Pure Storage continues to take the complexity out of enterprise data storage

This week’s Pure Accelerate event in London kicked off with a bang. Pure Storage has released a series of updates across its portfolio aimed at improving performance, cost and simplicity. And, of course, AI had to be a part of this update version so as not to upset the tech gods.

There was quite a bit in this release cycle to unpack and explore—and the following few sections will do just that.

A Primer On Pure

Since its founding in 2009, Pure Storage has focused on modernizing the enterprise storage environment. It was the first storage company to support flash-only storage and pioneered the storage-as-a-service and cloud operating models. The company has also been at the forefront of the changing economics of storage consumption with the Evergreen program.

In short, Pure is the epitome of the modern storage company. To people who have been in the IT business for a while, some of the changes Pure has driven may seem borderline heretical: No spinning media? No tape? With Jupiter, what shall we do?

However, Pure’s approach is how IT consumes storage now—cloud connectivity, cloud operating models, and cloud economics (such as cloud economics supposed to work). The days of dedicated IT teams performing very specific functions in the data center are firmly in the rearview mirror. When an embedded development team in a business unit requires a development environment to be built, they want it now – not in four weeks after six different experts meet to upgrade the environment. Otherwise, they’ll just go to the public cloud.

Adding to this tension is a modern IT workforce that consumes and interacts with technology differently than the generation before it. These are smart IT people who grew up on apps and the cloud.

Pure seems almost uniquely focused on taking all the complexity out of storage management. This is critical, as storage is a fundamental building block for our IT environments. And Pure is attacking this challenge from every angle.

Given this context, it’s no surprise that Pure’s latest updates span hardware, software and services.

Real-time Enterprise File removes barriers

Here is the setup. The old way of storing files is really old—like 20+ years old. Teams would design and build a storage architecture and deploy it over time. In this scenario, what inevitably happens is that the silos grow and are managed independently of each other. One day, IT realizes how rigid this is.

In today’s world, storage needs to be more flexible. An enterprise’s AI and analytics applications want access to all available data across the enterprise, regardless of where it is and regardless of where the applications that use it are running. What is needed is a unified architecture that accesses data across the enterprise with a single layer of control. That, in a nutshell, is what Pure’s Enterprise File does in real time.

With real-time Enterprise File, all storage is viewed as a global pool (think clustering without limitations). All of this is managed as a single architecture from a single control layer. What the company has introduced is the realization of its cloud vision for storage — only it’s sitting on your premises.

As new workloads and applications are introduced into the environment, Pure’s implementation of the zero traffic tier will be extremely helpful in improving resource utilization and efficiency. So, what is zero motion gradient? It is better to start with what tiering is.

Storage tiering is a way to prioritize your storage, data and apps. Therefore, the most mission-critical applications access the fastest storage, and the least critical applications access the storage with the appropriate performance. For example:

• Tier 0 data storage is intended for workloads that require the fastest available storage with the lowest latency. Consider real-time stock trading and other financial workloads.
• Tier 1 would be for hot data, such as customer transaction data. A good example of this would be the retail platform handling the check out of a store.
• Tier 2 is for hot data where performance is required but not real time. A good example is a back-office ERP application that is accessed by employees.
• Level 3 is for cold data—that is, data that is archived.

The tier may vary from organization to organization, but the idea is the same: you connect your most important workloads and applications to the fastest and best storage. In the past, IT required a lot of work to do this. With the zero motion gradient, this work disappears.

Thanks to the single-tier architecture and global storage pool, all data is already together. In other words, there are no layers of data storage. In this case, Pure’s FlashBlade product intelligently prioritizes critical workloads (and data) for processing, and no assets are moved from one storage class to another. Instead, compute and networking resources dictate the tier class.

To make it a little easier to deploy and manage, Pure has extended copilot AI (announced at Accelerate in Las Vegas) to manage file services. This goes more directly to the previous point about the modern IT organization being made up of lots of smart people and not just experts. With Pure’s copilot AI, IT people can manage their pure storage environment through natural language, not weird semantics. I’m a fan of the copilot concept in general and how Pure has developed theirs. It makes everyone an expert and can turn experts into experts through direct engineering.

VM evaluation tool

Pure also announced the availability of a VM assessment tool to help administrators better manage their virtual environments. Virtual environments have forever promised to increase the utilization and overall performance of data centers. For many organizations, the reality is very different. Too many virtual machines are running on servers that aren’t even close to being used to their full extent. This tool, when available, will be a good way for organizations to become more efficient.

Given VMware’s recent turmoil, this could be a big help for organizations in figuring out their strategy moving forward. Not necessarily to move away from VMware’s VCF offering, but certainly to streamline licensing and deployment.

Universal Credits

Finally, Pure introduced Universal Credits to the market. Here’s the scenario: Oversubscribing to one service and undersubscribing to another as an IT organization. This happens all the time. In one scenario, I have to move the couch cushions around to come up with a budget. In the other, I’m throwing money out the window. With this service, I can use my Pure wallet credits—Evergreen//One, Pure Cloud Block and Portworx. Additionally, if I end my membership and have extra credits, I can carry those credits forward (under certain conditions). This is very nice.

Here’s what I’d like to see sometime. For some organizations, IT budget centers come from different funding buckets and are managed separately. A good example of this is when I was an IT executive in state government. There were about 39 agencies with about 39 IT budgets. What would be great is if I could share my credits with a sister company to get even better use of Pure’s services. But hey, I’m just wishful thinking.

What should I do with Pure announcements?

At the bottom of every Pure PowerPoint box is “Uncomplicated Data Storage, Forever”. From my perspective, that’s exactly what the company does with every release of updates and services across its portfolio: make IT life easier. While the majority of my words here have described Pure’s real-time Enterprise File solution, it is the combination of all these services (plus the release of the entry-level FlashBlade//S100) that delivers great value to IT across operations, organization and finances.

There’s a reason why Pure’s revenue grew significantly year over year while others (except NetApp) saw quarterly declines in their storage portfolio. And that reason is simple: IT wants storage consumption to be similar to cloud consumption — frictionless and easy. What’s more, it wants to do so with the promise of the cloud-based economy.

It’s fair to say that Pure’s strategy is direct and its message is getting through to the market. The only question is, what’s next?