Pure Accelerate 2025 Recap
It's hard to believe we're halfway through 2025 and the OEM Conference season. Pure Storage's yearly Accelerate conference in Las Vegas occurred a few weeks back (June 17th – 19th) where it was filled with exciting announcements, educational breakout sessions and networking with industry peers, Pure specialists and old friends. WWT showed up in full force this year with representation from our sales, technical and partner mgmt. teams across our Enterprise and Public Sector teams, and even walked away with Pure's Americas Partner of the Year award.
WWT also participated in a FlashTalk session around our Cyber Resiliency strategy and a panel talk session around Generative AI Pods for Financial Services based on the work we've done in the ATC with Arista, KX+, NVIDIA, RedHat, SuperMicro and Pure Storage.
Wednesday morning's keynote* was kicked off by Pure's CEO, Charles Giancarlo, where he highlighted what was going to be announced during the conference and emphasized again this year that Pure Storage continues to look at data storage as High Technology and not just a commodity. Chad Kenney was up next where he covered the new software features and then Rob Lee went deeper into the hardware updates and new models released.
Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC)
While Pure's hardware advancements are impressive, it's all about the software (that unlocks the hardware performance). As the amount of data continues to skyrocket, managing the underlying storage silos is complicated and requires larger teams to be able to deliver the same levels of service to the end users. Enter the Enterprise Data Cloud, which in a nutshell, is really a paradigm shift in how storage will be managed in the future…. except the future is now.
The goal of the EDC is:
- Auto provisioning and load balancing for your volumes, file systems and buckets
- Global governance and protection policies for data to be accessible anywhere
- A Virtualized Cloud of Data
- Built-in Cyber Resilience
- Software defined with global scalability
At the heart of the EDC is the Intelligent Control Plane and the Unified Data Plane.
Unified Data Plane (UDP)
What makes up the UDP is a common Operating Environment (Purity) that runs across all FlashArray (including Cloud Block Store) and FlashBlade models covering your block, file and object needs for all your workloads and workflows. Purity supports the Evergreen Architecture which delivers non-disruptive upgrades and capacity consolidations that keep your data storage current without the need to migrate data.
Intelligent Control Plane (ICP)
The ICP utilizes Purity and the recently released Pure Fusion, which is included at no cost and runs natively within the Purity Operating Environment. Pure Fusion provides Fleet-level mgmt. for all your storage arrays to create a virtualized cloud of storage within and across your data centers and Cloud Block Store deployments.
Pure Fusion's Presets feature provides standardization of your storage configuration along with shortening the provisioning time through automation workflow tasks. Presets can include Array type, QoS needs, Volume quantities and sizes, snapshot intervals and retention, and replication schedules. As new storage needs come in, simply choose a preset that matches the workload type, complete the prompts and hit Finish. Pure Fusion works closely with Pure1's telemetry data to help with initial workload placement and the re-balancing of workloads (coming soon). Pure Fusion's API allows 3rd party integrations with hypervisors, data protection, and security providers to aid in the provisioning, protection and remediation for your storage.
Pure Fusion's Workload Orchestrator extends beyond your storage and into full application workload provisioning. This is possible through integration into your CMDB environment where the orchestration engine automates the deployment of storage volumes, makes hypervisor calls to create a VM and install the required applications, and finally configures data protection and replication of the VMs to the cloud for Disaster Recovery.
Purity and Pure1 work closely to provide the newly announced Data Intelligence Engine that will be used for Compliance Reporting and provides Application Insights, Data Catalogs, Sensitive Data and Ransomware Detection through Pure1 Dashboards and Assessments.
The final piece of ICP is that CO-PILOT is now live in Pure1 supporting natural language contexts and prompts to determine issues like…where is the bottleneck in my fleet that is impacting backup performance. But… what if you want to use an AI agent to provision volumes, setup external monitoring and run a training simulation all through chatbot prompts. This is possible through the ICP but is too deep of a conversation to cover in this recap blog post. Reach out to your WWT account team to learn more.
Hardware innovations and updates
While software is cool and all, we can't forget what the software runs on and makes all the goodness possible.
FlashArray//XLR5
The //XL line is getting its first controller generation refresh since it launched in December of 2021. Don't get confused with the R5 nomenclature as this puts it in line with the rest of the FlashArray line and their next release version number. This updated hardware release brings support for higher capacities, increased density and efficiencies, and huge performance increases over the prior generation. And the best part - it's an easy, non-disruptive upgrade for prior //XL customers without needing downtime or data migrations.
FlashBlade//SX00R2 (200, 500)
Staying on the hardware refresh train, the FlashBlade//S blade models are getting an upgrade to the latest hardware release that utilize faster memory and networking along with higher core count CPUs. The initial results show up to 50% increase in performance for AI, HPC, EDA, Genomics and Cyber Resiliency workloads. And the best part, first generation S200 and S500 Blade customers under an Evergreen Forever contract will get the latest model and will experience a seamless upgrade without disruptions or the need for a data migration.
300TB DFMs
It seems like it was just last year that Pure released 150TB DFMs… oh wait, it was. They showed off onstage the new 300TB DFMs option that will be shipping this fall, and the best part is that they don't use any more power. Your power usage per TB will be cut in half all while maintaining the small data center footprint. Your DC facilities team will love you for the space saving and reduced power needed for these ultra-dense flash modules.
FlashArray//ST (FA//ST)
Do you have in memory database workloads that require super-fast storage? Welcome FA//ST to the FlashArray family to target specific in-memory, ultra high-performance workloads such as SAP HANA and KX KDB+. Built on the proven FlashArray//XL chassis/controller design, FA//ST delivers ~10M IOP/S and upwards of 88 GB/s of throughput. This kind of high performance requires NVMe over fabrics (or RoCE) as the SCSI stack just can't keep up. FA//ST uses a new class of SCM based DFMs and runs the same Purity//FA operating environment but forgoes deduplication and compression so it can focus on consistent ultra-low latency response times. Snapshots, writeable clones and replication however are still available.
FlashBlade//EXA is GA
Unveiled earlier this year at NVIDIA's GTC conference, The FB//EXA is a new FlashBlade design aimed at supporting AI workloads using >1000 GPUs. The FB//EXA, is said to be 5 times faster than the fastest AI storage in the world. This new design utilizes the S500 blades to handle the metadata management and uses bare metal nodes connected via pNFS to store the data. The design goal is targeting 10+ TB/s read in a single namespace with unlimited scale for capacity and performance. We're looking forward to getting our hands on this in the ATC and validating the numbers and the ease of deployment.
As-a-Service Updates and Add-ons
Evergreen One (EG//1) is Pure's subscription service offering that allows customers to pay for what they use and stop overbuying storage they don't need. EG//1 also provides flexibility for customers looking to ship some of their workloads to the cloud as the committed capacity you subscribe to isn't tied to a specific hardware model or location but instead focuses on a Service Level Agreement. Below are a few of the new add-ons to EG//1 that reduce risk, simplify storage sizing and provides a greater level of efficiencies and flexibility.
Adaptive Tier
Targeted for secondary workloads that are latency-insensitive, this new service level option allows for independent scaling of performance and capacity to optimize costs. Workloads such as backup, large-scale file repositories, test/dev and media repositories are best suited for the Adaptive Tier add-on. Customers can commit to a performance SLA independent of the capacity consumed to provide predictable throughput and you can increase your capacity and/or performance any time as your workloads grow.
Snapshot Retention
Snapshots provide a quick way to recover from operational issues. Enabling SafeMode on the storage array ensures immutability for your snapshots and helps clients be prepared to recover from cyber-attacks. While they are easy to setup and are space efficient, the challenge is knowing how often you want to take a snapshot and how long do you want to keep them so you can size accordingly. The Snapshot retention add-on simplifies the sizing complexity by eliminating the need to size for snapshots up front and instead just pick a retention period that matches your data protection policies (14 days, 90 days, 365 days), and you're covered.
Pure Protect //DRaaS
You can't just have backups; you need a Disaster Recovery plan as well. Pure Protect //DRaaS is an add-on option for VMware environments that replicates your VMs data to either an AWS EC2 offline instance or between vSphere environments that can be activated in an automated, run-book fashion when a disaster strikes…. or when you just want to test your DR strategy.
In closing
Overall, the feedback from the WWT team was that Pure Accelerate 2025 was time well spent and was packed full of technology updates, such as the AI-driven Fleet Management tools, that are sure to have a great impact as customers transition their storage into an Enterprise Data Cloud. WWT.com is your single spot for Pure Storage updates, Pure Storage on-demand labs showcasing newly released features, and everything Pure Storage and WWT are doing together around the AI space in our AI Proving Ground (AIPG). Reach out to your WWT account team for more information on how to implement these newly announced features in your storage environment.
* Keynotes can be watched on-demand here.