I once had a customer tell me after installing their first all-flash array that “Happiness is never having a conversation about which RAID group the database redo logs are on.” It was a funny off-hand comment, but it really stuck with me.
It wasn’t what storage did, it was what storage did for him—how it made life better. For that customer, happiness was taking away one of the hoops they had to jump through routinely and making it a non-issue.
Today, there are still lingering issues that cost us all time and are honestly just no fun. Slow development cycles, planned and unplanned disruptions, and waiting weeks or months to provision new services through antiquated manual processes. As WOPR said in the classic 1983 movie WarGames , “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Yet, we’ve had to play the game of endless tickets and brute force operations. The storage industry as a whole has been focused on keeping the game going. You keep buying hardware and keep doing the heavy lifting to make sure their products are actually working for you. That is, until now.
Pure Storage® has announced three exciting new expansions to our portfolio for customers like you—customers who can’t afford disruptions due to slow data or upgrades, long development cycles, or sluggish delivery of new data services. These tools can help you deliver what everyone is looking for—agility.
Pure Fusion
Now agile isn’t the first word you think of when you think of storage infrastructure. And it’s probably not the second or third either. But it should be.
Before server virtualization, the landscape was very similar to what is happening in the storage world today. Every workload required planning, design, and configuration. And it was tied to a physical box. Then came abstraction. By virtualizing workloads on a cluster of machines, suddenly applications did something they hadn’t done before:
They became portable, repeatable templates that were easier to manage across their life cycle. This opened the door to the real value that followed—automation.
As Pure’s CEO and Chairman Charlie Giancarlo said during our launch event, “We need to move past using human middleware to configure, tune, maintain, update, and attach storage systems and software.”
Like virtualization for servers, Pure Fusion ™ breaks apart the old model requiring weeks of human middleware interventions to give you infinite scaling, the ability to rebalance and optimize workloads on the fly, and treat storage as a pool of resources that can be automated and consumed on-demand via self-service. This makes other methods of storage management look like the collection of one-to-one connections you’d see on an old-time telephone switchboard. It’s time to trade in the switchboard for a smartphone.
Portworx Data Services
Automation not only frees your IT staff, but it also enables your developers—and therefore, your organization—to accelerate. Portworx allows you to build the on-demand models needed to deliver tailored storage services to your developers.
Your developers shouldn’t care what infrastructure backs your storage services. It should be invisible to them. You define the custom storage services that meet your security, resiliency, compliance, and regulatory needs. You can then make them available in a price-performance service catalog to your developers. They configure and choose their data management class with code, and it’s delivered to them immediately. Portworx Data Services lets you and your developers do more, do it more quickly, and with more predictable results.
As an example, the ability to create a database as a service that is easy to scale and deploy, adheres to your policies, and is available to developers with API calls or a single click, without human middleware, is what we all think of when we hear terms like agility.
Pure1 Digital Experience
Making your storage invisible doesn’t mean it’s invisible to you. It’s time users have the ability to see, in real time, data SLAs across their cloud and visualize their modern application infrastructure from end to end. It’s time AIOps identifies not only internal issues but external issues like potential ransomware activity.
It’s also time to take the guesswork out of IT operations. Pure1® fundamentally simplifies operations by anticipating changes across the infrastructure stack and proactively recommending actions for optimizing storage and applications. It predicts and forecasts needed changes to users’ subscriptions or their Evergreen™ storage estate. In short, Pure1 is like that coworker everybody loves—the one who has answers when others have questions, suggestions when others only identify problems, and has the skills to make those suggestions work.
Pure is dedicated to your success, not just as an organization but also your personal and professional success. It’s time for you to stop being the middleware. It’s time to stop playing the same old game that results in the same old no-win scenario. The new agility game is winnable, and Pure Storage is here to help you in this new era of easy AIOps, invisible data services, and true software-defined storage.
