Why Building SAN-Like Architecture into Your Cloud Is the Smarter Move

For years, IT teams have faced the same painful trade-off: higher IOPS means paying for premium disk tiers and over-provisioning compute just to hit throughput targets.

Native cloud storage ties performance directly to capacity — want more speed, buy more disk.

For I/O-intensive applications migrated from on prem to the cloud, this creates a compounding problem most teams underestimate. Increasing core counts to reach the IOPS your database needs doesn’t just raise VM costs — it multiplies database licensing fees (SQL Server, Oracle) in lockstep. And running Prod alongside Dev/Test means duplicating everything on those expensive premium tiers. After all, these applications can run in the cloud but they were not built for the cloud.

Consider a workload requiring 200,000 IOPS on Azure. Native Premium SSD forces you to 32+ cores to hit that number — which can triple your SQL Server licensing cost compared to a properly decoupled architecture. You’re not paying for what you use; you’re paying for the ceiling you’re forced to build.

But what if that trade-off no longer exists?

A Software-Defined SAN, Delivered in the Cloud

Silk brings data centre-grade SAN architecture into cloud environments — decoupling performance from capacity so you no longer must buy storage headroom just to get the IOPS you need.

With Silk in your cloud environment:

• Performance scales independently from capacity — no over-provisioning
• Storage is centralised and optimised across workloads
• Zero-copy clones spin up in minutes via simple API calls
• Data footprints shrink by over 50% through compression and deduplication
• Metadata snapshots replace slow, expensive full backups
• Latency stays sub-millisecond, predictably, under load

In short: Silk eliminates the cloud performance-vs-cost trade-off and makes the cloud behave like a high-performance enterprise data centre.

The Numbers That Matter

Performance

• Up to 10x faster than native cloud storage
• Sub-millisecond latency for consistent workloads
• Up to 35 GB/s throughput per VM
• Over 2.1 million IOPS delivered

Cost

• 40%+ overall cloud cost savings
• Up to 50% reduction in storage costs
• 79% lower cost vs Azure Ultra Disk
• Up to 70% storage savings and 76% compute savings

Validated Business Outcomes

• 139% ROI — Forrester Total Economic Impact study
• $2.8M annual savings through eliminating over-provisioning
• 5x performance improvement with ~36% cost reduction

Are You Overpaying Right Now?

The exact savings depend on your workload mix, storage volumes, and licensing profile — but here’s a practical rule of thumb: from around 40TB of fast disk and 128 cores of database licensing, there’s almost always a compelling cost case on Azure spend alone, before you factor in operational efficiency.

If you’re running SQL Server, Oracle, or PostgreSQL at scale — or operating AI/analytics pipelines, high-frequency transactional workloads, or environments where Dev/Test clones consume significant storage — you could be overpaying by 30–70% right now.

The ability to create instant database copies, clones, and mount them on different VMs isn’t just a storage feature — it increases the speed and quality of data for Dev/Test teams and their ability to innovate.