Pure Storage Empowers Developers, Engineers, and Architects With AI-Driven Storage Innovation

Pure Storage Accelerate 2024 showcased groundbreaking innovations in enterprise storage technology, with a focus on AI integration, enhanced cyber resilience, and seamless cloud connectivity. The announcements and insights shared at the conference offer significant benefits for developers, engineers, and architects looking to optimize their data infrastructure for modern workloads. Let's dive into the key takeaways and how they can impact your work.

AI-Powered Storage: Revolutionizing Data Management

One of the most exciting announcements at Accelerate 2024 was the introduction of AI-powered storage solutions, designed to simplify management and boost performance for AI workloads. These innovations address the growing challenges organizations face in managing and optimizing storage for increasingly data-intensive AI and machine learning applications.

Evergreen//One for AI: Purpose-Built AI Storage As-A-Service

The cornerstone of Pure Storage's AI offerings is Evergreen//One for AI, a purpose-built Storage-as-a-Service solution tailored for AI workloads. Andrew Miller, Senior Principal Technologist at Pure Storage, explained the rationale behind this new offering:

"We were looking fundamentally at what people are trying to do. From an AI standpoint, it's about keeping GPUs busy. Because those are the most expensive things. And then secondarily, if you're keeping GPUs busy, it's almost as much about keeping data scientists busy."

Key features of Evergreen//One for AI include:

1. Guaranteed performance: The service provides SLA-guaranteed storage performance specifically designed to keep GPUs fully utilized, ensuring optimal efficiency for AI training and inference workloads.
2.  Dynamic scaling: Users can scale capacity and performance independently and instantly, without disruption. This flexibility allows organizations to adapt quickly to changing AI workload demands.
3. Throughput-based pricing: Instead of traditional capacity-based models, Evergreen//One for AI introduces pricing based on throughput performance. This aligns costs more closely with the actual value delivered to AI workflows.
4. Simplified management: The service eliminates the need for complex capacity planning and overprovisioning, allowing data science teams to focus on model development rather than infrastructure concerns.

Miller highlighted the engineering innovations behind this offering: "It's actually built on engineering innovation we've done over the last six or 12 to 18 months, which is why we believe it's going to be hard for everyone else to match, especially candidly, at the cost levels we'll be able to do so."

AI-Powered Storage Copilot: Intelligent Management Assistant

Complementing the Evergreen//One for AI service, Pure Storage unveiled an industry-first Generative AI Copilot for storage management. This AI-powered assistant aims to revolutionize how storage administrators interact with and manage their infrastructure.

Key capabilities of the AI Copilot include:

1. Natural language interaction: Storage teams can use conversational language to investigate complex performance issues, manage configurations, and stay ahead of potential security incidents.
2. Proactive problem solving: The Copilot leverages data insights from tens of thousands of Pure Storage customers to guide users through troubleshooting and optimization tasks.
3. Continuous learning: As Miller noted, "We're even several months in already finding that we're starting to throw out code and redevelop on top because of the pace of growth of the underlying [AI] components." This indicates Pure Storage's commitment to keeping the Copilot at the cutting edge of AI capabilities.
4. Hallucination mitigation: Addressing a common concern with generative AI, Miller emphasized their focus on accuracy: "We want to make sure that we solve this hallucination problem. Well, the scenarios of questions that I mentioned, getting around performance, around security levels, around patches like we need this not to be confidently wrong."

AI-Powered Anomaly Detection

Pure Storage also introduced enhanced AI-powered anomaly detection capabilities:

1. Broader threat detection: The system can now identify a wider range of threats, including ransomware attacks, unusual activity, malicious behavior, and Denial of Service attacks.
2. Performance-based analysis: In addition to existing data reduction anomaly detection, the new system analyzes performance metrics to identify potential security issues.
3. Machine learning models: Multiple ML models run concurrently to identify unusual patterns based on both performance heuristics and user context on how storage is used.
4. Rapid recovery support: By identifying the last known good snapshot, this feature helps organizations quickly pinpoint optimal recovery points in the event of an incident.

These AI-powered storage innovations represent a significant leap forward in storage management and optimization for AI workloads. By leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance both the storage infrastructure itself and the tools used to manage it, Pure Storage is positioning itself at the forefront of the AI-driven enterprise transformation.

As Miller summarized, "If we can facilitate the troubleshooting scenarios and not be as directly either following support or digging in, but give you an easier path to correlate it, that to me is a really legitimate use of Gen AI."

Larry Touchette, Director of Product Management for Core Platform elaborated: "We had some ML models watching the historical dedupe rate. Now it's based on write rates, anomalous changes in writing, and historical performance." This feature helps organizations stay ahead of potential security incidents by leveraging machine learning to detect unusual patterns in data access and usage.

For developers, engineers, and architects, these AI-powered storage solutions offer the promise of more efficient, responsive, and intelligent data infrastructure to support increasingly complex and data-intensive applications.

Enhancing Cyber Resilience: Protecting Your Data Assets

In an era of increasing cyber threats, Pure Storage has doubled down on its commitment to data protection and rapid recovery.

Cyber Recovery and Resilience SLA

Touchette explained the expanded offering: "The big thing with our cyber resilience SLA is we provide a time window when able to recover and equipment to recover. You will have a place to write and recover the data and the service to get the good data off the array and onto the new system."

This enhanced SLA now covers disaster recovery scenarios in addition to ransomware recovery, providing organizations with a comprehensive safety net for their critical data.

Streamlining Cloud Integration: Bridging On-Premises and Cloud Environments

Pure Storage continues to enhance its cloud offerings, providing seamless integration between on-premises and cloud storage environments.

Cloud Block Store and Portworx Enhancements

Cody Hosterman, Sr. Director of Product Management for Cloud, outlined Pure's cloud strategy: "We build a platform to make the cloud more efficient. Our Cloud Block Store product takes that technology and brings it to solutions like Azure VMware Solution, providing cost protection over half a decade."

The expanded cloud offerings aim to provide consistent performance, management, and data services across on-premises and cloud environments, enabling true hybrid cloud architectures.

Unified Storage Management With Pure Fusion

Pure Storage announced the next generation of Pure Fusion, now embedded directly into the Purity operating system. Touchette explained: "We took the brains of the automation platform and put it on-prem, directly integrated into the Purity OS on the array. It's a self-automating engine now delivered as part of Purity."

This enhancement allows developers to automate storage workflows using declarative commands, simplifying the provisioning and management of storage resources across hybrid environments.

Empowering Developers: Key Benefits and Considerations

As developers, engineers, and architects evaluate these new offerings, several key benefits and considerations emerge:

1. Simplified AI Infrastructure

The new Evergreen//One for AI service allows teams to focus on building and training models without worrying about storage performance or capacity planning. Miller noted: "It'll be about saying that when you're successful with what you're trying to do, that you won't lose velocity in the market."

2. Enhanced Developer Productivity

The AI-powered Storage Copilot can significantly reduce the time spent on storage management tasks, allowing developers to focus on higher-value activities. As Miller put it: "If we can facilitate the troubleshooting scenarios and not be as directly either following support or digging in, but give you an easier path to correlate it, that to me is a really legitimate use of Gen AI."

3. Improved Data Protection

With enhanced cyber resilience features, developers can build applications with greater confidence in data integrity and availability. Touchette emphasized: "Safe mode on Pure Storage is a marketing name for automatically enabled snapshots. Any system new out of the box has ratcheted snapshot retention."

4. Seamless Hybrid Cloud Development

The enhanced cloud integrations and Pure Fusion updates enable developers to build and deploy applications across hybrid environments more easily. Hosterman noted: "Having our CBS product and FlashArray on-premises, and the two are directly interoperable, same software replication consistent features, gives the customers looking for a hybrid strategy, consistent view across the board."

5. Future-Proofing Storage Infrastructure

Pure Storage's commitment to continuous innovation and non-disruptive upgrades means developers can build on a platform that evolves with their needs. As Touchette explained: "We designed Fusion this way to ensure that it remains backward compatible with the existing Pure Storage arrays. Fusion just lands on the array with the next Purity upgrade — simple, non-disruptive upgrade, turn on and start using, nothing breaks."

Looking Ahead: The Future of Enterprise Storage

As enterprise storage continues to evolve, Pure Storage is positioning itself at the forefront of key trends:

1. AI-driven operations: Expect to see more AI integration in storage management, predictive maintenance, and performance optimization.
2. Hybrid cloud flexibility: The lines between on-premises and cloud storage will continue to blur, with unified management planes spanning both environments.
3. Enhanced security: As cyber threats evolve, storage platforms will play an increasingly critical role in data protection and rapid recovery strategies.
4. Containerized workloads: Support for technologies like Kubernetes will become even more critical as organizations adopt cloud-native architectures.
5. Edge computing: Storage solutions will need to adapt to support distributed computing models and edge workloads.

Getting Started With Pure Storage's New Offerings

For developers, engineers, and architects interested in exploring Pure Storage's latest innovations, here are some recommended next steps:

1. Attend the post-launch webinar for deep dives into the new features and capabilities.
2. Explore the reference architectures and design documents, particularly those related to AI and ML workloads.
3. Participate in Portworx-hosted labs to get hands-on experience with containerized storage solutions.
4. Keep an eye on the Pure Storage website for updates on early access programs and new tutorials.
5. Engage with the Pure Storage community to share experiences and best practices with peers.

Conclusion

Pure Storage Accelerate 2024 demonstrated the company's commitment to innovation in enterprise storage, with a strong focus on AI integration, cyber resilience, and seamless cloud connectivity. By leveraging these new technologies and approaches, developers, engineers, and architects can build more scalable, secure, and efficient data infrastructures to support the next generation of enterprise applications.