Obsolescence awaits everything - and everyone. But Pure Storage has other ideas.
Patrick Smith, Field CTO for EMEA, says Pure Storage is challenging the idea that its customers should expect their tech to age and become out of date.
“Our products are designed to never become obsolete, are simple to operate, and provide self-service capabilities,” he tells The Stack. “Customers have the capacity to meet changing business demands and only pay for what they use.”
Key to this ambition is the Pure Storage platform for storage management. The platform provides a single operating environment across public, on-prem, and hybrid clouds and is accessible through Evergreen, “the world’s most flexible” storage subscription service. At the heart of the platform is the unique Evergreen architecture which brings continuous and non-disruptive upgrades. The big idea: Configuration consistency, data protection compliance, better workload utilisation, traceability for chargeback, and more.
The Pure Storage platform “provides this concept of a perpetual storage array that actually gets better over time and is an appreciating asset,” Smith says.
Waiting for a platform
Smith joined Pure Storage in 2018 after holding leadership roles at blue chips including Merril Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.
He is a champion of the power of the Pure Storage platform, which he says offers “foundational building blocks” that bring more value together than individually by “delivering the services, capabilities, and benefits customers need without the chaotic complexity that comes from combining discrete components…”
So, what makes a platform better than a “potpourri” of point products?
To answer this question, Smith points out that Pure Storage’s peers are not just companies in the storage sector but also include consumer-facing businesses like Apple and combined B2B and B2C brands such as Nvidia.
“Apple has built a fantastic platform,” Smith says. “Macs and iPhones increasingly use Apple’s own proprietary silicon, in a move away from Intel.
“Apple has the App Store as a commercial interface as well as its own silicon and operating systems. There is a consistency of experience across all its products and services because they are embedded within a platform made up of components Apple actually owns.”
At Pure Storage, the inspiration of Apple, in particular, goes a long way back.
Founder John ‘Coz’ Colgrove was inspired by one of the most defining Cupertino-born products, Smith tells us. “Coz had a vision that the complicated world of enterprise storage didn't need to be complicated,” he says. “His reference was the iPhone. Even back in 2009, when Pure Storage was founded, you didn't get an instruction manual with an iPhone. It was intuitive to use. That was one of the guiding principles for all of the products that we build on our platform.”
When it comes to Nvidia, Smith sees the range and diversity of its platform as its key strength: “Nvidia has had phenomenal success in building a platform and everybody is now talking about it,” he tells us. “Who would have thought a company focused on GPUs for gaming PCs would become the most valuable company in the world? It’s the platform that has powered that success.”
Planned non-obsolescence
When building its platform, Pure Storage started by setting “philosophical targets” about what it wanted to achieve and deliver, Smith tells us. A key consideration was efficiency, which has the additional benefit of improving sustainability.
To Pure Storage, efficiency also means economical and modular design, so that infrastructure is built with as few components as possible. Crucially, in a notable break from Apple’s approach, Pure wanted to give its customers clear “non-disruptive” upgrade paths for both hardware and software. “We've built a process whereby you can upgrade the technology at a modular level.”
To achieve this, Pure Storage uses a single operating environment, called Purity, across its product range. It offers predictable, high-speed data access for enterprise apps and web-scale workloads, with end-to-end NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) optimised for flash multi-protocol support and balanced resource distribution.
No more “tiny black boxes”
As an all-flash data storage provider, Pure Storage moved away from “inefficient” SSDs unlike its competitors. “SSDs didn’t align with our efficiency philosophy,” Smith says. “It also created tiny little black boxes. The manufacturer of the SSD decides what goes on inside it - there’s no transparency.”
To address this problem, Pure Storage devised a concept called “direct to flash” and created a component called the direct flash module. ”It's a really simple idea,” Smith explains. "We take flash from vendors, put it on a drive, and expose all the flash to the Purity operating environment without any abstraction layers in-between to add complexity, slow it down and add potential points of failure.”
Direct flash modules are a “fundamental component” in the Pure Storage platform, along with its operating environment. The DirectFlash flash module is designed in-house and allows all-flash arrays to communicate directly with raw flash storage. It uses “raw” flash rather than SSDs.
The third “foundational element” is the Pure1 management layer, which enables customers to “manage all Pure Storage products in exactly the same way through the same portal”, offering insights into behaviour and AI-enabled predictive capabilities.
The final aspect of the platform is the Evergreen subscription service (storage-as-a-service) that provides a flexible consumption model. Pure Storage goes further with guaranteed Service Level Agreements as part of Evergreen//One - now offering ten concurrent SLAs covering capacity buffer, performance, availability, no data migration, energy efficiency, cyber recovery and more.
“We've brought a consumer-influenced subscription concept to the world of enterprise storage, whereby customers don't own assets but instead pay for the data they store,” Smith adds. “This makes our users’ lives easier because they can treat the system sitting in their data centre as a service, paying to write and store data. Pure handles capacity management to make sure we never get in the way of the business, so your customers never run out of capacity.”
Pure Storage also does all the lifecycle management, handling software updates to ensure customers don’t have to worry about security vulnerabilities.
“It would be impossible for us to deliver our Evergreen subscription services if we didn't have a platform that supports non-disruptive software upgrades and intergenerational hardware upgrades through our Evergreen architecture,” Smith says.
Pure Storage vs the pandemic
The strength of the Pure Storage platform was tested - and demonstrated - during the pandemic, which saw major supply chain issues in the enterprise technology landscape which hindered many vendors’ delivery of service and capabilities.
"Our lead time on delivery barely increased during the pandemic due to our simple platform approach,” Smith recalls. “We only saw a very small increase in delivery time during that time, whereas other technology providers were taking months and in some cases years to provide new technology to their customers.
“A platform approach mitigates some supply chain risks as we've rationalised the components that go into our systems rather than having a multitude of different components in each and every product. It continues our focus on driving simplicity at every level.”
What do customers say about Pure Storage?
On Gartner Peer Insights, Pure Storage has a rating of 4.8 stars. In the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage, it was positioned highest for “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” and has been a leader 10 years in a row.
It is also “very proud” to achieve a Net Promoter Score of 82. “This score indicates how likely our customers are to recommend Pure Storage to their peers, underscoring the effectiveness of our platform as well as our clients’ satisfaction,” Smith says.
"We’ve received tremendous customer feedback on the simplicity of our platform and products,” he continues. “From the moment a customer decides to do a proof of concept with one of our systems, the difference in setup time compared to others in the industry is significant. Setting up and operating Pure Storage systems are very simple. We’ve seen customers drastically reduce the operational overhead due to this simplicity, even at scale.
"Customers also appreciate the efficiency we offer, particularly in the current climate where sustainability is crucial. One customer reported a 96% reduction in energy consumption after switching to Pure Storage. Our products are typically up to 85% more efficient than current competitors, and even more so compared to legacy systems.”
Recent announcements
At its recent user conference, Pure Storage announced the next evolution of a key component of the platform called Fusion. Traditionally in many organisations, each storage system has been a management domain, with its data objects, client access, performance, protection, and security managed in isolation; fleet-level management that automates storage management tasks and integrates with data centre automation tools is often inefficient and unsophisticated. Fusion is an autonomous storage delivery and management mechanism that provides self-service capabilities to storage consumers, with fleet-level control of all of the storage assets in customers’ data centres and the public cloud.
“Just 20 months ago, many of us hadn't heard of generative AI,” Smith says. “Now, it's hard to avoid. We’ve taken large language model (LLM) technology and applied it to the world of storage management, making it simpler to manage the storage environment. We're the first in our industry to bring an AI Copilot to storage, so we are very excited about that.”
Pure Storage has also introduced an AI tier in its subscription model called Evergreen//One for AI, which allows users to subscribe based on throughput and storage capacity separately, catering to the specific needs of AI environments. Customers can start small and scale as needed, only paying for what they use.
Pure Storage was among the first enterprise storage vendors to work with NVIDIA. Now Pure Storage has achieved NVIDIA DGX BasePOD certification and NVIDIA OVX validation (reference architectures for the building and scaling of enterprise AI infrastructure). The storage firm’s partnership with NVIDIA is “going from strength to strength,” with SuperPOD (Nvidia’s data-center-scale AI supercomputer) certification expected later in the year leveraging Ethernet for storage connectivity. “We find this works very well with enterprise customers who like the simplicity and the fact that they're very familiar with Ethernet as a network protocol,” Smith says.
Additionally, Pure Storage enhanced the cybersecurity capabilities of its platform to include the identification of anomalies in both data performance and throughput, to identify suspicious signals in data requests and user behaviour on storage systems. It also now offers a cyber resilience and recovery service-level SLA that provide customers with a new system in their data centre within one business day to support their recovery efforts if they suffer a breach.
It’s all part of an Evergreen approach that means the Pure Storage platform is designed to cope with whatever the future has to throw at it.
“Our Evergreen approach to our platform means our systems get better over time,” Smith concludes. “They don't become obsolete. And that completely changes how our customers think about systems in their data centre. It eliminates the problem of legacy technology, because it's simple and easy to keep our technology up to date, current and future proof.”
Delivered in partnership with Pure Storage.
