Building a Virtualized and Networked Cloud of Data with Pure Fusion

Enterprise data management is undergoing a seismic shift, driven by AI-driven productivity, next-gen insights, rising cybersecurity threats, and mounting operational complexity. To stay competitive, organizations must break free from legacy systems plagued by rigid silos, manual provisioning, and tight coupling to physical infrastructure—factors that stifle agility, scalability, and innovation.

Now is the time to modernize, streamline operations, enhance flexibility, and reduce costs, unlocking rapid, scalable innovation. With data central to business success, maximizing its potential is key to driving deeper insights and smarter decisions. This transformation requires consolidated management, seamless accessibility, and high-performance systems to power AI and next-gen applications.

While workloads evolve rapidly, supporting infrastructure—especially storage—remains outdated. This is a familiar story—one we’ve seen before in the compute space. 

Not long ago, compute resources were rigidly tied to applications, forcing organizations to scramble to balance workloads. One server might be overloaded while another sat idle, wasting resources and driving costs sky-high. 

Then VMware stepped in and flipped the model. By virtualizing compute resources, VMware decoupled applications from physical servers, enabling shared infrastructure, higher resource utilization, self-service provisioning, and intelligent management.

The Harsh Reality of Legacy Storage

Legacy storage, unfortunately, has never made the transition and needs a revolutionary overhaul. In the world of storage, users still have to go through IT teams to provision resources. The process is slow, clunky, and anything but agile.

Here’s a familiar story: A developer or line of business (LOB) owner needs storage. They open a ticket with IT, expecting a quick turnaround. Days go by. Eventually, IT requests requirements and begins the slow process of assessing the infrastructure. Can any existing hardware accommodate the request, or is new hardware needed? If it’s the latter, it’s a waiting game—sizing, purchasing, and deployment will take even more time. But let’s be optimistic and assume hardware is already available. IT still needs to size the application, provision the storage, allocate it to the workload, and—weeks or even months later—the storage is finally ready.

For IT admins, this leads to yet another “pet” to manage—a fragile, static infrastructure that requires constant care and attention. Instead of treating storage like “cattle”—easily replaceable, scalable, and shared infrastructure—organizations are weighed down by slow, manual processes and siloed systems. This outdated approach doesn’t just create inefficiencies; it actively slows down business processes, increases costs, and erodes agility. Storage, which should be an enabler of innovation, becomes a bottleneck.

The Way Data Is Managed Needs a Revolution

It’s time for a paradigm shift. Just as VMware revolutionized compute by decoupling applications from physical servers, the next step for enterprises is to adopt a virtualized, horizontally scaling, microservices-oriented model that mirrors this transformation. The way data is managed needs to stop holding business back.

Through our recent hyperscaler design partnership, we’ve learned how hyperscalers deliver a unified data plane for their customers—much like the Pure Storage platform, powered by Purity and DirectFlash®, which delivers:

• Industry-leading reliability, with return rates of just 0.15% compared to over 1% for off-the-shelf SSDs
• Significant power savings and the ability to consolidate storage tiers into a unified platform
• High availability and exceptional performance for AI and data-driven workloads

Our streamlined architecture simplifies operations across all tiers—whether it’s cost-efficient archives or high-performance AI environments—while delivering unmatched price, performance, and density at scale. Imagine a world where:

• Applications aren’t tied to physical silos.
• Self-service provisioning empowers users to access resources without waiting on IT.
• Intelligent automation optimizes workload placement, eliminating the guesswork and inefficiency of today’s manual processes.
• Infrastructure is treated like cattle—scalable, sharable, and replaceable—freeing IT to focus on innovation rather than firefighting.

This is the future we’re delivering with the Pure Storage platform, enabled by our unique innovation, Pure Fusion™.

What Is Pure Fusion?

Imagine the conveniences of the cloud in your data center and across the public cloud without limits—eliminating the physical and operational silos of traditional infrastructure. That’s what Pure Fusion, a centralized control plane, enables. It virtualizes and unifies your data systems into a seamless, networked cloud.

Pure Fusion effortlessly federates FlashArray™, FlashBlade®, and Pure Cloud Block Store™, transforming them into a single fleet of endpoints. Each array serves as a gateway—accessible through API, CLI, or GUI—into a fully integrated ecosystem. The best part? There’s nothing to deploy, configure, or maintain. Pure Fusion removes complexity, so you can focus on innovation instead of operations.

Pure1® provides the intelligence, as the largest repository of telemetry data on the planet, that informs Pure Fusion’s execution. With workload planning, AI-driven placement recommendations, and real-time analytics, Pure1 ensures your data is precisely where it needs to be, performing at its peak—every time.

But Pure Fusion doesn’t just simplify how your data is managed—it redefines it. By empowering businesses with a modern, service-oriented approach to data management, Pure Fusion delivers:

• Self-service speed: Eliminate bottlenecks by enabling users to independently provision and manage resources via workflows built to ensure consistency. With less reliance on IT teams, businesses can accelerate time to value and respond quickly to shifting demands.
• High utilization and cost efficiency: Maximize resource usage and reduce costs with optimized workload placement and mobility. Pure Fusion improves efficiency across your fleet, enabling you to do more with fewer resources.
• Seamless scalability: Whether scaling up, down, or across protocols and storage types, Pure Fusion adapts effortlessly to changing workloads. Say goodbye to the manual, error-prone processes of infrastructure expansion.
• Intelligent automation and management: With AI-driven workload optimization, Pure Fusion ensures resources are used efficiently. Actionable insights on security, data protection, and balancing workloads simplify operations, minimize intervention, and boost reliability.
• Simple, consistent operations: Enjoy a unified, consistent experience across your entire storage environment. Pure Fusion reduces complexity and human error, delivering high reliability, minimal downtime, and predictable outcomes for your most critical workloads.

With Pure Fusion, you don’t just modernize how you manage your data—you unlock the agility, simplicity, and intelligence businesses need to thrive in a world defined by AI, data-driven innovation, and ever-growing workloads.

Next, let’s explore how Pure Fusion’s intelligence and optimization services empower users to manage policies, optimize workloads, and fully utilize their Pure Storage platform—seamlessly and effortlessly.

Pure Fusion Data Services

Pure Fusion transforms the way data sets are managed, creating a unified, fleet-wide control plane that seamlessly spans multiple arrays. Manual mechanisms are gone, replaced by workflows that ensure consistency and control of data, so enterprises no longer have to worry about data proliferation. Each array begins as a standalone “control plane of one” out of the box, requiring zero configuration. Need to expand? Pure Fusion makes it effortless—arrays can be securely joined to grow the control plane, with trust establishment and ownership verification ensuring smooth integration. Need to scale back? No problem. Arrays can easily revert to standalone operation or be decommissioned entirely.

But Pure Fusion isn’t just about unifying your storage. It goes beyond that by maintaining a detailed cluster topology, complete with array and addressing information. This intelligent foundation enables efficient message routing and unlocks advanced features for both internal operations and customer use:

• Expose environment resources: Pure Fusion lets you define fleets, availability zones (AZs), and regions, simplifying scalability. Arrays can be addressed by name, whether grouped into AZs/regions or not, enabling intuitive and flexible operations.
• Enable multi-tenant consumption: Tenant-based management makes resource allocation effortless, reducing complexity across large fleets and ensuring smooth operations.
• Publish and enforce presets: Storage provisioning becomes streamlined with reusable policies and storage presets, simplifying multistep processes like QoS configuration, access rules, and client connections. These platform-agnostic templates empower customers to provision storage end to end with a single command.
• Policy-based protection: Intelligent, automated protection policies safeguard critical data without manual intervention, ensuring business continuity.

Here is a quick demo of the provisioning automation:

Pure Fusion delivers more than just a change in the way you manage data—it provides seamless control, unmatched flexibility, and unparalleled efficiency, empowering businesses to scale smarter, operate faster, and eliminate operational headaches. Next, let’s dive into Optimization Services.

Pure Fusion Optimization Services

Traditional data management is labor-intensive. Admins must carefully plan workload placement, anticipate future changes, and manually handle disruptive migrations when requirements evolve. With ever-changing workloads, growing data sets, and heterogeneous infrastructure, a once-optimal placement decision can quickly become obsolete. Pure Fusion changes everything:

• Pure1 AI-driven workload placement: Pure Fusion brings the power of Pure1 Meta’s AI-driven placement recommendations to assign new storage resources to the most suitable array automatically. Pure Fusion executes these decisions seamlessly, allowing customers to place volumes at the granularity of an AZ, ensuring optimal performance and efficiency.
• Adjust storage classes and rebalance the fleet: Pure Fusion’s workload mobility toolkit simplifies moving workloads between arrays, offering both disruptive and non-disruptive migration options based on specific use cases. Admins can trigger migrations on demand or automate the process using policy-driven rebalancing. Pure Fusion orchestrates the underlying array capabilities (via Purity) to ensure seamless workload mobility.
• Utilize new resources: As new resources are added to the fleet, Pure Fusion integrates them into the control plane, automatically optimizing workloads to maximize performance and utilization without manual intervention.

The result is an entirely different user experience for developers and LOB owners. Services are provided and can be consumed by developers and LOB owners, where they can be consistently deployed within minutes. 

Conclusion: No More “Pets,” Just “All-flash Cattle”

Enterprises are at a crossroads. The demands of AI, services-first models, and modern workloads are growing exponentially, yet legacy storage systems remain a bottleneck, slowing innovation and driving inefficiencies. Pure Fusion changes everything. By delivering a virtualized, networked cloud of data, Pure Fusion eliminates the silos and complexity of traditional storage, transforming how businesses operate.

Pure Fusion provides a unified control plane, intelligent automation, and effortless scalability. With features like self-service provisioning, AI-driven optimization, and policy-based protection, Pure Fusion empowers developers and LOB owners to consistently deploy data resources within minutes, freeing IT teams to focus on innovation, not administration.

The future of data management is agile, automated, and built for the demands of modern enterprises. With Pure Fusion, the possibilities are endless, and the barriers to innovation are a thing of the past.

Now Is the Time

Legacy storage is holding you back, so now is the time to step into the new world of data management with Pure Fusion, available to all Pure Storage customers. Reach out to your Pure Storage representative or explore Pure Fusion directly in your environment to experience the power of seamless, intelligent data management firsthand. The future of data management is here—are you ready to embrace it?

Until next time…stay flashy my friend!

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