The News: Pure Storage has released several significant announcements at //Accelerate 24. Among notable announcements are new management capabilities, a new AI Storage-as-a-Service offering, enhanced cyber resiliency services, and new SLAs for Evergreen//One. Read more here.
Pure Storage//Accelerate 24 Announcements
Analyst Take: Pure Storage made several significant announcements at its //Accelerate 24 event. Pure’s latest announcements cover a range of topics, including manageability, AI, cyber resiliency, and bolstering its Evergreen//One service offerings. A high-level overview of Pure’s announcements include the following:
- Updates to Pure Fusion for enhanced fleet management and automation
- A new storage-focused AI Copilot
- A new AI Storage-as-a-Service Evergreen//One offering
- Enhanced cyber resiliency including SLAs for cyber resiliency and recovery, security assessment capabilities, and AI-powered anomaly detection
- New Evergreen//One capabilities including AI-powered expansion recommendations and new SLAs for site rebalancing, optimization, and increased performance
Notably, these announcements are not product-centric. Instead, they are outcome-focused, with emphasis on simplicity, manageability, and enhancing Pure’s service offerings. While the announcements span a wide range of capabilities, the general theme is consistent – they focus on reducing friction for some of today’s most common data infrastructure challenges. Updates to Pure Fusion address complexity of provisioning and managing an ever-expanding fleet of arrays. The new security assessment and cyber resiliency SLAs provide confidence to organizations that their data is safe and protected. Additionally, organizations leveraging Evergreen//One can utilize new SLAs that provide greater flexibility and optimization, while Evergreen//One UBF Ultra and Premium customers will additionally receive enhanced performance SLAs.
Most timely, however, is the significant presence of AI within the announcement. While an AI focus is not entirely unexpected, the announcement shows that Pure has addressed AI in thoughtful ways, both in how it can support its customers’ AI journey and how it can best leverage AI within its own portfolio. Regarding the latter, Pure has introduced AI in three places, all of which will help make its storage offerings more intelligent. First, it is introducing an AI copilot that can leverage data insights from Pure systems to resolve issues, optimize workflows, and reduce management complexity. The AI copilot can additionally be used by CISO’s to gain security benchmarking comparison against peers. Cyber security has additionally been enhanced by AI in Pure’s anomaly detection, which has also been updated to detect anomalous performance data, protecting against attacks such as denial of service. The third application of AI in these announcements is a new capability for reserve expansion in Evergreen//One that provides AI-powered expansion recommendations.
Perhaps the most interesting component of Pure’s announcements, however, involves how they are helping organizations meet their own AI goals. Pure announced a new Evergreen//One offering specifically targeted at AI. The new offering is focused on simplifying storage challenges for new AI deployments by tailoring the service around the bandwidth requirements of GPUs. The new Evergreen//One for AI offering is a smart move from Pure. While the offering itself isn’t radically different from other Evergreen//One offerings – it is still ultimately a storage as a service offering consisting of some combination of FlashArray or FlashBlade hardware – it helps organizations address one of their most pressing needs, meeting the bandwidth requirements of GPUs for new AI workloads. For many organizations, the requirements of AI are new and present many challenges, both regarding infrastructure demands and the general complexities of a new and rapidly evolving technology. With this announcement, Pure is simplifying the data infrastructure requirements and allowing organizations to focus their effort on the other complexities of AI.
Overall, the announcements from Accelerate//24 provide positive momentum for Pure, especially regarding its Evergreen//One service offerings. The new enhancements offer greater operational simplicity and provide new guarantees for Evergreen//One customers. They also address key topics, such as cyber security and AI, in smart ways that can be leveraged by Pure customers to address many of today’s biggest data infrastructure challenges.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Mitch comes to The Futurum Group through the acquisition of the Evaluator Group and is focused on the fast-paced and rapidly evolving areas of cloud computing and data storage. Mitch joined Evaluator Group in 2019 as a Research Associate covering numerous storage technologies and emerging IT trends.
With a passion for all things tech, Mitch brings deep technical knowledge and insight to The Futurum Group’s research by highlighting the latest in data center and information management solutions. Mitch’s coverage has spanned topics including primary and secondary storage, private and public clouds, networking fabrics, and more. With ever changing data technologies and rapidly emerging trends in today’s digital world, Mitch provides valuable insights into the IT landscape for enterprises, IT professionals, and technology enthusiasts alike.
