There’s a growing and alarming body of evidence that points to the harmful effects of stress on both physical and mental well-being in our daily lives.
Hardly surprising, workplace stress is routinely identified as a significant contributor to the overall level of stress and anxiety endured by the average individual. And what is consistently identified as the top cause for workplace stress? Workload management. In our careers, we’re continually asked to do more with less, and to get it done faster. The increasing demands of the job can put a sensible work-life balance further out of reach.
While important research is being done to identify effective coping strategies to manage stress and mitigate its impact, no strategy can match the benefits gained by eliminating the root cause of the stress. And when it comes to workplace stress, that means eliminating workload management pressures.
Easier said than done, right? At Pure Storage, we don’t think it has to be. That’s why simplicity is our ethos and what we set out to deliver in every solution we offer.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
What better place to begin than with the truly digital experience of Pure1®, our data management platform. As a cloud-based solution, Pure1 gives you (and your team with role-based access) the ability to manage your entire fleet of Pure arrays from anywhere in the world, from any device. You just need a web browser or the Pure1 mobile app.
Once you’ve logged in to the Pure1 portal, you’ll see an intuitive interface that delivers live monitoring within minutes of your system coming online, providing access to critical information about the health and functioning of your entire stack:
- See auto-generated alerting and auditing for ransomware protection.
- Generate shareable reports for commonly requested information, such as capacity, performance, or even service subscription status, with an easy-to-use reporting engine.
- Carry out active data management tasks with a level of ease that’s unmatched in the industry.
- Get a single view to effortlessly monitor, analyze, and optimize your Pure Storage, Portworx®, and VMware infrastructure.
This simplicity reduces stress on the people who are responsible for keeping watch over these critical resources. But it also provides peace of mind.
“The core of beauty is simplicity”
Like beauty, true simplicity is more than skin deep. Pure1 Meta®—the very soul of Pure1—is what makes it more than just another pretty (inter)face.
Meta is an AIOps engine that dramatically simplifies management and planning. It drives Pure1’s Workload Planner capabilities, allowing you to predict array performance and capacity for existing workloads over time or when adding new workloads. Choose between pre-loaded application profiles or model a custom profile and preview how they’ll impact your environment. If Workload Planner anticipates any issues in accommodating new workloads, it’ll make recommendations for changes to avoid problems. The impact of removing or scaling existing workloads is just as easy—all guesswork is removed.
Meta also powers the uncanny intuition of Service Assistant, which uses analytics collected from Pure’s worldwide installed fleet—more than 1 trillion data points daily—to quickly identify any potential trouble spots, such as hardware degradation, software faults, and environmental issues. Once identified, the Service Assistant generates alerts that include recommended corrective actions. These powerful insights are the reason that Pure’s support teams are able to proactively resolve more than 70% of potential incidents, leading to an unparalleled consistency of performance and availability. It even monitors for unusual behavior that may be a sign of ransomware, enabling Service Assistant to help foil cyberattackers.
Pure1 Visibility: Performance Metrics on VMware Environments
So, while that’s great for the data management layer, you’re probably wondering: What can Pure do to simplify my life beyond that? Glad you asked. Pure1 extends visibility up the stack to give you rich performance metrics on volumes and VMs in VMware environments. With visibility into latency, bandwidth, IOPs, and more, you’ll have the insight to quickly spot and resolve issues with ease. Pure1 provides a single view to monitor, analyze, and optimize your Pure Storage, Portworx, and VMware infrastructure from anywhere in the world, with enterprise-grade, AI-driven support all from the convenience of your phone.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”
You’re probably thinking that AI-driven environment analysis and recommendations will certainly help with workload management, but what about when it comes time to act on some of that analysis? Or deal with endless data management service requests for allocations, database clones, volume snapshots, and the like? Can Pure make your life any easier on that front too? You bet!
This is where Pure’s ability to support automation shines. All those things that Pure doesn’t already do on your behalf can be automated to an incredible degree. The comprehensive FlashArray™ and FlashBlade® REST API services allow you to automate provisioning and other management functions at the array level. And the Pure1 REST API service delivers programmatic access to the rich value-added and AI-augmented data it possesses, providing you the ability to seamlessly integrate that information into your service management ecosystem. You may even find the routines you’re looking for in one of our automation libraries (Ansible, PowerShell, Perl, Python, and more). If not, you can also reach out to our Professional Services team to ask about custom automation services.
Storage-as-a-service Simplicity with Evergreen//One
Need a little more to help you fully replace your workplace stress with a Zen-like mindset? Maybe you should consider swapping out your traditional enterprise storage resource acquisition approach for Evergreen//One™, Pure’s industry-leading consumption-based, storage-as-a-service solution. Get the best of the cloud operating model for block, file, and object storage resources through a genuine service subscription delivered wherever you choose to run your operations—in your private data center, a colocation facility, or the public cloud. Get it without sacrificing the best of what enterprise storage technology has to offer—compression and dedupe, thin provisioning, encryption at rest, replication solutions, and more. And get it all without the headaches of having to worry about capacity management, consistent performance, availability, and more because it’s backed by service level agreements that will protect you against the things that can go bump in the night.
“Simplification is one of the most difficult things to do”
If reading this leaves you wondering why things always seem so complicated with your current storage provider’s products—and why you’re faced with the stress all that complexity introduces—it’s because simplicity doesn’t come easy.
It wasn’t a happy accident that Pure delivered world-class enterprise storage arrays for which the contents of the management instruction manual fit onto a tent card (two business cards front and back). It wasn’t dumb luck that produced products with proven 99.99999% availability inclusive of upgrades and maintenance, instant snapshots with zero overhead, and a Satmetrix-certified Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 81, which ranks in the top 1% of B2B companies. And it wasn’t by chance that we brought to market the far-and-away best-in-class, storage-as-a-service solution in Evergreen//One.
Simplicity is the guiding principle in everything we create at Pure because we know that of all things we can offer to our customers, the inner peace that comes with solutions that are highly effective yet simple to use is without a doubt the most invaluable.
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