Meet Data’s New BFF: Pure Storage Makes Play for Data’s Heart
- By Winston Thomas
- June 25, 2024
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Data is the lifeblood of modern business, but managing it can feel like fighting a hydra.
One company that gets it is Pure Storage. With their recent announcements in Las Vegas, they want to be your data's new best friend: always there, always helpful, and always on your team.
At the Las Vegas bonanza — Pure//Accelerate 2024 — the company unveiled a series of game-changing developments that promise to redefine the very fabric of data infrastructure. Mark Jobbins, Pure Storage's vice president and field chief technology officer for Asia Pacific and Japan, shared his insights on these groundbreaking advancements.
"Organizations are grappling with the complexities of extracting value from their AI investments, often hindered by the intricate infrastructure layer," Jobbins revealed. "We're tackling this head-on by simplifying the data landscape and empowering our customers to adapt to evolving needs."
Fusion: Conducting data harmony
At the heart of Pure Storage's arsenal lies the next generation of their Fusion product. This orchestration layer acts as a maestro, conducting the management, provisioning, and governance of data storage.
"Fusion will automate the provisioning of storage pools, leveraging the most advanced technology available within defined zones," Jobbins elaborated. "It will seamlessly relocate storage pools to ensure performance profiles and protection policies remain intact, all without disrupting the end user's experience."
The elegance of Fusion lies in its simplicity. It's not a separate add-on but seamlessly integrated into Pure Storage's Purity operating system. It means no extra licensing or components for customers to grapple with — just pure efficiency.
Data management has a wingman
Pure Storage is injecting generative AI straight into the heart of the data center with its AI Copilot. This intelligent tool harnesses the power of a large language model trained on Pure Storage's vast telemetric data and supports FAQs to provide deep insights into customers' environments.
"The AI Copilot boosts visibility, enabling administration and operations teams to respond with lightning speed and precision," Jobbins emphasized. "It mitigates risks within environments by ensuring consistency across large-scale fleets."
Customers can tap into the AI Copilot's expertise to inquire about security upgrades, billing details, and a myriad of other aspects of their storage ecosystem. It's a practical application of AI that streamlines management and minimizes operational risks.
Evergreen//One AI reimagined as Storage-as-a-Service for AI
Pure Storage recognizes the unique demands of AI workloads and has unleashed a new service under its Evergreen//One banner. This AI-centric storage-as-a-service offering flips the traditional model on its head.
"Customers can subscribe to a throughput performance profile," Jobbins explained. "We'll provide the data with the guaranteed throughput profile, and customers pay a nominal fee for the capacity. It enables our customers to rapidly meet the demands of their GPU compute layer and accelerate their AI initiatives."
This adaptable model, called Evergreen//One for AI, acknowledges the dynamic nature of AI workloads. As Jobbins put it, "The AI landscape evolves so rapidly that it's difficult to predict what your workload will look like a year from now. This service offers greater agility and enables organizations to achieve a faster return on their AI investments."
Bolstering cyber resilience
In an era where cyber threats are an ever-present danger, Pure Storage is doubling down on its cyber resilience offerings. The company has expanded its anomaly detection capabilities to identify potential ransomware attacks, data exfiltration, or denial-of-service attempts.
"We can now alert administration teams if something unusual occurs, allowing operations and security teams to zero in on an event much faster," Jobbins stated. "This gives customers a better chance to pinpoint when an incident has happened and, crucially, when to initiate the recovery process."
Pure Storage has also broadened its cyber resilience service level agreement within Evergreen//One. Initially focused on cyber attacks, it now encompasses any disaster, providing customers with a pristine storage array to kickstart recovery in the event of an incident.
Sustainability shifts to the core
While pushing the boundaries of performance and flexibility, Pure Storage remains committed to sustainability. The company announced new 150-terabyte direct flash modules, doubling the capacity of last year's modules while maintaining the same power and cooling requirements.
"We're providing the capability to store larger volumes of data in the same footprint using the same power and cooling," Jobbins emphasized. "This reduces the watts per terabyte, effectively decreasing the amount of power needed per unit of data stored."
Furthermore, Pure Storage's non-disruptive upgrade model allows components to be replaced or upgraded individually, significantly reducing e-waste compared to traditional systems that require complete array replacements.
Partnership becomes a competitive differentiator
Announcing these new capabilities, but for Pure Storage, which is 100% channel-driven, it also needs to get its partners on the same bandwagon.
This was the focus of the Pure//Partner Forum on the sidelines of the Accelerate event. The company introduced an AI-powered asset management tool to give partners the visibility of their Pure1 assets, complete with AI recommendations.
Besides expanded partner intelligence and simplified invoice management, another major announcement was the digital master services agreement. It offers a new self-service purchasing model so partners’ customers can easily subscribe to new Evergreen//One services with Pure1. Partners gain additional visibility into margins and revenue growth.
A platform for mastering data-driven innovation
These announcements collectively signal Pure Storage's evolution into a platform approach to data management. As Jobbins succinctly put it, "We believe our customers are transitioning from wanting point solutions for different applications and profiles to simply desiring a storage pool with a specific profile and protection level."
Embodied in the Pure Storage ecosystem, this platform approach aims to eliminate complexity altogether. "Customers can simply concentrate on how they deliver a superior experience to their own customers and accelerate innovation," Jobbins affirmed.
It also matters as companies shift toward AI. By simplifying data management, providing flexible consumption models for AI workloads, and enhancing cyber resilience, Pure Storage might just help beat data’s many-headed hydra all at once.
Image credit: iStockphoto/Cameron Prins
Winston Thomas
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends. He likes to piece together the weird and wondering tech puzzle for readers and identify groundbreaking business models led by tech while waiting for the singularity.