale one without paying for the other. This “one-size-fits-all” approach is insufficient for the complexity of modern enterprise environments. 

By partnering with Microsoft, we’re completely opening up the architecture. You can now seamlessly integrate Everpure FlashArray as high-performance external storage for your Azure Local environment. This means you can decouple compute and storage, giving you the ultimate freedom to scale performance and capacity independently. Need more storage? Just add arrays, without buying unnecessary, expensive server compute nodes.

This integration enables the use of existing FlashArray storage area networks (SANs) with Azure Local via Fibre Channel connectivity. This allows for side-by-side deployment with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), where the SAN volumes are used exclusively for user workloads like VMs and Kubernetes. SAN mode can be added to existing HCI mode deployments.  SAN mode may also be deployed as disaggregated storage, without S2D, and it supports up to 64 compute nodes. In SAN mode, FlashArray provisions block volumes across a Fibre Channel fabric. iSCSI and NVMe connectivity will be supported in future Azure Local releases.

Figure 1: Azure Local can be deployed in HCI mode (left) with local drives that create a storage pool, as well as in SAN mode (right) with external storage. SAN mode can be added to existing HCI mode deployments. In SAN mode, FlashArray provisions block volumes across a Fibre Channel fabric. iSCSI and NVMe connectivity will be supported in future Azure Local releases.

Ready to modernize without compromise?

It’s time to bring cloud-native agility to your on-premises infrastructure. Whether you’re actively planning your exit from legacy virtualization platforms or simply looking to supercharge your hybrid cloud, Everpure and Azure Local are ready to deliver enterprise performance without the tradeoffs.

Contact your Everpure or Microsoft account team today to unlock the ultimate hybrid cloud experience.

Learn more about our solutions for Azure. 

*While Azure Local keeps data physically on-premises, Microsoft as a US-headquartered company remains subject to US law, including the CLOUD Act, which may compel disclosure of data to US authorities regardless of where it is stored. Organisations with strict legal sovereignty requirements should seek independent legal advice.