With a nod to the late 1980's Scorpions song, let's dive into the prevailing forces that are causing organizations to reevaluate their strategies with relational databases.  To do that effectively, we welcome back to the program Ryan Arsenault, Principal Field Solution Architect (and heavily accented Bostonian), who has broad experience previously running SAP and Database operations at a large competitor.  Ryan and I navigate through the landscape of trends that are requiring DBAs and IT leaders to change their approach to the software that manages their most important assets - the database. We touch on the impact of Cloud, Automation, AI and AI operations, Security, and the recent changes with VMware - plus how all-Flash changed the game for tier 1 database storage management. Always a fun conversation when Ryan stops by.  For more information on Pure Storage solutions for Databases, check out: https://www.purestorage.com/solutions/applications.html

The Winds of Change Altering Relational Database Strategy and DBA Operations

Welcome to episode 3 of our special launch series of the Pure Report podcast.  In this episode, we dive deep into the critical topic of cyber resilience with Scott Taylor, Director of the Cyber Resilience Field Solutions Architects Team at Pure Storage.  We discuss why traditional, siloed security approaches are failing in the face of escalating cyber threats. From there, we explore the real-world impact of cyberattacks, from significant financial costs and reputational damage to the often-overlooked human toll on IT and security teams.

Watch and listen as Scott unpacks Pure Storage's innovative approach to cyber resilience, built on principles of Built-in Security, Connected Threat Detection, and Dynamic Response and Recovery. Discover how Pure's "as-a-service" offerings are changing the game, providing optionality and flexibility to react to rapidly changing environments. We delve into our recent launch announcements, including deep integrations with CrowdStrike and Superna, transforming storage from a passive target into an active defender. Plus, get insights into Pure's new Real-Time Malware Scanning directly at the storage layer and the expanded Veeam partnership for simplified backup and recovery delivered as service.

This episode is a must-listen for IT and security professionals looking to move from a reactive to a proactive security posture. Scott shares his "hot takes" on overlooked aspects of cyber recovery, essential cultural shifts for IT organizations, and how AI is influencing the ongoing battle between attackers and defenders. Learn how to secure your data, minimize downtime, and build a truly cyber resilient enterprise in the era of the Enterprise Data Cloud.

H2 Launch Series: Cyber Resilience Innovations

The Pure Report welcomes Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D, Customer Engineering at Pure Storage, to explore the critical topic of workflow optimization in today's IT landscape. Shawn shares his unique perspective on how the industry is moving beyond a product-centric view to embrace a platform mindset, emphasizing the profound impact this shift has on people and processes. Drawing on decades of experience, he highlights how true value is derived when technology actively evolves the way companies operate, making life better for IT professionals and streamlining essential business functions.

Our conversation dives deep into the "death by a thousand cuts" phenomenon, where seemingly minor inefficiencies in IT workflows accumulate into major productivity drains and significant risks. Shawn breaks down key areas such as provisioning and resource allocation, performance management and monitoring, and refresh cycles, illustrating how traditional approaches often lead to wasted time, increased costs, and security vulnerabilities. He uses compelling analogies, from ride-hailing apps to airplane checklists, to underscore the need for automated, consistent, and intelligent solutions that simplify complex tasks and minimize human error.

We ultimately arrive at a discussion around an autonomous operating environment, where human ingenuity is augmented by machine intelligence to proactively identify and resolve issues, reduce risk, and accelerate time to market. Thought the episode we link to how Pure’s platform approach, including innovations like Pure 1 and Evergreen//One, is transforming the way customers manage their data estate, enabling centralized policy controls, self-service upgrades, and seamless cloud integration. 

The Platform Mindset: Driving Workflow Efficiency in the Data Center

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

Join Pure Storage Technical Evangelists Don Poorman and Mike Nelson as we dive into Pure Fusion and how Pure Storage is enabling users to focus less on managing storage and more on managing their data.  We start by examining the complexities of managing storage and application workloads in today's rapidly evolving IT landscape. We expose the challenges posed by legacy vendor "portfolios" which often consist of disparate products lacking unified GUIs and APIs. Learn why a fundamental shift is necessary to eliminate silos in enterprise storage, moving beyond mere federation to true integration – a unified management plane with common APIs that seamlessly operate across the entire storage ecosystem. Poorman and Nelson underscore how this integration and automation are not just valuable for traditional workloads but will be absolutely critical for the future of AI implementation, especially for inference.

Our discussion pivots to Pure Storage's groundbreaking solution: Fusion. Learn what Fusion is – a powerful capability included in the latest versions of the Purity operating environment that provides an intelligent control plane for a centralized, unified management experience across an entire fleet of arrays. Our experts explain how Fusion inherently adopts Pure's API-First strategy, offering robust automation capabilities through PowerShell SDK, Ansible, and Python. They highlight how Fusion drives management, compliance, and workload configuration consistency from a single pane of glass, and how it's a vital foundation of Pure's Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) vision.

Listeners and viewers will gain invaluable insights into the tangible benefits of Fusion, including the ability to provision storage on any array from any array within the same UI, search and manage storage resources globally, and reconfigure resources without needing to access a specific array. Poorman and Nelson also explore how Fusion simplifies and standardizes workload deployments with pre-configured definitions, enabling end-to-end workload orchestration. They touch upon future enhancements like seamless interoperability across file, object, and block storage in on-site, hybrid, and cloud environments, and the exciting prospect of workload mobility.  
Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:  https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/


Pure Fusion: Unified and Automated Data Management enabling the Enterprise Data Cloud

In an era where enterprises are undergoing a significant re-evaluation of virtualization strategies, our episode dives into the new strategic partnership between Pure Storage and Nutanix. Join industry experts Don Poorman and Erin Stevens as we unpack the latest trends in virtualization strategies and why the timing is perfect for a new approach, and how Nutanix, with its AHV hypervisor, is well positioned with Pure to deliver a solution designed from the ground up for high-performance and enterprise scale.

This episode explores the "what" and "how" of the jointly engineered Pure and Nutanix solution, detailing how Nutanix AHV hosts can leverage Pure FlashArray for shared storage, offering an apples-to-apples replacement for traditional setups. We'll cover the details around joint integrations, including the NVMe/TCP connection between Nutanix and Pure FlashArray, and how VMs are managed through Nutanix Prism for a granular vVols-like experience. Learn about the specific workloads and use cases this solution targets, particularly environments needing a balance of computing and networking, and those with high transactional database demands.

Gain insights into the current state of the project, including its early access phase with customer feedback, and what to expect regarding general availability coming soon. Finally, get their "Hot Takes" on industry trends, memorable customer screw-ups, and their predictions for the future of data management.

For more information, visit: https://www.purestorage.com/partners/alliances/nutanix.html

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

00:00 Intro and Welcome
04:49 Stat of the Episode
09:53 Current Virtualization Landscape
14:46 Primer on Pure Nutanix Relationship
23:28 Target Use Cases and Workloads
28:12 Details on Integrations and APIs
36:15 Early Feedback on Early Access
40:20 Hot Takes

Redefining Virtualization: The Pure Storage and Nutanix Full-Stack Modern Solution

This episode of the Pure Report features a conversation with Eugene McGrath, a nine-year veteran of Pure Storage and a Field Solution Architect. Our discussion delves into Gene’s diverse background, starting from his early days in IT racking and stacking servers at companies like Microsoft and Pixar, and how that hands-on experience shaped his career. We compare the evolution of his role and the industry, emphasizing the importance of a versatile skill set in the ever-changing tech landscape, particularly with his focus now on converged infrastructure solutions like FlashStack.

We then dive into the partnership between Pure Storage and Cisco, specifically around the FlashStack converged infrastructure solution. Gene explains why this decade-long collaboration works, attributing it to a shared philosophy of simplifying infrastructure and improving the customer lifecycle. Our conversation also touches on the recent shift in Cisco's mindset, with Pure Storage taking a more prominent role, including the recent Nutanix partnership announcement. We further explore the concepts of "Day Zero" and "Day One" challenges in infrastructure deployment, emphasizing how Cisco Validated Design and automation mitigate risks and accelerate implementation for customers.

Our discussion concludes with the "Hot Takes" segment, where Gene discusses the growing trends of "hypervisor fatigue" and the repatriation of workloads from the cloud due to cost and performance issues. He predicts a significant shift towards containerization as companies seek more agnostic and flexible approaches to their IT infrastructure. Gene also shares a memorable "oops" moment from his career, involving 3,000 servers racked upside down, and offers advice to his younger self about the explosion of data and the increasing importance of data management.

For more information, visit: https://www.purestorage.com/products/integrated-platforms/flashstack.html

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

00:00 Intro and Welcome
04:55 Cisco and Pure Relationship
06:48 Stat of the Episode on Cloud Repatriation
12:35 Solving Day 0 and Day 1 Challenges
17:25 Using Cisco UCS in FlashStack
24:37 Cisco Validated Designs
26:54 Nutanix and Pure Partnership
32:35 Hot Takes Segment

FlashStack: A Decade of Converged Infrastructure Innovation

In this episode, we welcome Lead Principal Technologist Hari Kannan to cut through the noise and tackle some of the biggest myths surrounding AI data management and the revolutionary FlashBlade//EXA platform. With GPU shipments now outstripping CPUs, the foundation of modern AI is shifting, and legacy storage architectures are struggling to keep up. Hari dives into the implications of this massive GPU consumption, setting the stage for why a new approach is desperately needed for companies driving serious AI initiatives.

Hari dismantles three critical myths that hold IT leaders back. First, he discusses how traditional storage is ill-equipped for modern AI's millions of small, concurrent files, where metadata performance is the true bottleneck—a problem FlashBlade//EXA solves with its metadata-data separation and single namespace. Second, he addresses the outdated notion that high-performance AI is file-only, highlighting FlashBlade//EXA's unified, uncompromising delivery of both file and object storage at exabyte scale and peak efficiency. Finally, Hari explains that GPUs are only as good as the data they consume, countering the belief that only raw horsepower matters. FlashBlade//EXA addresses this by delivering reliable, scalable throughput, efficient DirectFlash Modules up to 300 TB, and the metadata performance required to keep expensive GPUs fully utilized and models training faster.

Join us as we explore the blind spots in current AI data strategies during our "Hot Takes" segment and recount a favorite FlashBlade success story. Hari closes with a compelling summary of how Pure Storage's complete portfolio is perfectly suited to provide the complementary data management essential for scaling AI. Tune in to discover why FlashBlade//EXA is the non-compromise, exabyte-scale solution built to keep your AI infrastructure running at its full potential.

For more information, visit: https://www.pure.ai/flashblade-exa.html

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

00:00 Intro and Welcome
04:30 Primer on FlashBlade
11:32 Stat of the Episode on GPU Shipments
13:25 What is FlashBlade//EXA
18:58 Myth #1: Traditional Storage Challenges for AI Data
22:01 Myth #2: AI Workloads are not just File-based
26:42: Myth #3: AI Needs more than just GPUs
31:35 Hot Takes Segment

Tackling Myths Around AI Data and FlashBlade//EXA

In this episode, we sit down with Solution Architect Robert Alvarez to discuss the technology behind Pure Key-Value Accelerator (KVA) and its role in accelerating AI inference. Pure KVA is a protocol-agnostic, key-value caching solution that, when combined with FlashBlade data storage, dramatically improves GPU efficiency and consistency in AI environments. Robert—whose background includes time as a Santa Clara University professor, NASA Solution Architect, and work at CERN—explains how this innovation is essential for serving an entire fleet of AI workloads, including modern agentic or chatbot interfaces.

Robert dives into the massive growth of the AI Inference market, driven by the need for near real-time processing and low-latency AI applications. This trend makes the need for a solution like Pure KVA critical. He details how KVA removes the bottleneck of GPU memory and shares compelling benchmark results: up to twenty times faster inference with NFS and six times faster with S3, all over standard Ethernet. These performance gains are key to helping enterprises scale more efficiently and reduce overall GPU costs.

Beyond the technical deep dive, the episode explores the origin of the KVA idea, the unique Pure IP that enables it, and future integrations like Dynamo and the partnership with Comet for LLM observability. In the popular “Hot Takes” segment, Robert offers his perspective on blind spots IT leaders might have in managing AI data and shares advice for his younger self on the future of the data management space. 

To learn more about Pure KVA, visit purestorage.com/launch.

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

00:00 Intro and Welcome
02:21 Background on Our Guest
06:57 Stat of the Episode on AI Inferencing Spend
09:10 Why AI Inference is Difficult at Scale
11:00 How KV Cache Acceleration Works
14:50 Key Partnerships Using KVA
20:28 Hot Takes Segment


Accelerating Enterprise AI Inference with Pure KVA

Data sovereignty is a hot topic of the year, driven by the massive proliferation of data, the rise of multinational hyperscalers, and the increasing use of AI. The Pure Report podcast welcomes Pure Field CTO for EMEA, Patrick Smith, to define this critical concept—data being subject to the laws and governance of the country in which it is created or stored—and to explain why enterprises must now focus not just on location, but on who manages, accesses, and controls their data. We discuss how a confluence of circumstances, including recent cloud provider outages, has highlighted the interconnected world and the risks inherent in where data resides, propelling this issue to the forefront for IT leaders globally.

Patrick dives into the three prevailing factors driving the need for a data sovereignty strategy: increasing data sensitivity and regulation (like GDPR), the massive growth and reliance on public cloud environments, and unpredictable geopolitical issues that create risk. He shares key findings from the recent University of Sydney survey, revealing a heightened sense of urgency: 100% of respondents are reconsidering their data’s location due to sovereignty concerns, and 78% are actively adopting strategies for sovereign capabilities. We also break down the strategic options available, ranging from doing nothing or too much (and accepting the risk) to the preferred middle-ground approach of a thorough risk assessment to guide placement decisions.

Our conversation shifts to actionable steps, with Patrick emphasizing that good data governance is the essential underpinning for any successful sovereignty strategy. We explore the necessity of a hybrid multi-cloud architecture that embeds sovereign capabilities, allowing organizations to run the right application in the right location based on its risk profile and move it easily if regulation changes. Finally, Patrick explains how Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud—focused on simplicity, automation, and industry-leading energy efficiency—directly intersects with and helps solve the challenges of delivering sovereign capabilities, leading to the crucial, easy win: understand the domain, track regulation, and above all, don't ignore the changing data landscape.

To read the report about Data Sovereignty, visit https://www.purestorage.com/resources/type-a/data-sovereignty-a-new-era.html

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

00:00 Intro and Welcome
02:17 A Day in the Life of a Field CTO
05:15 Defining Data Sovereignty
08:22 Trends around Data Sovereignty
11:36 Results from a User Survey on Data Sovereignty
16:25 Options for Managing Data Sovereignty
19:24 Getting Started with Data Sovereignty Actions
23:40 Evaluating Sovereign Data Providers
26:10 How Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud Helps

Data Sovereignty: A New Era

In this exciting episode of The Pure Report, we sit down with Ketan Shah, VP Products at Nutanix, and Cody Hosterman, Sr. Director, Product Management at Pure Storage, to celebrate the General Availability (GA) launch of our joint solution. Driven by recent market disruption and the need for virtualization optionality, this partnership is founded on a mutual culture of customer-centricity and innovation. Our guests discuss how their teams achieved this milestone in just over a year, highlighting  tight engineering collaboration, allowing them to build an architecture that will serve customers now and into the future.

Our conversation dives into the core technical capabilities, which are focused on simplicity and a "better" solution, not just an alternative. The joint platform integrates the Nutanix Cloud Platform with Pure Storage FlashArray via the low-latency NVMe/TCP protocol. This integration delivers a highly efficient, VM-centric experience, where provisioning, snapshots, and cloning are automatically managed through the familiar Nutanix Prism interface, abstracting away the complexity of traditional  management. A key takeaway from the early access program was the overwhelming positive feedback on the solution's resilience and the surprisingly easy adoption of IP-based storage.

Shah and Hosterman also detail the solution's comprehensive cyber resiliency features, combining Nutanix capabilities like Flow micro-segmentation and disaster recovery orchestration with Pure’s data-at-rest encryption and SafeMode immutable snapshots to offer end-to-end resilience. For customers looking to transition, the Nutanix 'Move' tool is fully supported, providing a non-disruptive migration path. Looking ahead, our guests note that this is just the beginning, with an exciting roadmap planned to integrate more sophisticated array-level features, positioning the platform as a long-term investment for not only virtualization needs but also for future AI and cloud-native workloads.

To learn more:  go to https://www.purestorage.com/partners/alliances/nutanix.html and https://www.nutanix.com/purestorage

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

00:00 Intro and Welcome
02:35 Corporate Culture Similarities 
04:54 Origin of the Partnership
06:13 Working Together on Innovation
09:08 Stat of the Episode on Future of Virtualization
14:10 Feedback from Early Access Program
18:00 Deeper Dive into Technical Capabilities
30:41 Closing Thoughts & CTA

Nutanix and Pure Storage: Propelling Enterprise Virtualization Forward

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