Pure Storage launches into storage as code and data services

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The cloud era began with the belief that eventually businesses would migrate all their workloads to the public cloud – drawn by promises of greater flexibility and agility, cost reductions, payment models. Manageable OPEXs and the ability to transfer responsibility for managing IT environments to the cloud providers themselves.

In recent years, this has evolved into hybrid and multicloud clouds, with organizations sending some workloads to multiple public clouds while keeping some on-premises, for various reasons, from security and compliance to spending and to latency. However, this change, along with the rise of modern technologies such as containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence and data analytics, has also sparked a demand from companies for more cloud-like capabilities in their data centers. , from on-demand to flexible resources. consumption patterns.

This has forced established data center technology providers to evolve from hardware manufacturers to software and service providers, as seen with vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise launching its GreenLake platform, Dell Technologies with Apex and Lenovo. with TruScale.

Pure Storage is no different. Initially a pioneer in all-flash storage space, the company has evolved to offer its products as a service, launching a flexible consumption model for block storage in 2017 and deploying its Evergreen Storage Service ( ES2) – offering its technologies via subscriptions. a year later and finally rename it Pure as-a-Service. It made block, file, and object storage available as a service, with all the benefits of the cloud of agile operations and economics.

Pure has continued to expand what it can do, as exemplified by its $ 370 million acquisition of Portworx late last year, an initiative that expanded its data services capabilities through the platform. Multicloud form based on Kubernetes from Portworx. At the time of the acquisition, Pure CEO Charles Giancarlo wrote in a blog post that modern organizations are embracing Kubernetes and containers as key elements in their adoption of cloud native technologies and that Portworx will be expanding the reach. of Pure by offering data services.

The twelve-year-old company continued the trend this week with the release of its storage-as-a-code platform Pure Fusion and its database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform Portworx Data Services, offering automated management capabilities to DevOps engineers responsible for juggling test, development and production requirements with requirements such as performance, availability and security.

“What we’re doing is driving a program where we don’t just focus on what we traditionally did, which was best-in-class infrastructure, but also on the cloud operating model by modernizing operations. “, Pure Chief Product Officer Ajay Singh says The next platform. “We are also moving to modern data services with Portworx Data Services. We are shifting our agenda more and more up the stack and more multi-cloud and Kubernetes-agnostic infrastructure [and] speed up operations with one-click automation. [The new platforms change] positioning with the company profile of the storage infrastructure to also include modern data services. Ultimately what we’re trying to do is empower technology teams to become internal multi-cloud storage service providers. We have a lot of things on the roadmap. Essentially, we map the customer journey to what we call a modern data experience, which basically provides a cloud operating model. To do this, a key part of the modern data experience is the modernization of the infrastructure. “

Pure’s roadmap also includes automation and cloud driving, operating in both on-premises and multi-cloud environments. That’s where the Portworx acquisition comes in, allowing Pure to go beyond operations management to deliver data services that leverage Kubernetes.

Key to all of this is Pure’s continued focus on flash, which Singh says is gaining ground on hard drives in terms of cost. This will allow flash to overtake hard as businesses build modern infrastructure, he says.

“We’re going to research all the hard drives, but it’s going to be a three to four year journey,” Singh says, noting the increasing use of solid-state drives (SSDs). “We’re two to three years ahead of SSD because we’ve gone straight to flash. … Traditional storage vendors already had a ton of software written for the hard drive. They said, rather than having to rewrite this stuff, if I can make a solid state or flash appear like a hard drive, then my software will just work with it and I can go about my business. We don’t have any inheritance on the hard drive, so we started flashing straight away. We have optimized the NAND at the individual cell level and therefore we get better data reduction. We’re starting to release a lot of hybrid drives with some really big deals. If I were a hyperscaler I would have scratched my head saying, “This thing is starting to take hold in my infrastructure as well. In the next three to five years, I will be dealing with SSDs. I can do it easy, but I’m very cost conscious and I also want to figure out how to go straight to flash. ‘ We have a ton of IPs in this space on direct flash.

With Pure Fusion, the vendor takes a step into the world of storage as code. The platform aggregates arrays and enables enterprises to scale their storage environment up or down, even in the public cloud, with on-demand consumption and instant, automated back-end provisioning. It will initially integrate with Pure’s FlashArray // X NVMe and FlashArray // C all-QLC flash storage as well as Pure’s Cloud Block Store, with planned integrations with Portworx and FlashBlade, which consolidates file and data data. ‘objects.

It leverages AI techniques to provide self-service and store-as-code automation, including tasks such as workload placement and fleet rebalancing, as well as intelligent management of workload to adapt to changing application needs. There are Availability Zones and an API framework.

“For storage administrators, they just need to define storage classes and capacities – file, object and block protocols, performance – then Pure Fusion will optimize placement, adjust storage classes and use your resources. as needed for the applications, ”says Singh. “You’ll optimize the entire fleet and implement policy-based production to properly perform safe mode, snapshots, to protect against ransomware, those kinds of things. In a sense, we are moving to a cloud operating model for our storage offerings.

Portworx Data Services puts Pure at the top of the stack, giving DevOps engineers a one-click way to deploy services to Kubernetes. They can choose options like SQL, NoSQL, search, and streaming.

“We’ve put a lot of energy into uptime, secure access, migration, a whole host of data management services that you get automatically with PortWorx – [including] backup capacity [and] compliance management, ”he said. “In addition to this software-defined storage platform, we also help you speed up your applications to include additional automation, bridging the gap between automating your data platform and automating services. of data. What’s new: PortWorx one-click data services. With just one click, deploy Cloudera, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Sandra Lastic, Kafka, Rubberneckers, and more, common data services that development teams want to use to accelerate data mining to generate new insights and gain in digital transformation.

The services can also run on any Kubernetes distribution, such as OpenShift from Red Hat, Tanzu from VMware, Elastic Kubernetes from Amazon, and GKE from Google, and any infrastructure.

“At the end of the day, the buyer of this is pretty much the same buyer who buys Portworx because they are trying to become multi-cloud storage cloud providers or storage service providers or storage service providers. data, because at the end of the day, that’s what businesses are asking for, ”Singh says. “They don’t care what storage they use. Dell or Pure or public cloud, they don’t care. They just want the services. This is what they need to generate information and get insight from the data. If we can provide these services, they only need an endpoint. They can run with it. This is what enables infrastructure teams to scale up, to become providers of cloud data services.

Pure will start with four or five services in the first half of next year, with more services rolled out over time, he says.

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