I didn’t get a chance to attend Pure Accelerate event last month. From the blogs and tweets of my friends, Pure Accelerate was an awesome event. When I got the email invitation for the localized Pure Live! event in Kuala Lumpur, I told myself that I have to attend the event.
The event was yesterday, and I was not disappointed. Coming off a strong fiscal Q1 2018, it has appeared that Pure Storage has gotten many things together, chugging full steam at all fronts.
When Pure Storage first come out, I was one of the early bloggers who took a fancy of them. My 2011 blog mentioned the storage luminaries in their team. Since then, they have come a long way. And it was apt that on the same morning yesterday, the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays 2017 was released.
In the event, there were a slew of announcements from the upcoming FlashBlade GA, to the Pure1 Meta, and plenty more. I captured several notable key messages. Here are some of them:
- The New Tier
- 99.9999 availability
- Maintenance and generational upgrade
- Purity Active Cluster with Pure1 Cloud Mediator
- Innovation for the Cloud Era
- Simplify VVOLs
- Cloud Automation and Security
- Copy Data Management
- Snapshot Portability (CloudSnap, Snap to NFS, DeltaSnap APIs)
- Purity Run – not hyperconvergence – Run Microsoft apps in containers on the FlashArray controllers
- Windows File Services (both SMB and NFS) for FlashArray
- FlashBlade
- Elastic Fabric
- Massively Parallelism
- 75 blades using the power of the 5 hairdryers (good one!)
- Making object storage faster with Flash Object Storage
- S3 compatibility
- Self-Driving Storage
- AI and machine learning
- > Trillion data points
- Real time analytics to prevent issues (Claimed to have prevented > 500 P1 cases last year)
- Performance sizing and capacity planning with accurate prediction for performance provisioning
- Pure1 Meta
- AI Engine – predictive application workload DNA
- > 1,000 measurements
- Workload Planner
- Global Predictive Intelligence
And I might have missed a few here and there … but have to catch my breath there.
The messaging and announcements were coming at the audience like a machine gun but one thing was clear – The Pure Storage Vision. From Multi-Cloud to Core to Edge, they have finally overcome the hump when the industry used to label them a one-trick pony. “Oh, they are just all Flash …”
That is no longer true. Now that they put the right pieces on the chess board, the world is looking at their execution.
In Malaysia, I know they have been quiet behind the scenes for some time, and won a significant deal with Hong Leong Bank, a Tier-1 bank early this year. The Hong Leong Chief Innovation and Technology Officer was the keynote speaker at Pure Live! yesterday.
Despite a relatively lethargic crowd at the event yesterday (yeah, Malaysian audience at events tends to be very docile and quiet), I was able to sense the strong current and the electricity of the Pure Storage team at the event.
For now I can say, WELL DONE Pure Storage!
