Pure Storage brings storage-as-a-service to files

Zero-move tiering

 Real-time Enterprise File also offers zero-move tiering, so admins can adjust performance without having to physically shuffle data between tiers. “There’s no more need for additional network resources or specialized switching,” Hansen noted. “We handle the performance needs of both hot and cold data without that management overhead.”

Matt Kimball, vice president and principal analyst, datacenter compute and storage at Moor Insights & Strategy, is impressed with the new offering. “The real-time file services element addresses a lot of the technical and operational challenges that many legacy storage environments face, with pre-planning and the siloed, manual approach to expanding environments to support new workloads, applications and other storage-intensive needs,” he said. “IT organizations don’t have the luxury of telling an embedded team in a business unit to wait for weeks, or even months, to build and deploy business critical applications so they can support them from a storage perspective. That embedded team will just take its needs to the cloud. So, the IT organization has to perform like the cloud — and storage is such a critical part of the cloud operating model. This is what allows IT organizations to ‘be the cloud’, if you will, to those internal customers.”

AI Copilot for File, an expansion of the Copilot Pure announced earlier this year, lets admins use natural language services to manage their files and get a quick, comprehensive view of their services. It also allows them to query the platform about issues such as performance or latency and ask for root causes, or even discover which data across the fleet hasn’t been accessed for a certain period.

Entry-level blade

In addition, to assist companies in need of a product to deal with entry-level use cases such as AI, compliance, content sharing, image repositories, IoT, and edge applications, Pure has introduced the FlashBlade//S100, an AI-ready platform with GPUDirect support which brings what it describes as “progressive pricing across all price points and markets.”

The new entry level system gives customers a lower cost offering which is more appropriate for edge and remote environments, where the existing systems may be too expensive or too large to deploy. 

“I do not view this as AI exclusive platform, though the GPU-Direct Storage on NFS feature is designed for AI,” said Henry Baltazar, research director at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The new entry level system can handle mainstream file sharing and application workloads, and has data protection services such as snapshots, WORM immutability, and replication, which are required for enterprise and midrange storage systems.”