Pure Storage made a couple of significant announcements last week at its annual user event, Pure Accelerate, in Las Vegas.

First, the company said it had released three new advanced storage-as-a-service service level agreements for the Pure Storage platform: cyber recovery, resilience and site rebalance. The company also announced new capabilities in the Pure Storage platform aimed at helping information technology and business leaders improve artificial intelligence deployments, enhance cyber resilience and modernize their applications.

I was there for the event and thought I’d relay what I saw as Chief Executive Charles Giancarlo (pictured) delivered the keynote alongside other team members. In his remarks, Giancarlo started with a truism. “It seems like we’re always doing application modernization,” he said. “It’s just one decade after another with new things to modernize.”

I found this comment both compelling and, unfortunately, accurate. Before becoming an analyst, I was an IT pro, and I recall working on application modernization in the late 1990s. The challenge with applications is that app architectures are constantly changing, making modernization like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Once you’re “done,” it’s time to start again.

He then provided his take on the challenges the industry faces. “If we’re going to address all of these different challenges, we can’t do it with the same type of thinking that we’ve always had,” he said. “New challenges require new ways of thinking, not just doing the same thing we’ve been doing for a new environment, but rethinking how we do things.”

He then discussed the company’s assumptions about storage: It’s managed by and provisioned by IT, siloed, inefficient and complex to manage. Pure Storage set about to turn those assumptions on their heads. With its Evergreen portfolio and the Purity OS that underpins all its products, the company is innovating.

Here are details of the announcements:

New platform capabilities

The company announced additions to their platform, including:

• Storage automation: The company says Pure Fusion will combine arrays while optimizing structured and unstructured data storage pools dynamically, regardless of whether on-premises or in the cloud. Pure Fusion is now fully embedded into the Purity operating environment and is available on the Pure Storage platform.
• Generative AI Copilot for storage: looking to build a lead in simplicity, Pure Storage’s first AI copilot for storage lets customers use natural language to manage and protect data. This offering, which uses data insights from tens of thousands of customers, assists teams grappling with performance and management issues and helps them handle security incidents.

Cyber resiliency services

The Pure Storage platform now includes enhanced cyber resiliency offerings, including:

• A cyber recovery and resilience SLA: Evergreen//One now includes disaster recovery, providing a customized recovery plan, clean service infrastructure, onsite installation and data transfer services. With ongoing quarterly reviews, Pure Storage will help organizations build and maintain a cybersecurity strategy.
• Security assessment: This new assessment offers visibility into fleet-level security risks and provides actionable recommendations. It uses data from over 10,000 environments to present security scores from 0 to 5 and align with NIST 2.0 standards. The AI copilot uses this assessment to help chief information security officers benchmark their security posture against other Pure Storage customers.
• AI-powered anomaly detection: This feature detects threats such as ransomware, unusual activity, and denial-of-service attacks through performance anomalies. It uses machine learning models to identify unusual behavior, helping customers quickly restore data by identifying recovery points.

In addition, Pure Storage introduced the Site Rebalance SLA for Evergreen//One, which enables organizations to adjust reserve commitments annually, providing flexibility for changing storage needs.

Some final thoughts

Pure Storage has disrupted the seemingly impenetrable storage market with innovative offerings such as Evergreen. Evergreen offloads nagging issues and makes storage work like a cloud app in marked contrast to rivals such as Dell and NetApp, whose approach follows the legacy model of disruptive upgrades.

Although Evergreen has been available for years, customer adoption has been slower than expected as, in some ways, it was a bit of a solution looking for a problem. Though the value proposition has always been there, storage buyers tend to be conservative and need some change in the industry to push them into thinking differently.

This change is the rise of the AI era that puts an even more significant premium on storage. Pure Storage’s frictionless upgrades go from a “nice to have” to a “must have” as it enables storage managers to operate faster, which is what AI requires.

Photo: Zeus Kerravala