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Pure Storage enters age of AI with wide-ranging storage portfolio
Thu, 15th Jun 2023

At Pure//Accelerate 2023, Pure Storage announced it has achieved its goal of becoming the first technology provider that covers the entirety of a customer's storage needs with all-flash.

Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage, comments, "We are now delivering the industry's most consistent, modern, and reliable portfolio that can address all enterprises' storage needs.

"As we enter a new age of AI, the superior economics, and operational and environmental efficiencies of Pure's product portfolio over both hard disk and SSD-based, all-flash competitive offerings will be more critical to our customers than ever."

For it's more than 11,500 global customers that span industries and workload-type, Pure Storage states that it can:

  • Improve reliability by a factor of ten over competitors;
  • Offer two to five times more power and space efficiency compared to all-flash and ten times more efficiency than disk;
  • Require five to ten times less manual labor to operate than legacy storage;
  • Result in at least 50% lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to competitive offerings of both flash and hard disk;
  • Enable customers to eliminate the cumbersome challenges associated with hard disks from their environment.

According to the company, Pure Storage is able to deliver these outcomes because of the following differentiators:

  • Pure Storage DirectFlash technology uniquely leverages software written directly to raw flash, while other competitors use more expensive, less efficient, and shorter-lived SSDs.
  • Pure Storage's consolidated product line consists of a common operating system, the Purity operating environment, one management system, Pure1, and operates on both a scale-up and a scale-out platform, while competitors require many disparate software and hardware platforms to cover the same breadth of use cases.
  • Pure Storage Evergreen model and services, which guarantee that deployed products never become obsolete, adapt to changing needs, and can be upgraded non-disruptively.
  • Pure Storage's Cloud Operating Model enables customers to operate their storage the way that cloud customers operate theirs: highly automated, orchestrated, and available as a service.

At Pure//Accelerate the company made important announcements, including:

  • The expansion of Pure Storage's disk replacement-focused Pure//E family of products with the all-new FlashArray//E delivers on Pure Storage's promise to relieve customers from the constraints of disk. The entire Pure//E family is the first all-flash storage system that can meet the needs of the secondary storage market at prices competitive to 7200 RPM hard disk systems, with a fraction of the power, space, and operational costs.
  • The introduction of the next generation FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C deliver the largest ever performance, efficiency, and security advancements to customers. New FlashArray models deliver up to 40% higher performance, 30% more inline compression to stretch storage capacity, and new ransomware protection capabilities delivered entirely via non-disruptive upgrade.
  • The new ransomware SLA guarantee for Evergreen//One and enhanced AIOps capabilities deliver advanced data resilience and enable organizations to benefit from a comprehensive data protection strategy.

In addition to the above, Pure Storage is investing in ongoing AI projects. The company states, as excitement over generative AI prompts a new wave of AI initiatives, the company's latest announcements will further Pure Storage's leadership as the go-to storage partner.

Pure supports leading-edge AI projects such as autonomous vehicle development companies and Meta AI's Research Super Cluster (AI RSC), the largest AI supercomputer in the world.

Pure Storage anticipated the coming demand for AI years ago, with the introduction of FlashBlade and its AI-Ready Infrastructure (AIRI) solution, co-developed with NVIDIA. AIRI//S is a ready-to-deploy solution developed by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, built on the NVIDIA DGX BasePOD reference architecture for AI, including the latest FlashBlade//S storage.

Pure Storage's FlashBlade hardware portfolio is GPU Direct Storage (GDS) ready, with software enhancements delivering complete GDS support to be available in the near term, further strengthening Pure's collaboration with NVIDIA and enhancing the AIRI//S solution.