Pure Storage APJ CTO Mark Jobbins explained to iTWire that the two big trends he was seeing are the increased and ongoing concerns around cyber attacks, as well as the noise around generative AI. Cyber attacks are always a concern, but especially so when it comes to storage. Your last defence against ransomware is trustworthy, secure storage - without that, you're only one attack away from disaster. And, meanwhile, generative AI is clearly the big topic of the day. In Jobbins' experience, it's begun to settle down and mature as people begin exploring solidly-reasoned proof of concept projects.

Pure Storage has put a lot of thought into how it is best positioned to serve organisations of all sizes and all types in advancing their AI aspirations and continually protecting their investments.

The result of this thought is a carefully-crafted strategy with four pillars. And, these new services will be rolled out as part of existing licensing, along with two additional add-on services for EverGreen//One, the Pure Storage storage-as-a-service platform.

These four pillars include expanding innovations in the Pure Storage platform, accelerating AI success in the enterprise, arming enterprises with new cyber resiliency services and capabilities, and delivering plartform flexibility with storage-as-a-service.

These are driven by Pure Storage's own thinking and strategising, as well as customer feedback, and most definitely from observing how the world hs changed. Long gone are the days when data solely resided on disks in an office; today it can be anywhere in the world, literally. A modern storage platform needs to ensure platforms and endpoints can grow and develop over time, seamlessly blending data between on-premises and cloud.

There's a lot to tackle here, so let's go through it:

Copilot

A brand-new AI-driven Copilot will be available within the Pure Storage platform itself, aiding administrators in managing and protecting data using natural language. This has been trained on insights and telemetry from tens of thousands of customers, along with Pure's FAQs and documentation, and can deliver actionable steps to address concerns or improve benchmark rankings. It is available to enterprise customers via the PureOne platform and Pure says its training model will get stronger over time.

Example questions might be, "Can you give me a security update over my flash arrays?" or "Can you confirm my billing?"

Administrators will be able to ask all kinds of questions, giving fast access to usage and billing, surfacing security issues, and much more. The Copilot will give responses and recommendations, and, importantly, link those recommendations to action. It will aid Pure Storage customers by giving them a greater view, and make the platform simpler to manage, Jobbins said to iTWire.

"We're the first storage vendor to provide a GenAI copilot environment," he said.

Next-gen Fusion storage automation

Meanwhile, many organisations have made huge investments on GPU compute layers. "It's huge what you can do with GenAI, but it takes a huge investment too," Jobbins said.

And, while GenAI brings great promise, it's a hungry beast that needs data - and fast. This costs money. "People are nervous about how much to invest in the storage layer from day one, and whether it will still be relevant in six, twelve, even 18 months when profiles may have changed," he said.

Imagine being the person who has to explain to the CFO why the "$ X million" investment provided is only running at, say, 20% utilised. "It plays on people's minds how to drive maximum efficiency."

However, being able to have multiple workloads on the same or similar platforms, with the right performance levels, and to be future proof means you need the right investments, the right security, and the right throughput for training to drive it all and shortern your time to go-live.

"The Pure platform can address all these," Jobbins said, "wrapped around with the new first-of-its-kind Fusion storage automation."

This next-gen Fusion improves and simplifies provisioning from one array to thousands. It's protocol agnostic - no matter if you use FC, iSCSI, VNMe, file/object, or other.

It will be embedded into Purity for all its arrays, available with a simple update. It's not a seperate license, or an external control plane. It's fully backwards compatible and does not break existing intgrations.

A major key to the new capabilities is its strong policy-driven nature: specify service levels and requirements, and Fusion will automatically move workloads seamlessly and non-destructively as appropriate. This includes taking snapshots, performing replications, and all kinds of other autonomous actions to comply with the policies you set. It brings you a much more cloud-like experience to managing your storage.

Throughput subscription in Evergreen//One

Traditionally, people choose storage options based on structured block+file data or unstructured data. Both options serve specific needs, but Pure Storage recognises when it comes to AI, capacity is not often the driver; instead it's throughput - how fast can you supply data to the compute layer?

In comes Evergreen//One for AI - this is a new subscription type that "flips the model", Jobbins said. "Customers can subscribe to guaranteed performance based on bandwidth. The storage capacity piece will be a nominal fee against it."

This helps give organisations choice and comfort; it removes the risk of over-committing huge resources into a technology. "You can start at an entry point then scale up," he said. "Once you understand your long-term profile you can change it over time." 

NVIDIA SuperPOD certification

Pure Storage is extending its relationship with NVIDIA to move into its SuperPOD certification, an accelerated AI data centre infrastructure platform for delivering agile and scalable performance for the most challenging AI and HPC workloads.

This is driven by NVIDIA's timelines, but Pure Storage expects the process will work its way through before the end of the calendar year.

This will extend Pure Storage's existing NVIDIA DGX and OGX certifications.

AI clusters for mission-critical data

Pure Storage will provide new Application Workspaces that bring fine-grained access controls, giving security, independence, and control. It means companies can be confident their mission-critical data can be leveraged for AI applications but without risk of misuse or leak.

Enhanced cyber resiliency

Sadly, today's reality is it's not if a company will be impacted by cyber criminals, but when. And, exasperatingly, as much as AI is helping companies innovate and deliver new services, it's also being leveraged by criminals to increase the sophistication of their attacks.

Pure Storage has announced an extension of its cybersecurity offerings. Last year, the company announced anomaly detection. Now it is introducing greater support and services for cyber resiliency, helping customers hone right in on events, and notifications, along with providing a clean storage environment for recovering into.

Pure Storage says this will not be limited to ransomware, but will be open to all disaster recovery situations. Further, it will tie into the Fusion enhancements above with new policy upgrades so you can further define policies around data protection. Customers will be able to tailor policies to their own individual environments.

These new capabilities bring a holistic approach to protecting your environment.

Cyber resiliency advisory services

Meanwhile, new services will see Pure Storage work proactively with you to determine how to best protect against, and recover from, an incident.

These services will allow you to assess and score your risk, and can be supplemented by advice from the new Copilot feature detailed above.

When a customer subscribes to the Pure Storage cyber resilience service, the company will proactively work with the customer to determine recovery procedures and processes so these are all planned and ready before an incident occurs. These will be reviewed quarterly.

Rebalance

It's always difficult to predict the future. Imagine if we could trade hindsight for foresight? Happily, we live in a world of possibilities. "What if we could use AI to proactively tell customers when we think there will be a change to reserved capacity, and thus avoid on-demand charges?" Jobbins asked. And, sure enough, Pure Storage has delivered more new ways to get insights to make informed decisions.

This can be asked through the Copilot capability above to ask "what if" questions - "what if I change the environment this way ..."

In addition, Pure Storage will now offer rebalancing storage among sites. For example, Jobbins explained, "if you have multiple sites you allocate reserved capacity with good intentions, but in time might need to move data from site A to B. You have a reserved commitment of 200TB with 100TB in two sites but now want, say, 150TB in site A and 50TB in site B."

With the new rebalance option, customers can rebalance their storage once per year, and Pure Storage will move the infrastructure appropriately at no additional charge. Currently, the company believes 12 months is a good logical amount of time but Jobbins says the SLA will evolve over time based on customer feedback.

New SLAs

 Pure Storage has announced a comprehensive expansion to its SLAs for Evergreen//One and says customers will experience a 50% bump in performance in their new high-performance SLA enhancement.

It's a lot of news out of Pure Storage, but they all come down to a single, unified strategy around helping customers accelerate their AI journey while protecting their environments.

"All the way from Fusion to providing self-managed storage environments, a generative AI copilot to ensure best practices, flipping storage-as-a-service to mover from capacity and performance profile to throughput model allowing customers to start at whatever they want, building our relationship with NVIDIA, providing greater insights, delivering security and resilience ...," Jobbins said.

"It's hitting all the areas customers are talking to me about," he said.