Pure Storage brings storage-as-a-service to files

Pure Storage is adding features to its storage-as-a-service (STaaS) platform, including Real-time Enterprise File, Universal Credits, and a virtual machine assessment to help admins optimize their VMs.

With Real-time Enterprise File, Pure Storage said it seeks to address the limitations of traditional file storage to meet the needs of modern workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). It includes dynamic file services that “change, adapt and reconfigure in real-time to meet the fast paced demands of modern applications,” the company said.

Customers want the public cloud operating model behind their own firewalls, explained Shawn Hansen, general manager of the core storage business unit at Pure Storage, in an interview, so the company has focused on providing a single, unified infrastructure that is managed as a service, like the public cloud.

“File is kind of a legacy product,” he said. “It’s been around for many, many years, and we’ve looked at this with a clean sheet of paper and asked, ‘how do we start over from scratch? How do we create a clean piece of paper that looks like the public cloud, but bring that to our on-premises customers?’”

Pure’s solution includes the creation of global shared storage pools, with automation that takes care of tasks such as workload placement and rebalancing of arrays across the customer’s fleet of Pure Storage arrays.

“If you’re used to the old world of clustering, we’re creating unlimited scale clusters,” Hansen said. “We’re calling this a global storage pool, and this is the ability to not have to fix your allocations or reserve things in advance.”

Zero-move tiering

 Real-time Enterprise File also offers zero-move tiering, so admins can adjust performance without having to physically shuffle data between tiers. “There’s no more need for additional network resources or specialized switching,” Hansen noted. “We handle the performance needs of both hot and cold data without that management overhead.”

Matt Kimball, vice president and principal analyst, datacenter compute and storage at Moor Insights & Strategy, is impressed with the new offering. “The real-time file services element addresses a lot of the technical and operational challenges that many legacy storage environments face, with pre-planning and the siloed, manual approach to expanding environments to support new workloads, applications and other storage-intensive needs,” he said. “IT organizations don’t have the luxury of telling an embedded team in a business unit to wait for weeks, or even months, to build and deploy business critical applications so they can support them from a storage perspective. That embedded team will just take its needs to the cloud. So, the IT organization has to perform like the cloud — and storage is such a critical part of the cloud operating model. This is what allows IT organizations to ‘be the cloud’, if you will, to those internal customers.”

AI Copilot for File, an expansion of the Copilot Pure announced earlier this year, lets admins use natural language services to manage their files and get a quick, comprehensive view of their services. It also allows them to query the platform about issues such as performance or latency and ask for root causes, or even discover which data across the fleet hasn’t been accessed for a certain period.

Entry-level blade

In addition, to assist companies in need of a product to deal with entry-level use cases such as AI, compliance, content sharing, image repositories, IoT, and edge applications, Pure has introduced the FlashBlade//S100, an AI-ready platform with GPUDirect support which brings what it describes as “progressive pricing across all price points and markets.”

The new entry level system gives customers a lower cost offering which is more appropriate for edge and remote environments, where the existing systems may be too expensive or too large to deploy. 

“I do not view this as AI exclusive platform, though the GPU-Direct Storage on NFS feature is designed for AI,” said Henry Baltazar, research director at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The new entry level system can handle mainstream file sharing and application workloads, and has data protection services such as snapshots, WORM immutability, and replication, which are required for enterprise and midrange storage systems.”

Universal Credits

When subscribing to multiple services, Hansen noted, there’s always the issue that you overbuy for one, and underbuy for another, resulting in extra costs. To help eliminate the problem, Pure has introduced Universal Credits.

Universal Credits allow businesses to purchase a pool of credits and use them across various services without being locked into specific subscriptions, while still providing predictable billing. Customers can even leverage volume discounts by purchasing Universal Credits and applying them across various Evergreen//One, Pure Cloud Block Store and Portworx services.

“I’m not aware of any other storage provider enabling this financial flexibility. But I immediately see the value,” said Moor Insights’ Kimball. During his IT career, managing spend was difficult and inflexible because budget allocations were not transferrable, and he said the credits would have been useful to have in situations when new workloads and applications were introduced.

“[Universal Credits] clearly addresses the financial challenges IT organizations have,” he said.

For S&P’s Baltazar, “The top storage pain point for enterprises and smaller organizations is data growth, and in our surveys annual data growth in the 20%-30% range is common.” Cost continues to be a key issue, alongside keeping up with data growth, that is driving organizations’ need to modernize their infrastructure, he said.  

“The Universal Credits addition fits the cost savings theme as well, by allowing customers to reallocate their credits if their requirements change. For example, if a company decides to shift more of their storage investment to public cloud, they would have the ability to convert credits towards the Pure Cloud Block Store service,” Baltazar said.

VM Assessment

Customers with Pure 1 subscriptions are receiving a new benefit at no extra charge: VM Assessment. It offers performance monitoring, enhanced scenario planning, and rightsizing recommendations to help them optimize their VM resources.

“Every one of our large enterprise customers has asked us about Broadcom and what the impact of VMware is to their infrastructure costs,” Hansen explained. “Because we have visibility to not only the arrays that are running VMware — and more than 75% of our customers run VMware today — we have great insights at the individual application level. So we’re introducing this concept of a VMware assessment. It’s a tool that gives customers clarity into how their VMs are utilized and to understand potential savings.”

Kimball sees the tool as both timely and useful, as IT explores its options following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Some, he said, are considering another VM platform, some are considering moving to the cloud, and others are looking to better take advantage of the changes in VMware.

“While companies vying for customers will lead you to believe that every VMware customer is moving away and ‘strongly considering their solution,’ the reality is, every VMware customer is looking at what is best for their business,” he observed. “Part of that is rationalizing their licensing, deployments, and workload placements — and answering the ‘What if?’ questions. This is where the Pure assessment tool can be invaluable for its customers. I see this service/tool as a strong asset for IT operations.”