An Onramp to an Optimized Cloud

Years ago, when it came to data platforms, there was a pretty consistent and direct correlation between the size of a company (in employees or revenue) and the size of its data resources. It was rare to find a smaller organization with large-scale data challenges. 

The internet, IoT, and many other trends and technologies broke that model, and now even newly formed companies are frequently working with large volumes of data, supporting business-critical and performance-sensitive applications, both inside and outside the firewall. 

We were thankful at Silk to experience tremendous growth during economic uncertainty in 2022. That growth was driven by a continuous aggressive march to the cloud by enterprises demanding extreme performance and long-term cost-efficiency from business-critical applications.  

Demand for performance and cost-efficiency in cloud applications has clearly moved well beyond the largest organizations. 

Introducing Silk Express Pack

We’re very excited to introduce the Silk Express Pack pricing tier, a new way to offer the benefits of Silk for performance, availability, manageability, and cost-efficiency to smaller workloads. We see demand to support smaller workloads and leaner cloud instances in many situations:  

• Ancillary workloads that haven’t yet been prioritized for cloud migration 
• Dev/Test environments for new workloads 
• “Production POCs” – a desire, especially by smaller organizations to see Silk’s benefits in production with a smaller up-front commitment 

Silk Express Pack also adds flexibility for existing Silk customers. For example, we have some customers who offer SaaS access to their own clients, and for reasons of data sovereignty and latency, it makes sense for them to manage a region-specific instance of Silk Express Pack for a smaller customer in a new region that requires data locality. 

Silk Express Pack delivers Silk’s extreme performance acceleration for workloads up to 30 TiB, delivering up to 8GB/s and 790K+ IOPS performance with consistent, sub-millisecond latency and Silk’s portfolio of data services including thin provisioning, zero-footprint snapshots, and more. 

Our team has also been hard at work continuing to push the limits of cloud performance and efficiency. We have worked closely with Microsoft’s Azure team to deliver a new release of Silk Data Virtualization Platform to add support for Azure Premium SSD v2. Silk on Premium v2 complements the Silk Express Pack pricing tier, offering Silk Data pods with 5 TiB capacity and up, allowing customers to tightly fit their Silk deployment to their performance and capacity needs.    

Room to Grow

At Silk, we bet on our customers’ success, not just for cloud migration but for long-term optimization of their cloud workloads.  We designed Silk Express Pack to provide seamless growth into the Silk Data Virtualization Platform. On the technical front, that means that we made sure that upgrading will be effortless and non-disruptive when customers need more capacity, and that pricing and commercial terms are consistent to avoid any pricing discontinuity or surprises. We want to make it as easy as possible for mid-sized Enterprises using Silk Express Pack to succeed, expand, and upgrade.