Pure Storage inches toward a cloud business model

Pure Storage is upgrading to its Portworx Enterprise software that improves the scale of Kubernetes while simplifying the process of supporting multiple platforms.

Portworx Enterprise 2.8 features new integrations across Pure’s line of products and services and with VMware Tanzu, VMware’s container-orchestration software. It comes with dynamic storage provisioning on Pure’s FlashArray and FlashBlade hardware and offers unified visibility and support via Pure1, Pure’s AI-drive operations software.

This allows volumes and file systems to be provisioned using Kubernetes without the need to directly interface with the backing storage arrays. That means containerized workloads can run seamlessly across the cloud, bare metal infrastructure, Pure Storage arrays, and even storage solutions from other vendors.

Container-native volumes receive the full suite of Portworx container-storage management features, including backup, disaster recovery, security, auto-scaling, and migration. These features aren’t tied to hardware and travel with the containerized application as it moves between on-prem and cloud deployments.

Portworx also extends support for VMware’s Tanzu (TKG) by supporting the native Tanzu container-storage interface (CSI) driver. This means that customers can benefit from container-granular data management such as backup and recovery, encryption, and migration regardless of the storage backing their VMware environment.

More cloud-like services

For some time, Pure has offered Pure-as-a-Service, a cloud-like storage service meant to span both on-prem and public cloud services with a single subscription. The updated Pure1 Digital Experience builds on that by adding self-service management and online procurement to its catalogue. Customers can buy new systems and services from Pure or expand their as-a-service footprint on demand.

They can be alerted to needing more storage through Pure1’s AI-engine Meta, which delivers predictive service management that proactively identifies issues and prescribes resolutions so that issues are resolved before they become outages. In other words, it knows when to make a sales pitch.

By monitoring all data-service platforms, customers can be alerted to potential failure through predictive fault analysis and resolution as well as real-time troubleshooting across storage and VMs. The new Pure1 Digital Experience not only tracks how resources are being used, but forecasts what will happen if you add or move workloads.

Pure’s first-generation Kubernetes offering, Pure Service Orchestrator (PSO), will become a part of Portworx Essentials, the Portworx freemium offering, to provide unified storage orchestration for Kubernetes. Portworx Essentials is included and fully supported in a customer’s Evergreen or Pure-as-a-Service subscriptions with more functionality than the current PSO.

Portworx Enterprise 2.8 will be available in June.