This announcement is sponsored by Pure Storage. To learn more about Pure Storage, please visit purestorage.com
About two months ago, in the end of September 2021, Pure Storage held their Pure // Launch event. On this event, which we had the pleasure to cover through live tweets, several important announcements were made. Now that the dust has settled, time is due for a recapitulation blog post where we cover these announcements and Pure Storage’s strategy.
Also, don’t miss our TECHunplugged Videocast with Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage.
Pure Fusion
As Pure Storage continues to identify opportunities to deliver higher value to organizations, one of the areas of improvement they identified was automating storage provisioning / management activities and making them transparent.
To make this concept a reality, Pure Storage identified five key tenets that modern storage should deliver upon:
- Invisibility – storage services should be transparent and delivered through APIs
- Scalability – resources should scale in an almost unlimited fashion, following cloud-like availability zones concepts
- Instantaneous – resource delivery should take seconds/minutes, not hours or days
- Intelligence – workload placement and rebalancing activities should be fully automated and driven by AI
- Cloud-like experience – consumers should be offered a choice of storage classes / policies from flexible resource pools
Pure Fusion has been architected to deliver upon these five pillars by providing a self-service, autonomous storage-as-code platform that breaks traditional storage concepts. Organizations can automate storage activities and eliminate the bottlenecks of manual provisioning / management activities, empowering developers to include these tasks in their workflows.
AI-driven intelligent workload placement takes care of placing and moving without manual intervention; the scale-out approach allows near-infinite scalability without the constraints of traditional storage clusters. Finally, Pure Fusion is designed to deliver a cloud-like experience where storage users can consume various storage classes and policies, enable replication and other data services in a self-service approach.
Portworx Data Services
The next major announcement was Portworx Data Services (PDS). Portworx, which we identified earlier this year as “the gold standard” in both GigaOm Cloud-Native Kubernetes Storage and Enterprise Kubernetes Storage reports (to which TECHunplugged contributed), gets a new compelling capability in the form of a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) layer.
This DBaaS offering is a first in the Kubernetes space and offers a managed service experience to organizations looking at rapidly deploying production-grade databases. PDS allows developers to focus on using data services, removing the overhead and hurdles that come with management activities.
Portworx Data Services offers the following advantages:
- Single-click deployment: DevOps teams can simply deploy production-grade data services and configure options such as high availability, encryption, backups and launch the deployment through a single-click, dramatically accelerating provisioning. These capabilities are also available through APIs and can be integrated in CI/CD pipelines to further accelerate release cycles.
- Fully automated management: Comprehensive automation removes the burden of manual configuration and brings automated Day-2 operations capabilities to enterprises with services such as monitoring, backups, high availability, disaster recovery, migration, auto-scaling, and security.
- Broad catalog of data services: PDS leverages the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem and supports one-click deployment of various services for SQL, NoSQL, search, streaming and more. These include Cassandra, Couchbase, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL among others.
Pure1: Enhanced Automation
Pure1 Meta was also part of the announcement rounds with additional automation improvements. The solution can now provide orgs with real-time insights on SLA adherence across their infrastructure.
Pure1 can also monitor applications protected by SafeMode snapshots against ransomware attacks, and organizations can now also visualize their Portworx container infrastructure from end-to-end.
TECHunplugged’s Opinion
The September 2021 Pure //Launch event was not only about products announcement: it was the unveiling of what Pure described as a “significant progression in the company vision and direction”.
TECHunplugged sees this progression in terms of vision and direction into enabling a cloud-like experience which aligns with the end-goal of technology: allowing organizations to seamlessly deliver their products and services in a timely fashion, without the hassles of manual management chores.
Pure Storage delivers on the vision by offering flexible on-demand consumption, self-driven storage operations, and a growing “Everything-as-a-Service” model which fully embraces the cloud experience.
These capabilities empower organizations and their DevOps teams by meeting their expectations and delivering on four areas:
- Services that scale and are available on-demand
- Modern infrastructure that supports on-demand applications, delivered through a cloud model
- An “infrastructure-as-code” approach that helps control infrastructure and services through automation and workflows
- Self-driven intelligent storage using AI/ML to perform an increasing range of operational activities, including workload placement, rebalancing and detection of anomalies
This progression in the company vision and direction is important: it does not only acknowledge the profound transformation of the storage market in terms of customer expectations, but it also considers the way modern workloads are being developed and released, as well as the shift from the traditional IT operating model – a model where IT, in its benevolent will to act as the gatekeeper, involuntarily becomes a bottleneck that slows down innovation.
By embracing Pure Storage’s vision, IT departments can break free from outdated operating models, significantly reduce the amount of manual labor, and become an enabler within their organizations.