Pure Storage APJ CTO Mark Jobbins explained Tweet The two big trends he sees are the ever-growing concerns about cyber attacks and the buzz around generative AI. Cyber attacks are always a concern, but especially when it comes to storage. Your last defense against ransomware is reliable, secure storage. Without it, it only takes one attack to be catastrophic. Generative AI, on the other hand, is clearly a big topic today. In Jobbins’ experience, generative AI is starting to calm down and mature as people start to explore well-grounded proof-of-concept projects.
Pure Storage has been thinking deeply about how we can best deliver services to help organizations of all sizes and types advance their AI initiatives and continue to protect their investments.
This thinking resulted in a carefully crafted strategy based on four pillars: And these new services will be deployed as part of existing licenses, along with two additional add-on services for Pure Storage’s storage services platform, EverGreen//One.
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These four pillars include expanding Pure Storage platform innovation, accelerating the success of AI in the enterprise, delivering new cyber-resilience services and capabilities to businesses, and delivering platform flexibility with Storage as a Service.
They are driven by Pure Storage’s own thinking and strategy, customer feedback, and observations of how the world has changed. Gone are the days when data only lived on a disk in your office. Today, data can literally live anywhere in the world. A modern storage platform must seamlessly blend data between on-premise and the cloud, while ensuring that the platform and endpoints can grow and evolve over time.
There’s a lot to work through, so let’s take a look.
First Officer
The all-new AI-driven Copilot will be available on the Pure Storage platform itself, helping administrators manage and protect their data using natural language. It’s trained on Pure’s FAQs and documentation, plus insights and telemetry from tens of thousands of customers, and can provide actionable steps to address concerns or improve benchmark rankings. It will be made available to enterprise customers via the PureOne platform, and Pure says the training model will get stronger over time.
Example questions include “Can you provide security updates for my flash array?” and “Can you verify my bill?”
Admins can ask any kind of question, get quick access to usage and billing, surface security issues, and more. Copilot provides answers and recommendations, and importantly, turns those recommendations into actionable insights. Jobbins said the solution helps Pure Storage customers by giving them a broader view, making the platform simpler to manage. Tweet.
“We are the first storage vendor to offer the GenAI Copilot environment,” he said.
Next-Gen Fusion Storage Automation
Meanwhile, many organizations have made huge investments in the GPU computing layer. “There’s a lot you can do with GenAI, but it also requires a huge investment,” Jobbins says.
GenAI has great potential, but it’s a voracious beast that needs data — and fast. This comes at a cost. “People have concerns about how much they should invest in the storage tier from day one, and whether it will still make sense six, 12 or even 18 months down the line, when their profile may have changed,” he said.
Imagine being in the position of having to explain to your CFO why you need “$.” X The “million dollar” investments offered are only 20 percent utilized, for example, “leaving people scratching their heads as to how to maximize efficiency.”
But to be able to place multiple workloads on the same or similar platform with the right performance levels and be future proof, you need the right throughput for the right investment, the right security, the right training to drive it all forward and speed up your time to go live.
“The Pure platform addresses all of this by incorporating our new Fusion storage automation, which is the first of its kind,” Jobbins said.
This next generation Fusion improves and simplifies provisioning from one array to thousands of arrays, whether using FC, iSCSI, VNMe, file/object or other protocols.
It’s built into every Purity array and available with a simple update — it’s not a separate license or external control plane, it’s fully backwards compatible and won’t break any existing integrations.
A key part of the new capabilities is its powerful policy-driven nature: you specify your service levels and requirements, and Fusion will automatically move workloads seamlessly and non-disruptively as needed. This includes taking snapshots, performing replication, and any other kind of autonomous action to comply with the policies you set. This brings a cloud-like experience to managing your storage.
Evergreen//One Throughput Subscription
Traditionally, people choose their storage options based on structured block + file data or unstructured data. While both options serve specific needs, Pure Storage recognizes that when it comes to AI, it’s less about capacity and more about throughput – how fast you can feed data to the compute layer.
Enter Evergreen//One for AI, a new subscription type that “flips the model,” Jobbins said. “Customers can subscribe to a performance guarantee based on bandwidth, and the storage capacity portion is a nominal fee for that.”
This gives organizations choice and peace of mind, without the risk of committing huge resources to a technology. “You can start with an entry point and scale,” he says. “Once you understand your long-term profile, you can make changes over time.”
NVIDIA SuperPOD Certified
Pure Storage Expands Relationship with NVIDIA SuperPOD CertifiedA fast AI data center infrastructure platform to deliver agile, scalable performance for the most challenging AI and HPC workloads.
This will depend on NVIDIA’s timeline, but Pure Storage expects the process to be completed by the end of the calendar year.
This expands Pure Storage’s existing NVIDIA DGX and OGX certifications.
AI Clusters for Mission-Critical Data
Pure Storage enables granular access controls, providing a new application workspace with the security, isolation and control enterprises need to be confident that their mission-critical data can power AI applications without the risk of misuse or exposure.
Strengthening Cyber Resilience
Sadly, that is not the reality today. if Businesses are affected by cybercriminals, whenAnd, frustratingly, while AI is helping businesses innovate and deliver new services, it is also being used by criminals to improve the sophistication of their attacks.
Pure Storage has announced an expansion of its cybersecurity offerings. Last year, the company introduced anomaly detection. Now, the company is enhancing its support and services around cyber resilience to help customers respond to events and notifications in a targeted way, providing a clean storage environment for recovery.
Pure Storage says this is not limited to ransomware but applies to any disaster recovery situation. Additionally, the new policy upgrades align with the Fusion extensions mentioned above to further define policies around data protection, allowing customers to customize policies for their own environments.
These new capabilities provide a holistic approach to protecting the environment.
Cyber Resilience Advisory Services
With the new service, however, Pure Storage will proactively work with customers to determine how to best protect against and recover from incidents.
These services allow you to assess and score risk, complemented by advice from the new Copilot capabilities discussed above.
When customers subscribe to Pure Storage’s Cyber Resilience Services, the company actively works with them to determine recovery procedures and processes, all planned and ready before an incident occurs, which are reviewed quarterly.
Rebalancing
It’s always hard to predict the future. What if we could turn hindsight into foresight? Luckily, we live in a world of possibilities. “What if we could use AI to proactively tell customers when their reserved capacity is likely to change, helping them avoid on-demand charges?” Jobbins asked. And sure enough, Pure Storage has given us yet another new way to gain insights to make informed decisions.
This can be done through the Copilot feature mentioned above by asking “what if” questions: “What would happen if I changed my environment like this?”
Additionally, Pure Storage also offers storage rebalancing between sites. For example, Jobbins explained:When you have multiple sites, you allocate reserved capacity with good intentions, but over time you may need to move data from site A to site B. Say you have a reserved commitment of 200 TB with 100 TB across two sites, but you need 150 TB in site A and 50 TB in site B.
The new rebalance option allows customers to rebalance their storage once a year, and Pure Storage will move the infrastructure accordingly at no extra charge. Currently, the company believes 12 months is a good logical period, but Jobbins said the SLA will evolve over time based on customer feedback.
New SLAs
Pure Storage has announced an expansion of its Evergreen//One SLA across the board, saying customers will see a 50% performance boost with new high-performance SLA enhancements.
There’s a lot of news coming from Pure Storage, but it all comes together in a single, integrated strategy to accelerate AI adoption while protecting our customers’ environments.
“Everything from Fusion to delivering self-managed storage environments, generative AI copilots to ensure best practices, moving Storage as a Service (SaaS) from a capacity and performance profile to a throughput model so customers can start with what they want, to building our relationship with NVIDIA to provide deeper insights and enable security and resiliency,” Jobbins said.
“It applies to all the areas that clients are talking to me about,” he said.