Pure Storage is out today with Pure Fusion and Portworx Data Services. We are going to briefly cover those, along with some background. We will also highlight some more “quality of life” announcements that Pure is making around operating its stack.
Transitioning Away From High-End Storage Hardware
Pure Storage is looking to re-define itself from a maker of high-end all-flash arrays to a data services company. The reason behind this is twofold. Pure says it is what the market wants, but it also allows the company to access the multiples of an as-a-service company.
As part of this, Pure’s marketing materials place its infrastructure services at the very bottom of stacks and we have not heard from the company why its hardware is better than competitors in some time. The messaging is clear here.
Against this backdrop of transitioning to a data services company, we have new announcements around Pure Fusion and Portworx Data Services.
One of the other interesting announcements that did not get its own subheading is the quality-of-life improvements at Pure. We are going to dive into that a bit more.
Pure Fusion
Pure Fusion is the company’s modern storage vision. The company expects that users will be able to consume and scale storage resources, whatever they are, at scale. AI-driven workload, placement, and rebalancing along with self-service allow for quick resource delivery and lower management burdens.
Underneath, Pure’s orchestration and management solution manages where and how workloads are run across different classes of the company’s hardware.
Portworx Data Services
Pure Storage acquired Portworx some time ago, and one of the fruits of the acquisition is Portworx Data Services. This effectively deploys different types of databases, configures them, scales out as needed, manages backup and disaster recovery, and so forth. The idea really is to make deploying and managing databases easy.
This is an early access product, but the goal is to support MS SQL Server, MySQL, Postgre, ZooKeeper, redis, mongoDB, kafka, elasticsearch, couchbase, Cassandra, consul, DataStax and more. This is a very cool offering with the goal of making it easy to deploy all of these different tools in a way that developers can simply request the tool they need and get going.
Pure Storage’s Experience
Some other cool bits of the announcement, that were not a focus, is that the company is introducing some quality-of-life improvements for storage administrators. There is a new upgrade tool to help make upgrades as seamless as possible.
Pure also has a new data protection tool to help mitigate the impacts of attacks on storage infrastructure, something that many folks are dealing with these days.
Pure also has a new tool coming that will help manage container storage and identify where in containerized applications problems occur so they can be addressed.
These are not the big new product announcements, but they are still exciting for Pure admins.
Final Words
Pure has some interesting technology here, but it is wading into a field of giants. There are many large companies targeting this space from cloud providers such as AWS that will go the next step and even fork open source databases they want to help users manage to legacy players such as VMware and Dell EMC. Hopefully, the transition to an as-a-service company does not mean that the company falls behind on its hardware.
