Pure Storage goes beyond Flash with Pure Fusion, Portworks

Pure storage will launch on-demand database and storage services next year with its new Portworks and Pure Fusion data services. Both are important parts of Pure’s strategy to expand beyond all-flash storage with hybrid cloud-based storage and Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings.

At a virtual event last week, Pure, which delivers exclusively through partners, showcased Pure Fusion and Port Data Services (PDS). Company officials described Pure Fusion as a provisioning platform, management and scaling of enterprise storage, delivered as a service. PDS, which Pure calls “Storage as Code”, is a Kubernetes-based database-as-a-service platform that will enable DevOps professionals to deliver managed data services.

The platforms seek to take infrastructure out of the equation for developers and organizations that have switched to DevOps practices. Pure offers both as on-demand services with an emphasis on hiding storage infrastructure, according to Pure Storage CEO Charles Giancarlo.

“We have a strong focus on accelerating the digital transformation of your infrastructure, making your data more efficient and your organization more agile,” Giancarlo said at the online event. “Storage automation and virtualization were originally developed in the cloud for modern cloud native applications. Pure now offers you this capability for both traditional and cloud native applications in a hybrid cloud environment.

Based on an assessment of Moor Insights and Strategy senior analyst Steve mcdowell, more and more businesses are switching to more flexible, cloud-like on-demand storage and database services. McDowell noted that Pure’s strategy meets these expectations.

Steve McDowell of Moor Insights & Strategy

“We are seeing investments across the industry in increased levels of manageability, flexible options as a service, and public cloud integration.” he noted. “Some vendors do it well, and others do the bare minimum. Pure Storage, with its consistently high NPS scores, clearly understands its customer base and puts the customer experience first. “

Pure fusion

Fusion is a SaaS-based management plan that will provide storage arrays grouped into Availability Zones. The company designed it to automate workload placement and mobility, as well as fleet rebalancing. Fusion includes an API framework that will enable a storage-as-a-platform model that works with existing developer tools.

Dan Kogan, vice president of product management at Pure, said Pure Fusion provides unlimited scalable storage by unifying arrays and optimizing pools.

Dan Kogan of Pure Storage

“This is a new capability that will work in addition to our FlashArray, and basically allow you to make your FlashArrays invisible, ”Kogan told Channel Futures.

Pure Fusion will also allow administrators to create larger storage pools, which will then be exposed to end users in a self-service mansion, ”said Kogan.

They can also provision them from their own resources, the API framework, self-service portals or via Pure1, he added. Pure1 is the framework for monitoring and managing the company.

Because the Pure Fusion management plan provides an infinite pool of storage, administrators will be able to scale beyond the limits of current cluster storage, according to McDowell’s analysis.

“It integrates push-button resource deployment, offers storage capabilities as code, and includes intelligent workload management,” he noted. “It does this on customer-owned on-premises storage, storage provided through Pure as a Service, and supports Pure’s Cloud Block Store. “

Pure’s Kogan said the company will release a private preview of Pure Fusion by the end of the year. Pure expects general availability in the first half of 2022. Initially, Pure Fusion will integrate with Pure FlashArray // X, FlashArray // C and Pure Cloud Block Store. The company said it plans to eventually integrate into its Flashblade and Portworx.

Portworks Data Services

The introduction of Portworks Data Services comes one year later Purely acquired portworks. Portworks offers a Kubernetes-based data services platform that runs business-critical, container-based applications.

Michael Ferranti of Pure Storage

“Portworks is the market leader in containerized storage for modern applications and it has this unique attribute of being infrastructure independent,” said Michael Ferranti, vice president of product and corporate marketing for Portworks at Channel Futures.

It provides automated DBaaS management to simplify the challenges DevOps teams face with microservices used for cloud native applications. PDS enables DevOps engineers to deliver managed and Kubernetes-based data services from SQL, NoSQL, search, and streaming sources, among others.

“And now they have a managed DB-as-a-service instance that they can access that is autonomously managed by Portworks,” Ferranti said. “This means developers don’t have to worry about operations, they just get an endpoint they can connect to, or an endpoint they can send data to with credentials they can connect to. connect to this database. It’s like bringing an RDS- [Amazon’s managed database as a service offering] like experience to any infrastructure.

The advantage of Portworks is that it can manage storage from any vendor, giving partners the ability to expand their business to new accounts.

“Because Portworks is independent of the infrastructure, we see a lot of customers; in fact, most customers don’t use Pure, ”Ferranti added.

PDS is now available as a private preview. Pure said it would be generally available in early 2022.

Broaden partnership opportunities

Since Portworks is independent of the infrastructure, the Portworks Data Services offering could bring Pure’s arrays into new accounts. Likewise, it will enable partners to modernize the infrastructure and database environments of their existing customers.

“PDS makes it easier for those building modern applications to get the data services they need,” said Ferranti. “In the long run, this is a great standalone product that brings many new companies into the Pure ecosystem. “