This week’s Pure Accelerate London event kicked off with a bang. Pure Storage released a number of updates across its portfolio aimed at driving improvements to performance, cost and simplicity. And, of course, AI had to be part of this update release lest the tech gods be upset.

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

A Primer On Pure

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

In a nutshell, Pure is the embodiment of the modern storage company. For folks in the IT business for a while, some of the changes Pure has driven can seem to be borderline heresy: No spinning media? No tape? By Zeus, what will we do?

Yet Pure’s approach is how IT consumes storage now—cloud connectivity, cloud operating models and cloud economics (the way cloud economics is supposed to operate). The days of dedicated IT teams performing very specific functions in the datacenter are firmly in the rearview mirror. When an embedded development team in a business unit requires a development environment to be created, they want it now—not in four weeks after six different specialists meet to spin up the environment. Otherwise, they will simply go to the public cloud.

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

Pure seems almost singularly focused on abstracting all the complexity away from storage management. This is critical, as storage is a foundational building block for our IT environments. And Pure attacks this challenge from every angle.

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

Real-Time Enterprise File Removes Barriers

Here’s the setup. The legacy way of file storage is really legacy—like 20-plus years old. Teams would design and build a storage architecture and grow it over time. In this scenario, what inevitably happens is that silos grow and are managed independently of one another. One day, IT realizes just how inflexible this is.

In today’s world, storage has to be more flexible. An enterprise’s AI and analytics apps want access to all of the available data that exists across the enterprise, regardless of where it resides and regardless of where the apps using it are running. What’s needed is a single architecture that accesses data around the enterprise with a single control plane. This, in a nutshell, is what Pure’s Real-time Enterprise File does.

With Real-time Enterprise File, all storage is seen as a global pool (think clustering with no limitations). This is all managed as a single architecture from a single control plane. What the company has introduced is a 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 zero-move tiering will be extremely helpful in improving resource utilization and efficiency. So, what is zero-move tiering? It’s better to start with what tiering is.

Storage tiering is a way of prioritizing your storage, data and applications. Hence, the most mission-critical applications have access to the fastest storage, and less critical applications access the appropriately performant storage. For example:

• Tier 0 data storage is for workloads that require the fastest, lowest-latency storage available. Think real-time stock trading and other financial workloads.
• Tier 1 would be for hot data, such as customer transactional data. A good example of this would be the retail platform that handles checking out of a store.
• Tier 2 is for warm data where performance is required but not in real time. A good example is a back-office ERP application that employees access.
• Tier 3 is for cold data—i.e., data that is archived.

Tiering can vary from organization to organization, but the concept is the same: get more important workloads and applications connected to the fastest and best storage. In the past, IT required a lot of work to do this. With zero-move tiering, that work disappears.

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

To make this a little easier to deploy and manage, Pure has extended its AI copilot (announced at Accelerate in Las Vegas) to manage file services. This goes more directly to the earlier point about the modern IT organization consisting of a lot of smart people and not just specialists. With Pure’s AI copilot, IT folks can manage their Pure storage environment through natural language, not strange semantics. I am a fan of the copilot concept in general and how Pure has developed its own. It makes everybody a specialist and can turn specialists into experts through prompt-level engineering.

VM Assessment Tool

Pure also announced the availability of a VM assessment tool to help admins better manage their virtualized environments. Virtualized environments have forever promised to drive up utilization and overall datacenter efficiency. For many organizations, the reality is far different. Too many virtual machines run on servers that are not even close to being utilized to their full extent. This tool, when available, will be a good way for organizations to become more efficient.

Given the recent VMware turbulence, this could be a great help for organizations in the midst of figuring out their go-forward strategy. Not necessarily for moving away from VMware’s VCF offering, but certainly for rationalizing licensing and deployments.

Universal Credits

Finally, Pure has introduced Universal Credits to the market. Here’s the scenario: I oversubscribe to one service and undersubscribe to another as an IT organization. This happens all the time. In one scenario, I’ve got to shake the couch cushions to find a budget. In the other, I’m throwing money out the window. With this service, I can use my credits across the Pure portfolio—Evergreen//One, Pure Cloud Block and Portworx. Further, if I end my subscription term and have extra credits, I can carry those credits forward (with some conditions). This is pretty cool.

Here’s what I would like to see at some point. 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 39 or so agencies with 39 or so IT budgets. What would be great is if I could share my credits with a sister agency to leverage Pure’s services even better. But hey, I’m just wishful thinking.

What To Make Of Pure’s Announcements?

At the bottom of every Pure PowerPoint deck is “Uncomplicate Data Storage, Forever.” From my perspective, this is exactly what the company is doing in every release of updates and services across its portfolio: making life easier for IT. While the majority of my words here have described Pure’s Real-time Enterprise File solution, it’s the combination of all of these services (plus the launch of the entry-level FlashBlade//S100) that delivers a lot of value to IT across operations, organization and finances.

There is a reason why Pure’s revenue was up significantly year over year while others (apart from NetApp) saw down quarters in their storage portfolio. And that reason is simple: IT wants its storage consumption to be like its cloud consumption—frictionless and easy. Further, it wants to do so with the promise of cloud-style economics.

It is fair to say that Pure’s strategy is spot-on, and its message is landing with the market. The only question is, what’s next?