Pure Storage APJ CTO Mark Jobbins told iTWire the two biggest trends he is seeing are the increasing and ongoing concerns about cyber attacks as well as the noise surrounding generative AI. Cyber attacks are a constant concern, but they are even more so when it concerns storage. You’re only one ransomware attack away from disaster if you have a secure, reliable storage system. In the meantime, generative AI has become the hot topic. Jobbins says that the field has settled down and matured as people have begun exploring well-reasoned, proof of concept projects.
Pure Storage has spent a lot of time thinking about how it can best serve organisations of any size and type in advancing their AI ambitions and protecting their investments.
This thought process has resulted in a carefully crafted strategy with four pillars. These new services will be included in existing licensing along with two other add-on services to EverGreen//One’s Pure Storage platform.
These four pillars include expanding innovations in the Pure Storage platform, accelerating AI success in the enterprise, arming enterprises with new cyber resiliency services and capabilities, and delivering plartform flexibility with storage-as-a-service.
Pure Storage’s thinking and strategy, customer feedback, and a keen eye on how the world has changed have all been used to develop these solutions. Data is no longer confined to a single office. It can now be stored anywhere, literally. Modern storage platforms must ensure that endpoints and platforms can grow and evolve over time. This allows data to be seamlessly blended between on-premises systems and the cloud.
Let’s take a look at everything:
Copilot
Copilot, a brand new AI-driven tool, will be available on the Pure Storage platform. It will help administrators manage and protect data using natural language. It has been trained using insights and telemetry gathered from tens or thousands of Pure Storage customers, as well as Pure’s FAQs, documentation and other resources. It can provide actionable steps for addressing concerns or improving benchmark rankings. PureOne is available for enterprise customers and the training model will improve over time.
Examples of questions could be “Can you provide me with a security update on my flash arrays?” or “Can you confirm my billing?”
Administrators can ask any question, get quick access to usage, billing, security, and more. The Copilot will provide answers and recommendations and, most importantly, will link these recommendations to action. Jobbins told iTWire that the Copilot will help Pure Storage customers because it will give them a better view and make their platform easier to manage.
He said, “We are the first storage vendor that provides a GenAI copilot system.”
Next-gen Fusion storage automation
Many organisations have invested heavily in GPU compute layers. Jobbins said that GenAI is a powerful tool, but also requires a large investment.
GenAI is a hungry beast, and it needs data fast. This costs money. “People are worried about how much they should invest in the storage layer on day one and whether or not it will be relevant six, twelve, or even 18 months later when profiles have changed,” said he.
Imagine having to explain to the CFO that the “$ $ million” invested is only being used at 20%. It plays on people’s mind how to drive maximum productivity.
To be future-proof, you will need to make the right investments in security and training, as well as have the right throughput.
Jobbins said that the Pure platform could address all of these issues, “wrapped up with the new Fusion storage automation, a first-of-its kind.”
Fusion next-gen simplifies and improves provisioning for arrays of any size, from one to thousands. It is protocol agnostic, no matter whether you use FC or iSCSI.
It will be available as a simple update for all Purity arrays. It is not a separate license or an external control plan. It is fully backwards-compatible and does not break existing integrations.
Fusion’s strong policy-driven approach is a major part of its new capabilities. Specify service levels and requirements and Fusion will move workloads automatically and non-destructively, as appropriate. This includes performing replications and other autonomous actions in order to comply with your policies. It gives you a cloud-like experience when managing your storage.
Subscription to Evergreen//One
People traditionally choose storage options on the basis of structured block+file or unstructured data. Pure Storage recognizes that while both options are useful for specific purposes, when it comes down to AI, throughput is often more important than capacity.
Jobbins explained that Evergreen//One AI is a subscription type which “flips” the model. “Customers can subscribe for guaranteed performance based upon bandwidth. Storage capacity will be charged a nominal fee.
This gives organisations the option to choose and comfort, while removing the risk of investing too much money in a particular technology. “You can start small and then scale up,” said he. “Once you know your long-term profile, you can change it with time.”
NVIDIA certification
Pure Storage has extended its relationship with NVIDIA by moving into its certification. This is an accelerated AI data center infrastructure platform that delivers agile and scalable performance to the most challenging AI workloads and HPC workloads.
Pure Storage expects that the process will be completed before the end the year.
This will extend Pure Storage’s existing NVIDIA DGX & OGX certifications.
AI clusters to support mission-critical data
Pure Storage will introduce new Application Workspaces, which will allow for fine-grained control of access, ensuring security, independence and control. It allows companies to leverage their mission-critical data for AI applications without worrying about misuse or leakage.
Enhanced Cyber Resilience
Unfortunately, the reality of today is that cyber criminals will impact a company not whether but when. It’s frustrating to see that, while AI helps companies innovate and provide new services, criminals are also using it to increase the sophistication in their attacks.
Pure Storage has announced a new extension to its cybersecurity offerings. The company announced anomaly identification last year. It is now introducing more support and services to help customers with cyber resilience. This includes helping them focus on events and notifications and providing a clean environment for recovery.
Pure Storage says that this is not limited to ransomware but will be available for all disaster recovery situations. It will also be integrated with the Fusion enhancements, allowing you to further define your data protection policies. Customers will be able tailor policies to fit their individual environments.
These new capabilities offer a holistic approach for protecting your environment.
Cyber resilience advisory services
Pure Storage will also offer new services that will help you determine the best way to protect yourself from an incident and recover after it.
These services allow you to assess your risk and score it. You can also get advice from the Copilot feature described above.
When a Pure Storage customer subscribes to its cyber resilience service, Pure Storage will work with them to determine recovery processes and procedures so that they are prepared and planned before an incident occurs. These will be reviewed on a quarterly basis.
Rebalance
It’s difficult to predict the past. Imagine if you could swap hindsight with foresight. We live in an age of possibilities. “What if AI could be used to alert customers proactively when we believe that there will likely be a change in reserved capacity and avoid on-demand fees?” Jobbins asked. Pure Storage delivered.
You can ask “what if?” questions using the Copilot feature above – “what happens if I change my environment in this way …”?”
Pure Storage now offers rebalancing of storage between sites. Jobbins explained that, for example, “if you are a company with multiple sites, you may allocate reserved capacity in good faith, but at some point you might need to transfer data from site A B. You have a 200TB commitment reserved with 100TB at two sites, but you now want, for example, 150TB at site A and 50TB at site B. ”
Pure Storage will move infrastructure to the appropriate location at no extra charge. Customers can now rebalance storage once a year with the new rebalance feature. Jobbins, Pure Storage’s CEO, says that the company currently believes that 12 months is an appropriate amount of time. However, this will change over time as the company takes into account customer feedback.
New SLAs
Pure Storage announced a comprehensive expansion of its SLAs for Evergreen//One. Customers will see a 50% performance boost in their new high-performance SLA.
Pure Storage has a lot to announce, but it all boils down to a single unified strategy that helps customers accelerate their AI journey, while protecting their environments.
“From Fusion to self-managed environments, a generative copilot to ensure the best practices, flipping Storage-as a Service to mover, from capacity and performance profiles to throughput models, allowing customers to begin at whatever they choose, building our relationship to NVIDIA, providing more insights, delivering resilience …,” Jobbins stated.
“It hits all the areas that customers have been talking to me about,” said he.