Pure Is 11 Years Old: Let’s Celebrate the Decade to Come

Remember the famous line from Spinal Tap? Since the earliest days of Pure, we’re still turning it up to 11, again and again. Read what our Cofounder John “Coz” Colgrove has to say about the past, present, and future of Pure.

Pure Is 11 Years Old

4 minutes
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This Is Spinal Tap, guitarist Nigel Tufnel proudly shows off an amplifier with volume controls that go up to 11, because it’s all about exceeding limits and being bolder than everyone else. That’s our passionate tribe of Pure Storage® in a nutshell.

Since the earliest days of Os76 Inc. (Pure’s first code name, and the periodic table symbol for osmium, the highest density naturally occurring element), we’ve never been satisfied with the status quo or merely keeping pace. We’ve always wanted to go up to 11.

In the past several months of doing business in an environment like we’ve never experienced in our lifetimes, we still turned it up to 11, again and again. I am immensely proud of everyone joining in the 11th-anniversary celebrations this month—a milestone we couldn’t have achieved without our customers and partners supporting and cheering us on.

A Time to Reflect

Anniversaries offer a good occasion to look back on our accomplishments. The common thread in every year of Pure’s existence is innovation. We continue to top ourselves. (It’s that “turning it up to 11” thing!) I never get tired of seeing how disruptive we can be.

In Pure’s first decade, we set out to democratize flash and enable it to run every business process and speed every innovation project—all with levels of simplicity the industry didn’t know were possible. We combined consumer-grade flash with sophisticated, purpose-built storage software to lower costs and deliver enterprise-class resilience. Add in a revolutionary Evergreen subscription model and you have the essential Pure recipe of performance, reliability, simplicity, and customer service.

In 2012, we introduced the Pure FlashArray™ 300 series, our first commercial product. That was just the beginning. In 2016, we launched FlashBlade® for unstructured data and we partnered with NVIDIA to develop AIRI®, an out-of-the-box AI-ready system that’s enabling visionary companies to innovate faster with AI. Around it all with Pure1 users get a full-stack, AI-powered tool to manage and monitor it all, for truly self-driving storage and predictive support.

As we kicked off our second decade a year ago, we outlined our vision for a modern data platform. We’ve been investing in this since the Os76 days because we knew it was the foundation for the future. Our unified data platform is a prime example of what we can accomplish when we continue to bring innovation and bold thinking to the task of making storage even more simple and reliable.

A Laser Focus on Our Future

As we reflect on what we’ve accomplished, we should also take time to set a course for the future. Part of this focus is on creating storage that’s seamless, dynamic, and provides a cloud-like experience. We’re continuing to expand the suitability of flash for all workloads via shared services, flexible on-demand consumption, and responsiveness to the needs of applications. This is the right time to be bold and transform storage for all uses.

One year into our second decade, we know we’re on the right course. Our cloud strategy has continued to mature with your evolving needs. We’re committed to bringing some of what Pure Storage does best for enterprise to the cloud. Because what matters to enterprises hasn’t changed when it comes to storage.

Flexibility is also clearly a mantra as we accelerate into the future, and it’s never been more important to our customers. Our subscription services, such as our renowned Evergreen Storage™ model, Evergreen//One™, and Pure Cloud Block Store™ allow you to align spend with your actual usage. This helps you manage costs in a time when it’s difficult to predict requirements. And while many organizations continue to wrestle with the challenges of remote work and lack of access to facilities, we’ve seen tremendous demand for the benefits of as-a-service.

We took another bold stride forward this year. Our acquisition of Portworx, the Kubernetes data-services platform, expands our software offerings to deliver industry-leading data services for cloud-native applications and containers.

Clearly, we’re not resting on our laurels any time soon. And why would we? The best is yet to come. With our customers and partners at our side, the rock stars at Pure will stop at nothing to push the volume past 11.

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