A Golden Era of Innovation Is Unfolding at Pure Storage, According to CTO

It is easy to get lost in the promise of modern technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and cloud computing. But one thing is for certain: None of that promise comes true without reliable storage.

The problem is that storage is getting more and more complicated, to the point that it is creating significant knowledge gaps that could hinder correct usage and innovation. This is bad news, according to Matthew Oostveen, CTO and VP, of Asia Pacific and Japan, at Pure Storage, in an exclusive media brief with Data & Storage Asia (DSA).

“What I think is particularly complex about the storage space is that there’s so much fine-tuning and there’s so much nuance and so many acronyms that it can be very difficult for an outsider to be able to understand what’s going on. Now, we wanted to solve that,” Oostveen told DSA. “And we wanted to solve that because as we move into the future, with Artificial Intelligence, with analytics, with the broadening of technology across an organisation, more people are going to use storage. And those people aren’t going to be storage professionals. They’re going to come from different domains.”

This is why “simplicity is incredibly important,” said Oostveen, who also emphasised how Pure Storage, the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technologies and services, is looking to “bring simplicity to the enterprise real-time file space”—first around the block environment and now in file format storage.

The latest upgrades to the Pure Storage platform are proof of the company’s relentless pursuit of simplifying storage through a simple, consistent storage platform and subscription-based services for various use cases across on-premises, public cloud, and hosted environments.

Out with the Old, In with the New: Pure Storage Reimagines File Services with Real-time Enterprise File

Simplifying storage also means addressing major challenges, like rigidity and inflexibility, where customers are “often locked out of particular capabilities at the time of the purchase of their systems”—in turn making it “very difficult for them to go through a growth phase and therefore need to be able to expand and migrate their data from perhaps different tiers and different systems.”

This problem is even more pronounced in this era of data-intensive applications, whose storage requirements are often unmet by legacy file storage. Characterised by rigid architectures and layers upon layers of protocol and management complexity, traditional file storage is also extremely hard to update and change, making it virtually impossible to meet the evolving needs of modern workloads such as AI and analytics.

Solving this rigidity and inflexibility is the newly launched Real-time Enterprise File delivered right at the Pure Storage platform. Purpose-built to address the limitations of cumbersome legacy systems, Real-time Enterprise File lets customers respond quickly and manage application demands in real-time to deliver better outcomes while meeting the dynamic demands of the enterprise—all at a lower total cost of ownership.

In particular, Real-time Enterprise File by Pure Storage provides:

• Real-time agility. The rigidity of legacy storage forces organisations into pre-configured silos, preventing optimal use and the ability to adjust to dynamic application requirements. Real-time Enterprise File solves this problem by delivering agility to the business through global storage pools that maximise storage resources and automate workload placement through Pure Fusion™. This innovation also delivers industry-first zero-move tiering, which enables IT to deliver the required performance level without the need to physically move data between tiers. Pure Storage also offers true Non-Disruptive Upgrades (NDU) for seamless upgrades without downtime.
• Patchworking new capabilities into legacy storage is counterintuitive as it only creates significant complexity and time-consuming management. Real-time Enterprise File solves this limitation by incorporating cloud-like operations that deliver radical levels of ease to IT, enable simple data placement, and ensure services are automatically taken care of. Pure Storage further simplifies management with AI Copilot for File, an industry-first natural language model that “enhances the technology capability of a technology generalist that’s utilising these [storage] systems.”
• Storage-as-a-Service brought to file. Only Pure Storage delivers true storage-as-a-service for files through Evergreen//One and is backed by the industry’s highest number of concurrent SLAs.

Pure Storage Introduced FlashBlade//S100 to Expand Support for Cost-Sensitive Workloads

Pure Storage has also announced the new FlashBlade//S100, an AI-ready platform with GPUDirect support, which brings progressive pricing across all price points and markets. It features a scale-out architecture designed for entry-level enterprise use cases—including AI, compliance, content sharing, image repositories, IoT, Edge, and ROBO applications.

“[The FlashBlade//S100 is] the new entry-level of our S systems within the FlashBlade. And what we really like about this system is that it enables customers that are moving down the space of unstructured data or perhaps object-based data or even file-based systems to have a lower entry point while still providing a high level of performance,” Oostveen said. “This is a sensational system; it could be used in an edge use case. And we’re seeing a big rise in the need for edge AI and edge AI use cases. But for many customers, they’re not quite sure what the future path might hold for them. And being able to make an acquisition of a smaller system that still has very high performance makes a lot of sense for them.”

Indeed, this small, starter-level system is big on performance, ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) by enabling organisations “to be able to utilise the accurate and correct amount of resource that’s ascribed to it” and “automatically and intelligently allocate the correct amount of resource” for optimal performance every time, all the time.

“[With FlashBlade], customers can now boost that operational efficiency; they can prevent performance bottlenecks… The takeaway here is just the awesome amount of automation that Pure Storage is injecting into the file world,” Oostveen emphasised. “Lastly, that capability to be able to consolidate a workload more easily. What that means is with the FlashBlade, and its great level of performance built on all Flash, of course, it means that you don’t just need to put a single workload upon that FlashBlade, you can start to mix those workloads together.”

Optimising Virtualisation Operations with Virtual Machines (VM) Assessment

Pure Storage has also announced it is offering an industry-first VM Assessment to help IT decision-makers modernise their virtualisation operations for critical workloads in a time when virtualisation environments are facing increasing uncertainty and disruption. An industry-first, Pure Storage’s VM Assessment offers performance monitoring, enhanced scenario planning, and rightsizing recommendations through Pure1.

In addition, admins can use VM Assessment to start identifying opportunities to optimise their VM resources while gaining deep insights into their utilisation and potential subscription impacts. Even better news, VM Assessment is available to all customers free of charge with their Pure1 subscription.

According to Oostveen, Pure Storage is committed to levelling up storage, working tirelessly to deliver one innovation at a time with the end goal of simplifying storage and eliminating complications and pain points. In turn, Pure Storage is helping customers optimise their storage system and keep up with these fast-changing times.

“I will say that Pure Storage is in a golden era of innovation when it comes to the work that we’re doing both on the software side and the hardware side. This, for me, is the physical manifestation, you know, it’s the representation of all of that work,” Oostveen told DSA. “And it is something that we’re proud of as an organisation to be able to do something that, you know, helps our customers drive down cost, it helps our customers to decarbonise their data centres, to not go through the expansion and sprawl to take up too much space.”

It is truly a golden era—and it has to be. Today’s advanced technologies need it to be.