Data and how we manage it are the critical foundation for any organization’s AI strategy. Unfortunately, much of the data an organization finds valuable is generated in many different locations and in multiple formats. In many instances, this data sits in legacy, siloed data stores that make managing, protecting and using it seemingly impossible.
Overcoming the storage complexities and associated costs for this data that seem to challenge every IT organization is how Pure Storage has been so successful, outgrowing the market quarter after quarter and year after year. It is a company that has focused on removing the technical and operational barriers that have prevented storage and data management from modernizing, along with optimizing the workloads fueling the AI-driven business.
The company closed out the spring conference season in late June with its Pure Accelerate event. In the following sections, I’ll analyze what the company announced.
Data Management Starts With Storage
Data management is critical to the modern enterprise, no doubt. Managing the diversity of enterprise data—the collection, cleansing, tagging, etc.—is critical to the AI journey, but it is easy to overlook one simple fact: A practical and modernized data management strategy must begin with a modernized storage environment.
While many storage companies have focused on modernized messaging that indexes heavily on the data management element, Pure has done a strong job—both in product and in messaging—of flexing its capabilities across the storage stack. As basic as it seems, Pure’s reinforcement of the integrated data management stack that begins in silicon and extends through software was perhaps my biggest takeaway from Accelerate 2024. Optimizations in one area can’t be fully realized without optimizations in another. Pure seems to understand this well, and makes sure the market understands it, too.
Copilot Delivers Storage Management For The Masses
Simplicity is so important in today’s storage environment—which, as I touched on above, is why Pure has been so successful. The cloud operating model, Agile methodologies, DevOps and many other modernization efforts have caused IT organizations to reorient. The days of specialists are giving way to IT professionals who have to do much more than before, and do it faster. To achieve these goals, deploying, provisioning, managing and protecting the data estate must be simple and driven by automation.
Pure Fusion is Pure’s answer for simplicity. Like a data management operating system, this platform allows an IT organization to manage its entire storage and data environment from a single control plane. On-prem? In the cloud? Both? No problem.
While Fusion has been in the market for some time, the introduction of a GenAI-fueled Copilot for prompt-based storage management is new—and a potential IT game changer. Copilot enables IT professionals to manage storage with natural language. From provisioning to optimizing and troubleshooting, Copilot allows IT organizations to ensure their storage environment is running optimally and resiliently without the many hours per week of manually observing, tuning and troubleshooting that many of us in IT are used to.
As an analyst with roots in both product development and IT, I think Copilot is a home run. I believe the Pure presenter who talked about Copilot making an average storage administrator good and a good storage administrator great. I think it can make every IT person a strong storage administrator. Truly.
In the larger context, Copilot allows IT organizations to enable more self-service capabilities for developers without fear of a storage environment that has run amok.
Storage As A Service Isn’t The Future, It’s The Present
Pure is a company grounded in making storage simple, scalable and cost-effective. With this charter, it’s no surprise that storage as a service has been an area of focus for the company. Essentially, STaaS brings the cloud operating model to an organization’s storage environment.
Evergreen, the company’s subscription-based service, was announced back in 2015. Since then, the service has evolved considerably to allow organizations to deploy and consume storage with maximum flexibility. Evergreen//One is Pure’s STaaS offering, allowing companies to have the ultimate cloud experience. You pay for what is consumed, with assurances for performance, reliability and resiliency. And you never need to worry about upgrades and outdated storage equipment ever again.
While Evergreen//One is not new, Accelerate helped me better understand the inherent value of such a program. As an IT organization struggles to deploy the latest and best storage platforms for new and emerging workloads (read: AI), it cannot settle for bargain storage hardware. Through Evergreen, Pure guarantees seamless upgrades that allow its customers to adopt the latest storage technology (hardware or software) in a non-disruptive, non-capital-intensive fashion.
Frankly, given the budgetary and operational agility challenges that virtually every IT organization faces, I’m not sure why any organization would not give Pure’s Evergreen//One a long, hard look.
Why Should Enterprise IT Care About Pure Accelerate 2024?
Maybe a more apt subhead would be “Why should any IT organization care about Pure Accelerate 2024?” I write this because what Pure is doing in the storage and data management space has a considerable payoff for IT organizations of all sizes, from the largest hyperscalers to the smallest businesses. If the average reader buys into the concept of data’s criticality in today’s business, then what Pure is doing should matter because data is everywhere and diverse: file, block and object, structured and unstructured.
How on earth does an IT organization create an environment that can universally manage and protect these environments on the back end while making this data easily accessible on the front end? This is the complexity previously mentioned—a complexity that has vexed IT for too long but is easily remedied through solutions from companies like Pure.
Closing Thoughts
I’m not going to lie—I’m happy the spring conference season is over. At the end of June, my body and brain were tired and needed a week or two to recover. During that recovery period, I got to reflect more broadly on what I heard and saw over the last few months.
AI was front and center for every company (including Pure). Most conferences indexed so heavily on AI and Nvidia that it was difficult to fully understand the value of the vendor putting on the conference.
Pure Accelerate was different. Yes, I took away that Pure has a robust AI platform, that Pure and Nvidia are closely aligned, and that Pure is a forward-thinking company. However, these messages were wrapped in pragmatism—almost as if the company understood that storage and data management present challenges to IT organizations that can’t be resolved with slogans, platitudes or vision statements. These daily challenges require real solutions that can be deployed and consumed today.
This made Pure Accelerate 2024 a great way to close the spring conference season.
