This will be my fourth consecutive Pure Accelerate show. I have long been impressed with the ability of this dynamic company to progress, to innovate, and to build new approaches and expand solutions that solve the problems facing enterprise organizations from a storage perspective. They strive to achieve a simple, manageable manner for making these functionalities easily adopted, and incorporate this into the approaches companies require to move their functional IT systems forward to achieve better controls, and systems.
I anticipate new and significant improvements, and am hoping to see them in action.
ObjectEngine from Pure
As I wrote about last winter, ObjectEngine has been the Pure answer to Copy Data Protection. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s been done with this platform. I want to see how deeply the integration has come to help solve the problems related not just to backup and recovery but the significant aspect of leveraging that data for business purposes, analytics, trending, etc. The power of All-Flash and the horsepower that brings to the solution, to leverage the types of analytics needed by today’s enterprises to help to make business decisions based on real, even completely current data is quite compelling. I see the copy data protection and copy data management concept really becoming valuable to the needs of my customers, and the power of this approach is quite intriguing.
DirectFlash from Pure
DirectFlash was developed from the ground-up to address the performance issues created by taking data away from the data-source (as required by all traditional NAS or SAN environments) which became significant as the transport layer from (for example) database to and from data. Many organizations continued to leverage DAS (Direct Attached Storage) as a method to remove that boundary. The issue here is that we know that there are limitations on the amount of storage that can be connected directly.
The DirectFlash Fabric offering from Pure seeks to eliminate both the size and fabric latencies involved in, and that have challenged this particular solution since the dawn of enterprise storage environments. The consolidation of the storage into standard architectures should be designed for speed from all directions. This product, more a reference architecture, removes all the latencies of Ethernet or even Fibre fabric. The disk is as quick as it could be by using the ultra-dense NVMe-format SSD, and NVMe over fabric. The goal is to bring the disk as close as possible to the source, and yet to allow for scalability and densities as of yet unachieved in the industry. All of this delivered in a standard build reference architecture, rather than a one-off, custom solution. Powered by the Purity operating system. Simple and elegant, to me, this is what Pure has been all about from the beginning.
As products go, these are going to draw my attention. But the truth is, the company seems to be able to develop solutions as well to problems I hadn’t yet even considered. As in the past, I anticipate being wowed by what Pure determines appropriate, necessary, and exciting. In years past, the big and the little things have proven themselves to be worth exploration by Pure. They’ve arrived at research and development approaches that have astounded me, and I hope will continue to grow the space.
Matt’s Take
Traditional storage marketplaces are somewhat volatile. The recent consolidations of smaller companies into larger ones, as well as the addition of functionality beyond the standard space in which some of these players have worked has shown that in today’s world, storage, backup, and scalabilities are no longer enough. Pure has been at the forefront of innovating beyond the scale of the more straightforward “Storage Play” and into a world where far more can be expected as folded into the portfolio. I am intrigued by what has been done, and what can continue to be achieved by this innovative and exciting company.
