At its recent Pure Accelerate customer event, Pure unveiled a slew of new capabilities focused on meeting the rapidly evolving needs of enterprise AI. Its updated offerings are designed for the AI-enabled enterprise, both using AI to deliver a more robust and simplified experience, and delivering the performance and capabilities required by modern AI workloads.
Pure Fusion: AIOps for Storage
Among its newly announced innovations, Pure Fusion is the most interesting. Pure Fusion is a first-of-its-kind storage automation solution. Pure Fusion unifies storage arrays and optimizes storage pools dynamically across structured and unstructured data, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Fully embedded into the Purity operating environment, this next-generation technology ensures continual improvement through non-disruptive upgrades and is available to all global customers.
Further cementing its leadership in simplicity, Pure Storage introduced the industry’s first Generative AI Copilot for Storage. This AI-driven tool leverages insights from tens of thousands of Pure Storage customers, offering a revolutionary way to manage and protect data using natural language. It guides storage teams through complex performance and management issues, proactively addressing security incidents.
AI for Storage
Pure introduced its innovative AI copilot, a first in the storage industry. The Pure Storage AI copilot is an intelligent assistant embedded within the Pure Storage platform. It leverages aggregated insights from a vast array of deployed systems to streamline storage management tasks.
Users can interact with the AI copilot using natural language queries, allowing storage administrators and IT teams to swiftly and efficiently obtain detailed assessments, actionable recommendations, and benchmark rankings of security policies.
Integrated seamlessly into the Pure Storage platform, the AI copilot is accessible to all users without additional licenses or external components. This integration enhances usability and ensures consistent performance across diverse storage environments.
Storage for AI
Evergreen//One for AI is Pure Storage’s solution for addressing the unique challenges of managing storage infrastructure for AI workloads. It provides a purpose-built AI storage-as-a-service solution and guarantees the necessary storage performance for GPU-intensive tasks such as training, inference, and high-performance computing workloads.
Evergreen//One for AI is specifically engineered to support AI environments where performance, scalability, and reliability are paramount. It provides the necessary storage infrastructure to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of AI initiatives, enabling organizations to derive greater value from their AI investments.
By eliminating the need for costly forklift upgrades and allowing organizations to adopt new technologies seamlessly, Evergreen//One for AI helps optimize storage infrastructure costs. It ensures organizations can invest in AI resources rather than worrying about storage constraints.
Additionally, Pure announced its plans to expand its collaboration with Nvidia. Pure Storage has already achieved Nvidia DGX BasePOD certification and NVIDIA OVX validation and expects to achieve Nvidia DGX SuperPOD certification by the end of 2024.
Analyst’s Take
Data drives today’s enterprise. An IT organization must ensure that data remains available, delivered where it’s most needed, and with the performance required for the workload. The importance of efficient, reliable, and scalable solutions focused on data workflows, not point storage solutions, cannot be overstated. Taking a platform approach to storage is critical, and that’s precisely what Pure Storage delivers with this set of capabilities.
Pure Storage’s platform expansion introduces many innovations centered around automation, intelligence, reliability, SLAs, and heightened security features. At the core of Pure’s strategy lies a commitment to delivering dynamic, intelligent, and unified storage solutions that adapt seamlessly to evolving business needs, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or across hosted environments.
Pure Storage’s integrated unified operating environment, continuous upgrade capabilities through the Evergreen program, and innovative technologies like Fusion allow It to provide a flexible, efficient, and high-performance solution. This addresses traditional storage systems’ limitations and positions Pure Storage as a leader in meeting the demands of modern enterprise environments, including AI, cloud, and hyperscale data centers.
Pure Storage isn’t alone in approaching enterprise storage as a platform play. NetApp has recently shifted its message to reflect an approach centered on its Intelligent Data Infrastructure, promising to fill out its portfolio to match the approach. Others, like Dell and Lenovo, continue to deliver less-integrated point products. It was clear at its Accelerate event that Pure is aggressively delivering its vision.
Disclosure: Steve McDowell is an industry analyst, and NAND Research is an industry analyst firm that engages in, or has engaged in, research, analysis and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. Mr. McDowell does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.