Pure Storage moves upstack with new storage management and data service tools
Pure Storage on Tuesday is rolling out a set of new services that expand its as-a-service offerings. Pure Fusion is a self-service, autonomous storage environment that leverages a cloud operating model. Portworx Data Services, meanwhile, is the industry's first Database-as-a-Service platform for Kubernetes.
Both products expand Pure Storage's vision that "modern data, storage and management should be, at the end of the day, services delivered as code," Ajay Singh, Pure Storage's chief product officer, said to ZDNet.
With its new services, Pure Storage is advancing its vision by moving its portfolio upstack.
"We think of our portfolio in the context of the customer's journey to a modern data experience," Singh explained.
There are three aspects of that journey: modernizing infrastructure, modernizing operations and modernizing applications. Pure already inhabits the bottom of the stack, with all-flash data center products designed for modern infrastructure.
The new Pure Fusion builds out its middle layer of products related to modernizing operations. It offers a SaaS management plane that pools storage arrays into a cloud operating model -- meaning availability zones -- and automates previously complex tasks like workload placement, mobility and fleet rebalancing. It also includes an API framework that enables admins to provision using APIs programmatically while allowing consumers to consume on-demand with storage as code.
"So essentially, let's make the Pure infrastructure invisible and make it appear like a line of code," Singh explained.
It's focused on Pure assets like FlashArray, FlashBlade, Cloud Block Store and Portworx -- it's not designed to overlay on top of assets from competitors like Dell.
To use Pure Fusion, an admin simply defines a storage class, and Pure Fusion automatically optimizes placement, adjusts storage classes and utilizes new resources, and it optimizes an entire fleet.
While Pure Fusion is about modernizing operations, the new Portworx offering brings Pure Storage into the top layer of the stack -- modernizing applications.
Pure acquired Portworx last year as part of its push into multi-cloud data services. It allows customers to operate and scale enterprise apps across any cloud or data center.
The new Portworx Data Services offers one-click deployment of production-grade managed data services on Kubernetes. Users can choose from a broad catalog of SQL, NoSQL, search, streaming, and more options. It's essentially a platform that gives you one common means of running data services. It offers curated templates for database sizing, scheduled backup policies, application-aware backup and restore, as well as other features.
Pure Storage on Tuesday also announced enhancements in the Pure1 Management Portal. Users can now see in real-time data Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across their cloud, monitor applications that are being protected by SafeMode snapshots against ransomware attacks, and visualize their Portworx container infrastructure from end to end.