During a Gestalt IT video interview with Pure Storage’s Director of Product Marketing, James Gallegos, I was constantly reminded of what an amazing time we’re living in. Although we still live in a world plagued by a pandemic, where the COVID-19 virus is still killing tens of thousands of people each day, we are also seeing the amazing effects of what technology offers humanity.
This is not a post on the pandemic issues though, but how technology offers solutions in ways we’ve never imagined before. In a world where data is becoming one of the most important things, monitoring and managing data storage is most important. By providing the Pure customers with an AIOps solution to keep their most important IT assets healthy and efficient, more information on this tooling is something to dive into.
Pure1 Meta: AIOps
Pure Storage’s Pure1 Meta is constantly evaluating the Pure Storage fleet of customer-installed systems to locate and find problems before they even occur. When a customer had issues with the systems, this was usually noticed once a problem had occurred and the customer would then react by solving this issue. Now that we have a lot of sensors and the ability to analyze the telemetry data, we are looking at these issues from second to second and can even adjust before it becomes a real issue, so we become proactive in solving problems. To put it simply, we went from firefighters that could only fight the fire to firefighters that were already on the scene when the fire started.
But could we do even better with Pure1 Meta?
The answer seems to be a simple yes, but there is much more to it than we think. If we stay with the firefighters, it meant that we were still focused on a single fire and making sure that if there was a potential fire, we could control it and keep it from doing its devastating course. And although this is a great thing, it is still prone to errors, and we all know what that means. The other thing is that we’re all trying to solve the same issue and don’t organize things from an overall perspective. This is exactly where Pure1 Meta comes in.
In a world where everything is connected, we have the ability to connect our Pure Storage arrays to Pure. This makes it so all telemetry data can be picked up by Pure Storage from all (or almost all) storage hardware that clients have deployed in the field. By putting all of this telemetry data into a huge data lake and putting up things like ML and AI, Pure is able to look at and analyze a dataset that enables them to learn from all of these together. This means that if certain wear is analyzed as a potential risk for the flash, Pure is not only able to warn that particular customer, but they can warn all of their customers that there is a potential threat and how it can be avoided.
Another thing is that by analyzing all of this telemetry, Pure can estimate so many more key factors in the storage system. Even to the level of predicting how long the capacity will be sufficient, or if certain workloads would be better off somewhere else. This means that a customer profits from the knowledge of all Pure Storage customers. It takes the telemetry of all those systems and analyzes this by looking at what is going on and learning from all of this data to proactively provide all the insight needed to have a healthy and stable storage environment.
In the interview, we discussed what Pure provides to its customers (and yes, that is even more than what I have described above) and I was able to ask questions about this, as well as which new options were announced during the annual Pure //Accelerate event, as well as where the future for these solutions will go to. You can also check out the On-Demand //Accelerate sessions here.
