This week, at Pure//Accelerate 2017, Pure Storage has unveiled its vision for the data platform for the cloud era. As modern organisations become increasingly reliant on technology, companies that have existed for decades across a wide range of industries have evolved into fundamentally digital businesses. Globally, digital business tools drive nearly half of revenue for enterprise organisations. Modern digital businesses require a data platform capable of delivering data with speed, agility and intelligence, across increasingly complex workloads and applications.
The Pure Storage data platform helps customers put their data to work. Now, organisations can run all operations with cloud agility, improve the economics of data analytics at high velocity and scale and ultimately derive new insights to deliver data-driven customer results never before possible.
Data is the lifeblood of the digital generation. Current estimates are that approximately 50 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created in 2020 alone (up from just four in 2016) and 180 ZB five years later in 2025 – an unprecedented growth rate. As data creation pivots from humans to machines – driven by sensors, IoT, digital cameras and a myriad of connected devices – it has exploded in volume. Simultaneously, the ability to analyse this data has transcended human cognition, with traditional analytics giving way to artificial intelligence (AI), machine and deep learning, neural networks and real-time data stream analytics. These new, data-driven applications require a different approach to storage, designed to deliver massively-parallel access to data at a very high bandwidth.
“Modern organisations require a data platform that enables organisations to build a new class of applications, to extract new insights from data and to do so in real-time,” said Scott Dietzen, CEO, Pure Storage. “With an infrastructure in place that supports mission-critical analytics at real-time speed, organisations can increase their pace of innovation, improve time to market and ultimately deliver better results for customers.”
Pure//Accelerate will showcase the ways Pure Storage enables customer innovation and business transformation through a host of comprehensive new hardware and software updates:
• Tier 1 storage, redefined. For years, organisations have had to choose between the highest reliability (Tier 1 disk arrays) and storage purpose-built for the cloud era (modern all-flash arrays). With the announcement of the introduction of Purity//FA 5.0, Pure Storage seeks to end the compromise for customers. The signature feature in Purity//FA 5.0 is ActiveCluster, a true active/active metro stretch cluster solution. Purity ActiveCluster extends availability to an unprecedented level and provides business continuity across the data centre or metro region. Application workloads on clustered Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, VMware Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) or Hyper-V continue to run transparently and effortlessly, even if an unexpected issue causes the array, network or data centre to fail. Pure Storage FlashArray offers 99.9999% availability, now proven over two years, inclusive of maintenance and generational upgrades. Organisations can now leverage best-in-class reliability and sophisticated enterprise replication in a purpose-built all-flash array, rich with data efficiency technologies, flash optimisation and cloud integration.
• From big data to intelligent data. The big data movement has helped organisations centralise data, but big data has historically meant slow data. Pure’s revolutionary FlashBlade system makes big data into fast data and unlocks iterative real-time analytics, advanced AI and machine learning (ML) and rich simulation for data of any size. And now with a fast object interface, tomorrow’s web-scale applications can be big, fast and intelligent, too.
• Multi-cloud, delivered. Cloud is everywhere – in core data centres and in edge data centres where data volume and latency necessitate local processing. It’s also stretched between multi-cloud IaaS and SaaS providers. No matter what cloud an organisation chooses or where they choose to run it, Pure’s data platform helps simplify storage in multi-cloud environments with new advances that deliver the simplest cloud on every platform: support for VMware VVOLs, Microsoft ODX, Docker Persistent Containers, native data protection integration with public cloud providers and pre-validated FlashStack solutions to speed the time to cloud.
• Self-driving storage. Cars have become more and more autonomous. They can self-navigate, avoid collisions and soon, they’ll drive themselves, too. It’s time for storage to catch up. Pure1® META, is Pure Storage’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for delivering on the vision of self-driving storage. Pure1 META delivers global predictive intelligence by collecting and analysing over 1 trillion array telemetry data points per day and enables effortless management, analytics and support. Pure1 META represents a major breakthrough in enterprise artificial intelligence and machine learning. Through the new Workload DNA generated by Pure1 META, customers will be able, for the first time in the industry, to predict both capacity and performance and get intelligent advice on workload deployment, interaction and optimisation.
“With hybrid cloud environments expected to be the future for most enterprises, IT is entering what many are calling the ‘Cloud Era’,” said Eric Burgener, Research Director, Storage, at IDC. “Storage infrastructure designed for tier one workloads in the cloud era must not only meet the traditional high performance and ‘six nines’ availability requirements, but must also meet a new set of expectations for scalability, efficiency, flexibility, ease of use, cloud integration and simple, non-disruptive technology refresh. Companies like Pure Storage, with their FlashArray//X storage array and the Evergreen Storage Program, are delivering on these requirements.”
