At Cloud Field Day, Pure Storage laid out a case that most enterprises already know to be true: traditional storage architecture is fundamentally broken. But rather than simply pointing out the problem, Pure demonstrated how its Enterprise Data Cloud—powered by the newly redesigned Pure Fusion V2—aims to eliminate the complexity that has plagued storage administrators for decades.
The Real Cost of Storage Silos
Traditional storage architecture follows a simple but limiting pattern: one array, one purpose. Your database gets its own storage. Your virtualization platform gets another. File shares, backup stacks—each receives its dedicated infrastructure. This approach made sense when data centers were smaller and workloads were predictable.
It doesn’t scale.
As environments grow, the management burden compounds exponentially. What starts as a manageable collection of arrays evolves into a maze of spreadsheets, runbooks, and manual configurations. Admins must duplicate protection policies across every stack. When business requirements change, each policy needs manual updates—a process that inevitably leads to configuration drift and inconsistent data governance.
The data itself becomes captive. Resources can’t be shared efficiently. Scaling requires new purchases rather than better utilization of existing capacity.
The uncomfortable truth? Moving to the public cloud often replicates these same problems. Cloud storage typically bundles performance and capacity together, forcing overprovisioning to meet peak demands. A single database workload might require five different disk types. Azure alone offers six storage variants, and when cloud providers introduce new versions, administrators face complex migration projects.
Cloud sprawl is just another form of the silo problem.
Pure’s Answer: The Enterprise Data Cloud
During their Cloud Field Day presentation, Pure Storage outlined a vision built on three architectural pillars designed to break the silo model entirely.
· Evergreen//One shifts storage to a consumption-based service model. Pure manages the arrays, handles upgrades, and guarantees performance and capacity SLAs. The infrastructure becomes someone else’s problem.
· The Unified Data Plane (Purity) provides block, file, and object services across Pure’s entire portfolio—FlashArray, FlashBlade, and Pure Storage Cloud. One consistent environment handles VMs, containers, and PaaS applications. Built-in resilience features like Active Cluster and Cloud Snap work uniformly across all platforms.
· Intelligent Automation through Pure1 brings predictive intelligence and AI Ops to workload balancing, placement, and provisioning through a single control plane.
Pure Fusion V2: Where Automation Gets Practical
Pure Fusion V2 represents a complete redesign of Pure’s control plane, and the changes address real enterprise concerns. The original Fusion required lift-and-shift migrations and relied on cloud-based management—a non-starter for many large enterprises and air-gapped environments.
Version 2 integrates directly into Purity as a native feature. Existing customers can enable it with an upgrade. Backward compatibility with current workflows and APIs means no rip-and-replace. For organizations wary of remote cloud management, this architecture change matters.
Fusion V2 introduces several capabilities that fundamentally change how storage gets managed:
· Presets codify provisioning requirements as declarative definitions. Instead of manually configuring each workload according to a checklist, storage architects define the desired outcome once—a specific database service configuration, for example—and Fusion enforces it consistently across the entire environment.
· Fleet Management treats multiple arrays as a coordinated unit. Rather than managing individual FlashArray, FlashBlade, or Pure Storage Cloud instances separately, administrators manage the entire fleet with a single set of presets across heterogeneous platforms.
· Predictive Workload Placement leverages Pure1 telemetry and workload-specific characteristics to recommend optimal placement within the fleet, balancing capacity and performance requirements automatically.
· Compliance and Drift Detection continuously monitor workloads against preset configurations. When an administrator makes an unintended change, Fusion identifies the drift and offers remediation options—either reapply the preset or update it to propagate the change rigorously across all affected workloads.
Pure Storage Cloud: Bringing the Vision to Public Cloud
Pure’s cloud portfolio—including Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated and the new Azure Native Service—extends the unified data plane into public cloud environments. This addresses the cost and flexibility problems inherent in native cloud storage.
Pure claims that Pure Storage Cloud delivers industry-leading data reduction through deduplication and compression, with one customer reporting $1 million in savings per petabyte stored. More importantly, the Azure Native Service separates capacity costs from performance costs—customers pay for storage and speed independently, eliminating the need to overprovision.
Data mobility becomes cost-effective. Pure’s replication sends only unique, reduced data between regions, providing up to 4:1 reduction on egress charges and dramatically faster replication times.
The Azure Native Service integrates as a first-party service within the Azure portal, handling networking configuration automatically. For Azure VMware Solution users, Pure provides a vSphere client plugin that enables storage management—datastores, snapshots—directly from vCenter, eliminating the need to context-switch between management interfaces.
Why This Approach Matters Now
The storage industry has recognized the silo problem for years. What Pure demonstrated at Cloud Field Day wasn’t just problem identification—it was an architecture for solving it.
Vertical silos, policy duplication, and rigid resource allocation create unnecessary operational costs and risk. These issues affect both traditional data centers and public cloud deployments equally.
Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud, powered by Fusion V2 and the Pure Storage Cloud portfolio, offers a unified management approach across block, file, and object storage. By codifying management requirements into repeatable presets and automating workload placement, storage transforms from a source of manual intervention into an outcome-based utility.
For organizations managing hybrid environments, the value proposition is straightforward: reduce operational complexity, achieve consistency across platforms, and maintain configuration compliance through automation rather than documentation.
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