It's time to rethink enterprise storage for the AI era

Pure's platform play

Back to Pure Storage and Fusion. Pure's big idea here is that it can uniquely enable a transition from a product-centric approach to a platform-oriented posture. If that sounds too vague in an industry where every vendor seems to have a platform, then instead think about it in terms of managing a fleet of storage systems, rather than individual arrays.

This message should particularly resonate with larger customers, who might have tens or even hundreds of arrays, each of which must be configured and managed individually. But any organization with more than one array installed should be able to benefit.

By embedding Fusion into its Purity storage operating system, Pure is creating a control plane for data storage that spans all its arrays -- and is backward compatible -- incorporating block, file and object, scale-up and scale-out, and high performance as well as high-efficiency storage. The resulting "cloud of storage" enables data across all systems to be managed globally on a policy basis and dynamically adjusted over time to cater to changing requirements across a full span of workloads, including structured and unstructured data, and across on-premises and cloud-based locations.

This means capacity previously "trapped" in one system could be easily tapped to support a fast-growing workload located on another system without having to buy a new storage system. This could be a major benefit in an industry where average storage system utilization still struggles to reach 50%. It would also benefit a developer requiring access to storage for a new app, such that they could easily locate and provision this themselves using APIs. This could be particularly important as organizations continue to mature their AI strategies, and as data engineers look to quickly tap storage resources to use AI models for inference, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering and the like.

Pure says it is uniquely positioned to deliver this, not only due to the new Fusion capability, but also because of its ability to deliver both nondisruptive upgrades by its Evergreen subscriptions, as well as its increasingly popular storage-as-a-service offering. This combination is designed to ensure that Pure's customers can evolve their storage environments to meet critical current and future challenges: AI readiness, cyber resilience, modern application support and hybrid cloud realization.

Pure will not be the only storage vendor talking up a platform approach: NetApp is also beginning to couch its capabilities in these terms as part of its broader rebranding around the "intelligent data infrastructure," and others will follow.

Nonetheless, Pure has a strong track record of innovation -- not just at the product level, but in helping organizations simplify the way they buy and manage enterprise storage. The latest set of announcements from Accelerate demonstrate that Pure remains resolutely committed to continuing that path and helping customers ensure their critical storage infrastructure keeps pace with the fast-evolving IT landscape.

Simon Robinson is principal analyst covering infrastructure at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group.

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.