Pure Storage Expands Cloud Reach With New Automation, Database-As-A-Service

‘As a company, we are going more and more upstack with our infrastructure, including our Purity operating system, our Portworx Kubernetes technology, and our all-flash data center technology. We are updating our operations and automation capabilities with our new Pure Fusion SaaS management and new Portworx data services,’ says Ajay Singh, Pure Storage’s chief product officer.

Pure Storage Tuesday unveiled new software aimed at helping solution providers help their customers have a single seamless cloud operating and procurement model and container-based cloud-native applications across all cloud and on-premises environments.

The new offerings stem from Pure Storage’s position that storage and data management should be more services-oriented, with more automation, self-service capabilities and ease of management, said Ajay Singh, chief product officer for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

“Pure Storage is making significant strides in delivering the cloud operating model in storage and data services,” Singh told CRN. “This is storage as code at an infinite scale. And it’s the ability to work with modern applications with a couple of clicks to have modern data services including SQL, noSQL and more.”

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For Pure Storage, modernizing customers’ data experience includes a mix of modern infrastructure, operations and applications, Singh said.

“As a company, we are going more and more up-stack with our infrastructure, including our Purity operating system, our Portworx Kubernetes technology, and our all-flash data center technology,” he said. “We are updating our operations and automation capabilities with our new Pure Fusion SaaS management and new Portworx data services.”

Improving the automation and availability of data services is important as customers look for ways to take better advantage of the cloud, said Raphael Meyerowitz, vice president of technical services and strategic partnerships at Presidio, a New York-based global digital services solution provider.

“For Presidio, customers are suddenly more agile today in how they develop their operations,” Meyerowitz told CRN. “Pure Storage wants to make it easy for someone to go in with an API call to get what they need.”

New from Pure Storage is Pure Fusion, a SaaS management plan that pools all Pure Storage arrays into a single pool with fleet re-balancing of capacity, Singh said.

Pure Fusion is developer friendly, with an API framework that allows storage to be done as code so developers can spin storage up and down automatically, he said.

“This enables a Pure pool of storage resources to plug into a Kubernetes framework,” he said. “And with the CSI [container storage interface] protocol, it works with non-Pure Storage storage. It brings the full richness of Pure Storage to Portworx and, with CSI, to any containers with heterogeneous storage.”

Pure Fusion provides self-service autonomous storage as code, giving businesses infinite scale, instant self-service provisioning, intelligent workload environments and the delivery of a cloud operating model anywhere, Singh said.

“If I’m a storage administrator, I want to define my requirements and have the storage optimize data placement, adjust storage classes utilizing new resources, and optimize the entire fleet,” he said. “So storage becomes more cloud-like.”

Pure Fusion will be in preview by the end of this year, with general availability to come in the first half of 2022. DevOps teams today are looking for technologies that provide self-service and are ready to use at any time and Pure Fusion can make that happen, Presidio’s Meyerowitz said.

“They are looking for an API-driven infrastructure,” he said. “Today, customers procure their infrastructure through APIs. On the storage side, they are looking for something built from the ground up to take any input they provide and from there provision storage. It doesn’t matter where the storage is. So self-provisioning is important to get to cloud-like business models.”

Pure Storage also introduced Portworx Data Services, based on Pure Storage’s 2020 acquisition of Portworx, at the time the leading developer of Kubernetes-native cloud storage technology.

“We’re providing one-click deployment of production-grade managed data services on Kubernetes,” Singh said. “This provides a full range of services including high availability, backup, disaster recovery, encryption and migration while customers leverage popular database services to work in the Portworx platform.”

The result, Singh said, is the industry’s first database-as-a-service platform for Kubernetes for businesses using a wide range of stateful applications including SQL and NoSQL databases, search, streaming and more.

“This helps ‘cloudify’ customers’ infrastructures,” he said. “They can now also accelerate the management of their DataOps [data operations], and add new services with one click for Cloudera, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Spark and more. This is driving us up-stack to help add value. And it runs on any infrastructure, whether it’s Pure Storage or not.”

Portworx Data Services is also currently in the early access stage of availability, with general availability slated for the first half of 2022. It will initially support Kafka, Cassandra, RabbitMQ and Redis, with support for other applications to come.

Customers provision databases in a variety of ways and Portworx was built with Kubernetes in mind regardless of what storage is used, Meyerowitz said.

“It has a management plane in the cloud,” he said. “Just point to it from a customer’s infrastructure and it auto provisions the database, backs it up and secures it. This provides customers with consistency in deploying databases. Otherwise, one person provisions the database one way and another person provisions it a different way. Consistency is important. Customers today are looking for standardization. Without it you get security vulnerabilities.”

Pure Storage Tuesday also added new capabilities to its Pure1 Meta A.I.-driven IT operations platform. These include the ability to see real-time data service level agreements across their cloud, monitor application in SafeMode against ransomware attacks, and gain end-to-end visibility into their Portworx container infrastructure.

Pure1 was built from the ground up to work in the cloud and offers analytics for on-premises, virtual arrays and cloud arrays, Meyerowitz said.

Customers don’t care where their storage arrays are, he said. “Pure1 gives Pure Storage the ability to rapidly provision storage in a way that the DevOps people don’t need to care about what array the data goes on,” he said.