Conference Coverage

Browse Sections
News

Pure Storage software tooled up for containers, OpenShift, VMware

Pure Storage adds software for building, managing and protecting data in containers, clouds, VMs and on premises. Pure ES2 subscription offers a managed on-premises cloud.

Garry Kranz
By
Published: 29 May 2018

Pure Storage software news received less attention than its nonvolatile-memory-express-enabled FlashArray last week at the company's Pure Accelerate user conference, but the new features did cover a lot of ground.

The expanded Pure Storage software includes integrated cloud synchronization with VMware, Red Hat OpenShift and Linux-based Docker containers. Pure also introduced the Evergreen Storage Service (ES2), a Pure-managed private cloud with utility pricing for on-premises bare-metal consumption.

Software features tackle virtualization woes

A core tenet in Pure Storage software development is to add data services while keeping things simple for customers, said Sandeep Singh, Pure's senior director of cloud and new stack solutions marketing.

"This is all part of our strategy to help you build a data-centric architecture to transition workloads faster and with less effort to multiple cloud environments," Singh said.

Pure Storage wrote its own software-defined stack for VMware SDDC. The VMware-certified code integrates with VMware Virtual Volumes and the full vRealize suite. Authorized users provision data storage to individual virtual machines via policy-based service catalogs. The underlying storage is Pure Storage FlashBlade in place of VMware Virtual SAN.

Pure also launched software tools to address the challenges of persistent Docker storage application containers. Customers can get a reference design for implementing platform as a service using Pure Storage FlashArray and Red Hat OpenShift.

Additional Pure Storage software can help optimize large-scale Docker deployments with Kubernetes. The Pure Service Orchestrator is intended to speed stateless and stateful containers via the Pure stack.

"You have a big pool of storage across many FlashArray and FlashBlade [machines] and can allow the container environment to provision storage automatically," said Matt Kixmoeller, Pure's vice president of strategy.

Pure multi-cloud approach includes on-premises managed service

The all-flash array vendor also added data protection software. PureSnap enables snapshot replication from Pure Storage flash to any NFS target. CloudSnap replication to Amazon Web Services' S3 is on the product roadmap for this year, Singh said.

ES2 builds on the Pure Storage Evergreen Storage subscription that lets customers buy storage upfront and receive nondisruptive upgrades. With ES2, customers select capacity and performance requirements. Pure Storage selects the type and number of hardware arrays needed and deploys them at a customer's site.

Kixmoeller said ES2 gives enterprises a chance to build scalable capacity while maintaining control of data.

Rob Green, CTO of desktop-as-a-service firm Dizzion, said he expects to deploy ES2 as a private cloud for back up and testing on an existing 42-node Pure Storage environment.

"I think ES2 will be huge for us. I don't trust the big box clouds to protect my data. Having Pure on premises on a subscription? I'm geeked out about that," Green said.

For DevOps organizations, the vendor released Pure Storage software development kits for full stack automation with open source configuration engines, including Ansible, Puppet, Python and SaltStack.

Dig Deeper on Flash memory and storage