It's time for another edition of Unplugged with Andrew Miller and JD Wallace bringing you the 15 Pure Architectural decisions and more.  We start out with a quick recap of Pure's recent Accelerate industry event and some of the key highlights and takeaways.  Then hear about how Pure addresses security and encryption via the Purity operation environment.  We finish with a quick lookback at the significance of Pure's unified block and file announcement for FlashArray and plug a few upcoming fun webinars around disk replacement.  To send feedback on Unplugged and the Pure Report, email: purereport@purestorage.com.

Unplugged Vol 13 - Security/Encryption, Unified Block & File, Accelerate Recap

What happens when a long-time admirer of Pure culture and products joins the company?  Find out with this latest episode featuring Pure System Engineer Scott Nawalaniec, a former customer who joined Pure around a year ago. Hear about Scott's career journey including how he came to consider Pure and the technical and business reasons that led to his now 8 year relationship with the company.  Scott provides deep insight into the evaluations he made at his prior company between the incumbent storage compared to Pure and the notion that every competitive storage model required him to put on a different "spacesuit" to manage and tune the product.  In contrast, Pure provided him a simple and performant solution for database and virtualization operations that grew to over 10-15 arrays over time and improved company operations.  For more on how Pure Storage can help your business move forward successfully, check out: https://www.purestorage.com/

Put Away Your Spacesuit: Insights from a Customer Who Became a Puritan

There's plenty of buzz in the market around Storage as a Service (STaaS) and subscription-based solutions to meeting growing demands around managing escalating quantities of data.  But what's the reality in offerings that really deliver enterprise value vs. those that are more of a smokescreen for fancy financing models?  Hear from Stan Yanitskiy, Digital Experience Solution Architect, in the first of a multi-part series of STaaS episodes designed to help you understand the facts and details around Pure's Evergreen//One subscription offering.  Learn about business drivers compelling enterprises to consider this model, misconceptions behind CAPEX and OPEX, the true meaning behind Pure's guaranteed SLAs matched to business objectives, and the white glove support we provide Evergreen//One customers. Stan will be returning to the Pure Report on regular cadence over the next few months so be on the lookout for new episodes coming soon that dive deeper into SLAs and how a typical customer engagement evolves around subscription-based storage solutions that are flexible and non-disruptive.  For more info on Evergreen//One, go to: https://www.purestorage.com/products/staas/evergreen/one.html

Reality Check On Storage as a Service and Evergreen//One

It's a first for the podcast as we bring the Pure Report Unplugged to the Las Vegas Strip and record live on location in front of an audience at Pure Accelerate 2024.  New locale, same format and co-hosts JD Wallace and Andrew Miller as we navigate thru the highlights of the week at Pure's customer and partner event.  Up top, we hit on our favorite moments of Accelerate - behind the scenes of the Coz demo showcase, JD running FlashDrive demo labs, and Andrew hitting on 150 TB DFMs and Pure Fusion.  Plus much more around the exciting new announcements across fleet management, digital experience (DX). For more information on what went down at Pure Accelerate and to find an upcoming event near you: https://www.purestorage.com/accelerate.html

Unplugged: Live at Accelerate 2024

Join Matt Bradford and Don Poorman as they help me unpack an incredible year of technological advancement at Pure Storage, taking listeners on a thorough journey through our most groundbreaking announcements and product developments. From hardware innovations like the FlashArray//C20 to cutting-edge cloud solutions and AI reference architectures, this episode offers an insider's perspective on how Pure continues to push the boundaries of data storage and management.
Traveling through key solution areas including hardware, cloud, cybersecurity, AI, and digital experience, Matt and Don provide expert commentary on game-changing developments. Highlights include the expansion of Pure Storage Cloud for AVS, exciting enhancements to DRaaS, the transformative OVX reference architecture for AI initiatives, and the introduction of Pure1 assessments that are reshaping how enterprises approach technology evaluation and implementation.
Beyond the technical details, this episode celebrates Pure Storage's commitment to customer-driven innovation and continuous improvement. From the launch of Pure Skill's new subscription-based learning platform to the expansion of Evergreen subscriptions and the intriguing glimpse of an AI Copilot, Matt and Don paint a vivid picture of a technology company relentlessly focused on solving real-world challenges and empowering digital transformation. Whether you're a Pure Storage enthusiast, a technology professional, or simply curious about the latest in data infrastructure, this year-in-review episode is a must-listen.

ICYMI: A Year in Review of Pure Always-On Innovation

We finally chased down the smart and savvy Rob Quast, Principal Technologist at Pure, to discuss the latest trends in the tech world around AI, Networking and Cloud storage. Our conversation kicks off with Rob's journey, from his time at ePlus and working in sys admin roles, to a memorable experience at Pure's NYC Accelerate event where he saw the stock exchange firsthand. We touch on the various aspects of a PT's role, including Rob’s experience showing demos and helping customers understand complex solutions. 

Our conversation shifts to some of Rob's most passionate work, including involvement in a large AI solution for Coreweave. He walks through the intricacies of a massive deal and how it required close collaboration with the product management team, post-validation work, and strategic networking. Rob also shares insights from a hyperscaler win for Pure Storage, explaining what "hyperscaler" means and how they’re used in the industry. We dive into the technical details of large AI deals, such as GPUDirect, and discuss how Pure can better connect with networking professionals. A key theme here is the intersection of data storage and networking, with Rob revealing why NVMe TCP is a game-changer for the future of cloud infrastructure, particularly when compared to technologies like Infiniband.

We close with conversation looking toward the future, exploring the realities of cloud storage and hybrid cloud solutions, and what customers are trying to achieve and the challenges they face. The episode wraps up with a focus on object storage, where Rob discusses how Pure Storage's Fusion platform helps manage global namespaces and facilitates multi-tenant cloud environments.

Inside the World of Large-Scale AI Solutions, Networking, and Cloud Innovation with Rob Quast

Episode 4 of our series around Pure's fundamental design principles dives into aspects of Pure's technology that drive realistic efficiency for users. This episode tackles capabilities most Storage professionals are familiar with - snapshots, efficiency metrics and adaptive flexible RAID.

Pure learned from the challenges created by legacy architectures to build better versions of these features into our all-flash array portfolio. Hear about how Pure Storage’s snapshot architecture focuses on instant, efficient, and immutable copies that serve both operational and security needs. Snapshots can be created instantly with no performance overhead and used for rapid recovery, cloning, or replication—each one functions as a “gold copy version” and maintains group consistency, enabling rollbacks to any point in time without dependencies or data duplication. Their design is tightly integrated with metadata, enabling efficient thin provisioning and consistent protection, while SafeMode extends these benefits by enforcing privileged access and retention policies for ransomware resilience. Around realistic efficiency metrics - we deliver transparent and realistic efficiency metrics by directly reporting space consumption trends and physical storage utilization, rather than relying solely on claims about thin provisioning or data reduction. Our user interface distinguishes between budgeted capacity, usable capacity, and used space, with a focus on showing only live user data (volumes and snapshots), and hiding internal system overhead, RAID overhead, and reclaimable space until critical thresholds are reached. Finally, we tackle RAID - Pure’s RAID architecture is built for flash, utilizing a flexible, adaptive structure that never requires manual configuration while continuously ensuring optimal data protection and performance.

Series Overview: Pure Storage’s foundational approach to product engineering is guided by 15 architectural decisions that were established at the company’s inception and have shaped both the technical and user experience across its product lines. These architectural choices were not made arbitrarily—they stem from a deliberate focus on simplicity, efficiency, and scalability, ensuring Pure could deliver storage solutions that break away from legacy complexity and enable continuous innovation without compromise.  This series will guide viewers through all of the 15 principles, helping you understand why certain choices were made, how they impact your operations, and how they compare to other industry features and products. Join Pure Report podcast hosts Rob Ludeman, Andrew Miller, and J.D Wallace for this fun technical retrospective on Pure Storage.

15 Architectural Decisions Series: Snapshots, Realistic Efficiency Metrics, and Adaptive RAID

Data management in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI environments presents unique challenges, especially with heavy file usage and evolving data lifecycles. This edition of the Pure Report podcast delves into these complexities, exploring how data transitions through development, simulation/training, inference/optimization, and long-term retention phases. Together with Pure technologists Bikash Choudhury and Don Poorman, we’ll tackle the critical problem statement: reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) by automatically moving inactive data to different tiers without sacrificing accessibility or performance during crucial operational stages.

Join us as we introduce Pure Storage's innovative Zero Move Tiering (ZMT) solution. Discover how ZMT delivers dynamic Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across performance and capacity tiers without data movement, leading to lower TCO and zero operational overhead. We'll also examine how ZMT fits into various data lifecycle stages, from development build workloads to AI-augmented modeling and simulation, and compare Pure's approach to the common deficiencies seen in other vendor solutions.

Taming the Beast: Managing HPC & AI Data at Scale with Zero Move Tiering on FlashBlade

Welcome to episode 2 of our special launch series of the Pure Report podcast!  In this episode, Chadd Kenney joins again to help us dive into the critical foundation of the Enterprise Data Cloud: the Unified Data Plane. We start with a discussion on why a truly unified data plane is essential for organizations today, managing everything from archive to AI workloads.

Chadd shares insights into the latest innovations across the FlashArray family, including the new FlashArray/XL 190 and FlashArray//ST, enhancements to FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C, and how Pure's platform supports diverse virtualization landscapes and continuing data growth driven by core databases and business workloads.

We then talk about how the virtualization landscape is still in flux, and many customers are evaluating their options. The good news is that Pure's platform is designed to support them, whether they choose to continue with VMware, transition to a new hypervisor like Nutanix, or modernize with containers. Additionally, we delve into new innovations within Pure Storage Cloud, including the Azure Native integration, which rounds out the portfolio and provides comprehensive support across the board.

We also touch on the new Pure KVA integration with NVIDIA Dynamo, Purity Deep Reduce, and how Pure's Evergreen architecture ensures customers can leverage all our Unified Data Plane announcements  without disruption. Don't miss Chadd's "Hot Takes" on future data drivers and common data infrastructure mistakes.

H2 Launch Series: One Platform, All Workloads - The Power of Pure's Unified Data Plane

In our latest episode, we sit down with Ken Hui, Field Solutions Architect, to discuss his journey at Pure Storage and the evolving landscape of data management. Ken shares his unique perspective on Pure Storage's culture, highlighting the emphasis on collaboration and innovation. The conversation delves into the critical role of unstructured data in today's AI-driven world, exploring how enterprises can strategically manage and protect their ever-growing data assets without falling prey to common pitfalls.

Ken, a seasoned veteran in the storage and cloud space, offers valuable advice on approaching new technologies, stressing the importance of starting with the desired end-state and aligning technology with people and processes. He also revisits his early career frustrations with file storage, explaining how Pure Storage's advancements, particularly with FlashBlade and FlashArray, have transformed the experience, making data management simpler and more efficient. The discussion touches on the power of continuous innovation, self-service upgrades, and the multi-tenancy capabilities that empower customers.

Our episode concludes with Ken's "hot take" on industry trends, where he champions object storage as a scalable solution for large-scale data workloads, especially in the AI and analytics space. He also shares a memorable "oops" moment from his career and offers crucial advice for IT professionals: learn programming to effectively leverage automation and APIs in the future of data management. 

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:
https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/


From File Frustration to Flash Freedom: How a Technologist Learned to Love File at Pure Storage

Bringing you direct access to Pure Storage thought leaders, technology experts, alliance partners, customer insights, and our latest product news.

New tracks tagged #flashblade