Pure Storage Archives - Gestalt IT: Recent Episodes
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Portworx is Pure Storage’s end-to-end storage and data management platform for Kubernetes. Purpose-built for scale, it is targeted toward modern cloud-native container workloads. Besides containers, Portworx can also orchestrate Virtual Machines (VMs).
Why Porworx?There are several reasons for choosing Portworx. First and foremost, Portworx offers the full suite of capabilities and services a Global 2000 enterprise requires within a single data platform. Extensive experience and a long production run with large customers make it a reliable and trusted solution.
Customers can build a multi-cloud neutral architecture and run their applications anywhere with it. It is less opinionated about the infrastructure it is running on, and can virtualize almost any kind of infrastructure.
Portworx also actively participates in the Kubernetes community, and works with all major distributions and cloud providers. All that knowledge is built into the platform, making it easy to integrate and use.
AI/MLData powers tomorrow’s businesses and is the oxygen of digital transformation. A data platform is central to this shift, especially for the adoption of AI/ML workloads. Cloud leaders are known to use the cloud-native stack to churn value and insight out of their data, and roll out new features and applications for customers. This stack is built upon a multi-cloud infrastructure focused on automation with Kubernetes and containers.
The Portworx data platform is well-positioned to accelerate these workloads with speed, agility, and cost savings. Data-driven AI/ML workloads require a data platform like it that is capable of handling large amounts of data efficiently. It is scalable, and therefore, well-suited for scale-out data science and AI/ML workloads.
Image Provided by Portworx by Pure Storage End-to-EndPortworx is an end-to-end solution with an active role in training and inference. This facilitates the development of data pipelines and increases the success rate of AI projects, knowing that many projects fail in transitioning from training to inference due to a lack of a solid underlying platform.
With Portworx, the same model can train in parallel on different parts of the dataset, and simultaneously run many models in production without dropping a beat.
Use CasesPortworx has been in use in the automotive business since 2017. Portworx clusters have been used to process large amounts of training data for developing models for self-driving cars.
About 150 factories run Portworx at the edge to manage manufacturing lines for the production of electric vehicles (EVs).
Cyber fraud detection companies are also among the early adopters. Portworx clusters, in these companies, are used to train models for detecting fraud patterns and provide real-time alerts to users.
Other customers have deployed thousands of Jupyter Notebooks to serve data scientists. They work in parallel to analyze streaming data from manufacturing and retail for supply chain analytics.
Vector DatabasesPortworx is known for solving the database challenge within Kubernetes, but also provides solutions for customers requiring vector databases.
Vector databases are essential when working with innovative technologies such as ChatGPT, a conversational tool using generative AI, because they provide optimized efficiency and accuracy for AI solutions that rely on vector embeddings (data). Vector databases enable the integration of structured and unstructured datasets into a single system.
Portworx is integrating more vector databases to support customers in building Large Language Models (LLM) on infrastructures at the core and edge.
EdgeNowadays, inference happens much closer to the edge, and customers want to run Portworx clusters at or close to the edge. The platform has proven to enable end-to-end solutions at scale with thousands of nodes in a cluster at the datacenter. However, deploying it at the edge with fewer nodes is just as feasible.
ConclusionPortworx is a versatile data platform that enables running containers and modern databases at scale in production. It offers comprehensive data services for handling workloads across private, public, and edge computing environments. The platform is especially effective for AI as it handles scale-out workloads and delivers end-to-end AI solutions. It’s popularity predates the hype of generative AI and demand for GPUs. Customers have been using the data platform since many years for internal AI/ML development. With its extensive experience and loyal customer base, Portworx has more than demonstrated its effectiveness in meeting the demanding needs of AI solutions.
For more information, check out the Portworx by Pure Storage website.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Accelerating AI with Portworx Data Platform
In this Tech Note article from Pure Accelerate presented by Pure Storage, Stephen Foskett discusses how the introduction of Pure Storage's FlashArray//E family signifies a significant leap forward in their pursuit of capacity space and cost-effectiveness within the storage market. With its solid specifications, broad application support, and unwavering focus on efficiency, FlashArray//E solidifies Pure Storage's position as a leading provider of unified storage solutions. By addressing the diverse needs of organizations seeking high-performance, scalable, and affordable storage options, Pure Storage continues to innovate and reinforce their influence in the industry.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Pure Storage FlashArray//E Targets Bulk Storage with Capacity and Affordability
In this Tech Note presented by Pure Storage, Stephen Foskett discusses how Pure Storage is committed to delivering an integrated and user-friendly storage experience, not just a new storage array, which they showcased at Pure Accelerate. While the company emphasized the flash versus disk argument, conversations with customers revealed that their decision to invest in Pure Storage arrays was driven by the ease of use, Evergreen lifecycle, and data center efficiency benefits rather than flash technology alone. The expansion of the E family allows Pure Storage to access new markets that were previously reliant on disk alone. This development brings customers closer to achieving an all-Pure Storage data center, aligning with their desire for a streamlined and efficient storage solution. Pure Storage's complete integrated storage solution, combined with their dedication to advancing flash technology, sets them apart in a crowded market and positions them as a trusted partner for customers seeking a comprehensive storage experience.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Pure Storage: The Power of Flash and Customer Satisfaction
In this article presented by Pure Storage, Stephen Foskett discusses the FlashArray R4 platform and how it can empower organizations with high-performance storage arrays tailored to their specific requirements.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Pure Storage Unveils Flash Array R4: Empowering Next-Generation Storage Solutions
In this Tech Note presented by Portworx by Pure Storage, Joey D'Antoni interviews Venkat Ramakrishnan and discusses why databases are one of the essential parts of an application. But they can also frequently be a performance bottleneck for the entire application, and protecting their data is critical to keep operating. With the increased number of database solutions, and the various deployment and management methods in the picture, both on-premises and in the cloud, it has been challenging for operations teams to stay afloat. Portworx Data Services aims to meet this need by simplifying deployment, reducing administrative toil, and helping applications move forward wherever one wants them to run.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Portworx Data Services Makes MongoDB Simpler
In this Tech Note presented by Pure Storage from Pure Accelerate, Joey D'Antoni discusses how Pure Storage has used data science and its best-in-class customer support to help users quickly identify and recover from ransomware attacks. Building this intelligence into the Pure ecosystem helps them plan data protection and capacity without complexity.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: New Releases to Optimize Ransomware Resiliency at Pure//Accelerate 2023
Modern storage is a complex combination of both hardware and software. While software-only storage options do exist, if you’re after high-end performance, you’ll have to deal with the nuances of hardware sooner rather than later.
And this is especially true when dealing with modern flash storage. Assumptions from the HDD era no longer apply. What works well for spinning rust is often irrelevant, if not outright harmful, when applied to modern flash.
Software Runs on HardwareTalking directly to flash as it wants to be spoken to removes friction that only exists because of outdated abstractions. A SATA bridge between the outside world and the flash devices was useful when systems needed to speak SATA to the storage. But what if we don’t?
If we move to a higher level abstraction such as iSCSI, SMB or object protocols, why keep using an outdated bridge to nowhere? Translating from S3 to SATA only to re-translate to flash just slows things down. Why not skip the SATA bridge completely? That’s just what Pure Storage did with its DirectFlash approach. Instead of using commodity SSDs, Pure uses flash media directly.
To do this requires knowledge of what the flash hardware layer is doing, and what it is capable of. Changing the software in ignorance of the layer below the abstraction will only lead to pain. But with expert knowledge of how things really work at the hardware level, software can be made to dance. Consider the ways in which the early Apple II was designed to provide color at a time when color monitors were rare and expensive. And yet it required fewer chips to achieve!
These kinds of advances require working with both hardware and software together, rather than in isolation. Software runs on hardware, and understanding the target environment well can provide an edge to those looking for superior features or performance.
Yet as consumers of storage, we would usually prefer not to care too much about how things happen, so long as they do. We want to use abstractions, not talk directly to the flash ourselves.
The Right Amount of AbstractionThe challenge with abstraction is finding the right amount to use. Too little, and we have to wrestle with too many trivial or frustrating details from the underlying systems that were supposed to be abstracted away. Too much, and we’re unable to get our work done. Neither is appealing as a customer, and these issues often reveal themselves at the worst possible time. They’re exposed by edge cases, by things that aren’t part of the day-to-day.
Storage vendors like Pure encounter these edge cases early, often as they’re developing new product features and seeking feedback from customers. They get a variety of perspectives in order to figure out what the right amount of abstraction is in practice, not just in theory.
Yet the ‘right’ amount of abstraction is hard to prove objectively. Most of the time it’s a matter of judgement, taste, and wisdom earned from experience. While there may be some customers for whom manually tuning the compression algorithm or data layout might make sense, most are better served by letting Pure automate things.
By knowing the internals of how and when data is written to the flash hardware, Pure can adjust how the software functions on the fly. Data can be moved, or not moved, depending on the condition of the flash. Compression algorithms can be adjusted to suit the workload, automatically.
Freedom from FrictionHaving both hardware and software options available opens up more ways to address design challenges like this. Is a new compression algorithm best implemented in hardware, or in software? Should it be custom hardware, or a commodity part?
Or perhaps, as with the recently announced DirectCompress accelerator card for FlashArray//XL, a combination of software and hardware works best? DirectCompress uses a fairly standard component—an FPGA card—and combines it with Pure’s software expertise to improve inline compression performance. Other choices were available, like ASICs, GPUs, or staying with CPUs, but Pure’s experience and judgement guided the decision.
As customers, we can happily stay using abstractions and concentrate on the results. Does using DirectFlash improve performance? Does an FPGA help our workloads? We have performance and functionality goals to meet, so what ultimately matters is if our storage choices work.
Pure’s expertise with both software and hardware working together means it has more options to succeed, and so do we. Read more on FlashArray//XL on the Pure Storage website.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Innovating with Both Hardware and Software with Pure Storage
Last week, I met with the Pure Storage’s FlashBlade product team to hear about their newest offering for unstructured data storage. Given Pure’s focus on high-performance, scale-out all-flash solutions, I assumed that I’d be hearing about a new edition of FlashBlade//S. But instead, we talked about their new software-plus-hardware product aimed at workloads with similar access performance needs: FlashBlade//E.
The Current Storage MarketTypically, oragnizations keep their cooler data sets stored on spinning disks or other non-flash options to save on costs. Although they tend to be slower, these technologies remain the cheaper alternative for large data sets that are very infrequently accessed.
Traditionally, data professionals think of data access needs as hot, warm, cold, and archive. The acquisition and operational costs decline from hot to archive.
However, until now, the most cost-effective option for cold and archive data is spinning disks that are available at affordable price points. There is hardly any organization left that uses tape backups, for these reasons.
Of course, nothing stops an organization from hosting all its data on high-performance infrastructures other than the fact that data growth continues to be a significant factor contributing to the total cost of ownership for storing more and more data. Additionally, most of these cooler datasets tend to grow faster than transactional data. That runs up the cost really really quickly.
FlashBlade//EPure’s new solution builds on the same software and hardware architecture as the FlashBlade//S for unstructured data. Pure is delivering this offering with nearly all the features of their premier product while cutting costs to the point where organizations can save money moving from non-flash options.
Same FeaturesPure Storage wishes to make FlashBlade even more accessible and convenient for their current and new customers. To that end, it has included everything that FlashBlade//S solutions have:
- Scalability: Hardware uses the same extensible and upgradable Direct Flash Modules
- Capacity: Up to tens of petabytes
- Networking: Up to 16x100GbE, doubling max of FlashBlade//S
- Energy: 2,300W (Compute plus Storage) or 1,600W (Storage only)
- Software: Runs the same Purity/FB software
- Size: Hardware dimensions are much smaller than disk storage
- Data Security: Supports the same features such as SafeMode immutable snapshots as well as always-on encryption
The datasheet for FlashBlade//E has more technical specifications.
Lower Cost Lowering costs is the primary focus of this product. Pure says that the acquisition costs are similar to those of comparable disk solutions, and at a total cost of ownership of about $0.20 US per GB raw, it is 40% lower. Pure also points to costs savings over traditional storage because all-flash saves on energy use, at about one-fifth of that of disk systems.
Target WorkloadsPure uses the term repository workloads to describe the best fit for data access and usage for FlashBlade//E, and I think that helps explain the types of workloads they want to support. These include traditional unstructured data such as media, backups, snapshots, data lakes, documents, and records. These are large volume datasets that have a huge variety of performance and access needs.
Sample Use CasesConsider medical imaging as a use case. It would involve storing digital artifacts like these at a high resolution for a very long time. But in reality, they get accessed only a few times a year, depending on how long ago they were created.
The same goes for large data lakes, where data always flows in but never leaves the lake. Moreover, given that data lakes typically support data in its raw, non-aggregated form, they tend to be loaded with mostly uncurated data, and have no set structure to the same data from multiple sources. Add to that the fact that we often store raw, cleansed, and curated versions of these data. Data lakes grow faster than transaction systems such as data warehouses.
IoT streaming media is another great example of large volumes of data being stored in raw, cleansed, and analyzed versions. You might need to process all that data at the time of ingestion and archive it to storage for the longer term.
Target CustomersPure wants to entice their existing customer base to migrate all their spinning disk storage to FlashBlade//E, and that makes perfect sense. Expanding footprint in a datacenter is always easier if you already have products there. So if Pure’s estimates for cost and energy savings come anywhere near what they are predicting, it’s a win-win for both organizations.
However, Pure also sees a path for new customers with different requirements for high-performance all-flash storage. With the new price points and cost savings, these organizations with large unstructured data needs will see sense in considering FlashBlade//E as a solution for their repository workloads.
What Does the //E in the Name Stand for?As you may have guessed, the main focus of the E branding is Environmental. However, Pure also points to the lower cost feature as Economical, the simplicity provided as Effortless, and their Evergreen//Oneoptions as Everlasting.
With 10 to 20 times greater reliability and innovative designs, Pure claims that their products deliver 85% e-waste reductions over traditional disk storage. Given all this, I think this product deserves the //E branding.
Karen’s ObservationsPure has created a new entry point for organizations that have not yet transformed to an all-flash storage. With FlashBlade//E, they have opened a door for current customers to move to a more sustainable, energy-efficient set of storage solutions. I’ve previously written about Pure Storage’s commitment to building products that reduce energy usage and mitigate planned obsolescence. Their scale-out framework enables companies to extend the life of their storage infrastructure easier and with less downtime. To quote from my previous article, “This is the way I want all technology to go: upgrade instead of replace.”
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Meet FlashBlade//E, Pure Storage’s All-Flash Solution with Same Features but Lower Cost
Sustainability is one of the most pressing themes of our times in IT. Every organization that is a part of this wave is pushing for it by fulfilling their obligations. At Cisco Live EMEA 2023, corporate sustainability resonated in Cisco and its partners’ commitment toward going net zero, transitioning to renewable energy, and in the overall business model. Discussion around climate change and circular economy took centerstage as executives spoke about ESG risks and opportunities, and highlighted Cisco’s goals and initiatives around environmental sustainability.
At the event, former network engineer, and Tech Field Day events lead, Tom Hollingsworth sat down with Eric Blonda, Global Alliance Executive at Cisco, and Remko Deenik, Director Systems Engineering at Pure Storage, backstage to talk about these trends, and learn about their companies’ sustainability strategies.
Turning the Page on an Era of Reckless CapitalismUntil a few decades, sustainability was not a even priority on companies’ tech spend list. Organizations operated with a downright capitalist mentality, with heavy focus on profitability. It was normal to turn a blind eye to problems like emissions and e-waste that were often dismissed as unimportant.
Fast-forward a few years, climate change sweeps through the globe, opening our eyes to the alarming reality that in order to preserve the future of the planet, industries need to reduce the impacts on environment. The first step towards that would be to embed ESG in operations, and modify business models around it.
As awareness grew, customers came at it with a growing intensity. Their purchasing habits changed overnight, making it clear that if their sustainability criteria are not met by a certain vendor, they will spend their money on a vendor that does.
“It’s the top customer concern, and we’re working in every part of our company, every part of our product line, to make sure that sustainability is a priority,” informed Cisco’s Eric Blonda.
Seeing as digital transformation is the best chance to survive in the business, companies in the last few years have started taking small steps towards sustainable practices to create more positive impacts. Today corporate sustainability initiatives are put under heavy scrutiny by authorities and customers alike.
Sustainability Pay-OffsCompanies and consumers have both come to recognize the merits of sustainability in the modern economy. Reducing energy footprint and waste inherently saves money. So, delaying the transition to a sustainable IT is not in the interest of either businesses, or their consumers.
The cost savings generated from sustainability initiatives has driven a lot of companies in the recent years, and inspired their customers to transition to sustainable practices.
Sustainability with Cisco and Pure StorageCisco and Pure Storage are jointly accelerating this transition to a circular economy. Pure Storage has sustainability embedded into their operations since many years.
“The way we’ve designed our system has been very sustainable from the start. But, the last decade, people weren’t all that interested. It’s now really picking up interest, primarily because of the energy consumption part,” said Remko Deenik.
Mr Hollingsworth pointed out, “It’s been a problem in the past in enterprise IT where we get locked into these systems where if you want to increase capacity, you have to get rid of the system you’ve been using, and you have to buy a new one because the new one is 10% faster and 20% quieter. But I could still be using the one that I was using.”
Pure Storage’s Evergreen model offers customers a break from the legacy consumption model. On it, customers can upgrade the components, and still continue to leverage the framework without overhauling it until it reaches expiration. This vastly reduces the amount of e-waste produced at datacenters, not to mention generate substantial cost savings for the operators.
“We’re upgrading all hardware components within the duration of the system. We do that disruptively, but by just upgrading the components that we need to upgrade, we minimize waste and usage of components, in addition to, of course from a sustainability perspective, shipping optimized packaging, optimized power consumption and all of that,” informed Mr. Deenik.
Green Datacenters with FlashStackRecently, Pure Storage and Cisco have launched FlashStack as-a-Service, a converged infrastructure solution that constitutes Pure FlashArray and Cisco UCS X-Series chassis, UCS Fabric interconnects and Cisco Nexus switches.
“It aligns very well, from a technical perspective, to the way we architect our system, and how Cisco’s architecting their system, using stateless design, being able to replace components at will without having to replace the entire system,” said Mr. Deenik.
Mr. Hollingsworth agreed that such flexibility would be needle-moving in the way enterprises stage their upgrade cycles, and will be able to “use the least amount of components possible to produce good performance for their users, but also good performance for our planet.”
“If you look at all the recent product announcements, you’ll see that there has always been a lot of focus on reducing complexity, and reducing the number of cables for example, reducing power, and all of that. It is part of our commitment,” said Mr. Deenik.
FlashStack uses Pure’s Evergreen for discreet scaling and Cisco’s network equipment for reduced complexity. The Pure Storage Evergreen consumption model is fully pay-per-use and lends great flexibility to consumers. Fully managed, it requires no planning at the customers’ end, and users can pay only for what they use. So customers neither overbuy capacity, nor sustain losses from underutilization
“At the start of the contract, a lot of the customers invest for the next five years. They buy a lot of empty capacity that just sits there running in the datacenter, using power for no good reason. We’re able, with this subscription model, to just right-size the solution as well as provide spare capacity so that they’re free to go wherever they want to go. We only put the equipment in place,” explained Mr. Deenik.
Additionally, the model affords flexible downsizing for times when businesses need to scale back their infrastructure when moving to public cloud. Pure Storage removes the free equipment and repurpose them to fit other customers’ environments.
Wrapping UpAchieving sustainability in an industry as robust and impactful as IT requires companies to first, believe that a clean, sustainable future is achievable, and unite in their efforts to power that future. Cisco and Pure Storage are paving the way toward environmental sustainability with their initiatives and innovations. With FlashStack, not only do the customers have a way to control cost, but also break out of legacy infrastructures to be in tune with the circular economy for better e-waste management and emission control.
To learn more about FlashStack as-a-Service, visit flashstack.com. For events from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live EMEA 2023, check out the Tech Field Day website.
Panelists for Today’s Interview:Remko Deenik, Technical Director Europe at Pure Storage. Connect with Remko on LinkedIn.
Eric Blonda, Global Alliance Executive at Cisco. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.
ModeratorTom Hollingsworth
Twitter@NetworkingNerd
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Achieving Sustainability in Datacenters with Pure Storage and Cisco
The financial industry is in a constant state of flux between moving to the cloud, and maintaining compliance with the unique requirements of on-premises datacenters. The growing need for availability and scalability, and the rising energy costs to run onsite datacenters are not helping with the back-and-forth journey.
Bare Metal as-a-Service (BMaaS), powered by Pure Storage, is offering a solution to this. By combining the economic efficiency of a consumption-based OPEX model with bare metal servers, it addresses the specific requirements of the financial industry.
Constraints of the Financial Industry in a Fast-Moving EnvironmentThe financial industry is facing a strange dilemma. Stuck between the ever-increasing demand for innovative data and availability, and the need to maneuver between private and public clouds. Organizations are struck with a new realization. As they embarked on the journey to cloud, it became quickly evident that a simple lift and shift of applications wouldn’t cut it.
An application that is not cloud-aware, or cloud-native, might not perform as expected, or not work at all. It is quite common for public cloud providers to have shared environments. Running an application in such an environment, with several tenants in a shared infrastructure, might affect performance as a tenant increases its compute requirements, or a run-away process starts to consume more CPU cycles that the provider is unaware of.
Lastly, as finance is a heavily regulated industry, the protection of sensitive data is of utmost importance. Being unable to be certain of where the data resides is a huge challenge for organizations that are already struggling with a tonnage of internal and government-issued audits and regulations.
Moving the Physical Infrastructure to a Hosted EnvironmentPure’s BMaaS is a new offering that brings a different approach to solving these challenges. It is looking to combine the benefits of cloud-based infrastructure with the autonomy of on-premises datacenters. It provides customers with full control of the hardware stack and single tenancy. And it allows institutions to configure bare metal servers to their specifications, without sharing their resources with other customers.
BMaaS is the product of a partnership between Pure Storage and Equinix which utilizes Equinix’s datacenters around the world for computing, and Pure’s data storage. All aspects of a local datacenter, from hardware to software support to lifecycle management, are under one contract and handled by one vendor.
Scalability, Data Governance, and Energy EfficiencyBMaaS allows organizations to move their datacenters and operate them in a hosted environment, built to the required specifications. Utilizing Equinix’s vast infrastructure allows firms to move their data closer to the edge, where compute and storage are needed. The same infrastructure enables data governance, as it is possible to define the region of the datacenter and comply with regulations, such as GDRP.
One of the biggest differences, when compared to public cloud offerings, is the single tenancy aspect of the service. Aside from performance issues that could be caused by other tenants, there is also an added security aspect. Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities surfaced years ago, and the industry is still dealing with the threat of infected systems being able to break through a hypervisor and infect other VMs running on the same host.
Another scenario is vulnerability testing on a shared system. While a tenant performs vulnerability and penetration testing against their own systems, it can have consequences for other tenants operating on the same host.
BMaaS aims to provide the flexibility to adjust to changing demands. If there is an increase in compute and storage demands, BMaaS enables the organization to spin up more resources faster than it would be possible with an on-premises data center. And while traditional data centers will occur costs regardless of utilization, BMaaS follows the cloud model as a pay-as-you-go service. Organizations only have to pay for resources being consumed.
Last but not least, an important aspect is energy footprint. As energy costs keep rising, running datacenters becomes more expensive. In recent years, one benchmark for servers that has become more relevant is performance-per-watt. Modern CPUs and higher-density servers allow for reduced power consumption. By having a hosted bare metal server, the cost for new hardware that can deliver such benchmarks shifts from the organization to the provider.
ConclusionThe financial industry has unique needs that other sectors might not be facing. With things like regulations, technical debt, and an ever-increasing demand for scalability and availability, a one size fits all approach is the least suitable solution. BMaaS presents a viable solution for organizations that want cloud like deployment and consumption benefits, but are unwilling to sacrifice performance and privacy on a shared system. It aims at combining the best of both worlds, from full control of an on-premises datacenter to the ease of availability of cloud computing.
BMaaS is available now. Learn more about it by looking at setting up a demo.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Bare Metal as-a-Service is Packing up the On-Premises Datacenter
Housing and backing up Microsoft SQL data has always had its challenges. Database administrators want control of their data, and they want it close to the processing. Storage admins have to contend with resolving data gravity issues while finding ways to back up the databases across different platforms and protocols. With Microsoft announcing new storage integrations with SQL Server 2022 at the recent PASS Data Community Summit, and using the power of the Pure Storage FlashBlade//S, DBAs and storage admins can finally find an easier path forward to these problems.
S3 and SQL Server 2022At the 2022 PASS Summit, Microsoft announced that the next release of SQL Server would feature S3 (AWS Simple Storage Service) Object Storage integration. This is going to offer up Parquet, CSV, and Delta file support with the initial release. The SQL Server 2022 (16.x) release’s storage offerings are going to be more robust right out of the box, as opposed to gradually releasing additional file types. This could not have come at a better time considering Microsoft’s announcement that SQL Server 2019’s Big Data Clusters would be depreciated in future releases, impacting the ability to scale.
Pure Storage and Microsoft’s RelationshipThere is a strong relationship between Pure Storage and Microsoft, including many Microsoft MVPs on Pure’s staff. With this relationship, Pure Storage has assisted Microsoft in the research and development of the S3 integrations with SQL Server 2022. While not the only partner in the ecosystem to help with this development, Pure Storage has been a leading alliance in this project.
Where Do Pure Storage and FlashBlade//S Fit?Historically speaking, backing up SQL data away from the original storage array was a multi-step process when using S3. Pre-S3 availability, the SQL databases that ran on Pure Storage FlashArray, the data would be backed up to another FlashArray, and then a 3rd party tool would be utilized to convert to S3 and migrate to a FlashBlade. With the new announcement, the entire process is streamlined and data is moved directly to the FlashBlade, simplifying the work of both DBAs and storage administrators.
Besides simplifying the process of protecting the SQL Server data, the addition of S3 and the use of Pure Storage FlashBlade//S has certain benefits. The processing and storage horsepower of the //S allows storage administrators to scale out their SQL environments, rather than just scaling up.
Pure Storage also allows for a single namespace to be utilized. With the power of the FlashBlade//S’ multi-threading and read/write buffers, enables accelerated backup and restores. Data provided by Pure Storage also indicates that as the number of databases on an array grows, the speed at which data is backed up and restored also increases.
With the S3 protocol utilizing REST API, the syntax to configure backup and restoration targets is similar to what they already know. Pure Storage anticipates no barrier-to-entry or learning curve with the release of S3 for SQL Server 2022.
Final ThoughtsTime and time again, the innovation and collaboration that emerge from the team at Pure Storage elevate not only their offerings, but also what the partner ecosystem can deliver. By working with Microsoft, Pure Storage and others have simplified the day-to-day operations within the datacenter. DBAs and storage administrators can rest well knowing that the process to protect the SQL data has been improved.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Improving the Relationship Between Storage Admins and DBAs with Pure Storage and Microsoft
increased Focus on Going GreenThese days you don’t have to look far to understand the importance and responsibility we all have regarding sustainability to reduce global warming and its impact on our planet. The need for change in sustainability is perhaps even more apparent at present, with world leaders meeting at the COP27 summit in Egypt, and eyes on businesses’ environmental policies across the globe. Europe is currently amid an unprecedented energy crisis with rising costs, resulting in everyone needing a better handle on energy usage. In that background, organisations must prove their green credentials to win new business with clients.
Meeting with Pure StorageI was lucky enough to meet with Prakash Darji, General Manager of the Digital Experience Group at Pure Storage, to talk about their latest sustainability initiative – the Pure1 Sustainability Assessment. Meeting with Prakash is always interesting as I know the conversation will be more than technology alone. It’ll about the coming together of technology with other business-led factors. I always enjoy these subjects where you can see technology reaching out into the business context. The intersection between business and technology is precisely where the Pure1 Sustainability Assessment comes in.
Introducing the Pure1 Storage Assessment The Pure1 Sustainability Assessment injects actionable sustainability insights directly into the Pure1 console. This information allows storage administrators and sustainability leaders to get clear insights into energy and carbon usage of the Pure platform across the organisation. With high-level expectations placed on businesses to be more sustainable, this provides critical information that can be used for reporting. The insights allow for changes to be made to improve efficiencies. The Pure1 Sustainability Assessment delivers metrics on three levels –
- Overall energy and carbon usage across the entire organisation
- Consumption at a data center location level
- Consumption at an individual array level
The Pure1 Sustainability Assessment can be quickly accessed from the assessment section of the dashboard menu within the Pure1 console. It initially presents a colour-coded breakdown covering all the appliances. Green indicates appliances with a good sustainability status, yellow indicates those with suggested recommendations, and red indicates appliances that require action. Quickly hovering over the appliances reveal further insights including appliance name, model and location, The Pure1 Sustainability Assessment can be quickly accessed from the assessment section of the dashboard menu within the Pure1 console. It initially presents a colour-coded breakdown covering all the appliances. Green indicates appliances with a good sustainability status, yellow indicates those with suggested recommendations, and red indicates appliances that require action. Quickly hovering over the appliances reveal further insights including appliance name, model and location, as well as the title for any insights. Clicking on the appliance shows further information detailing the insights.
In the image, an appliance has been identified with two insights – a recommendation to upgrade to newer, more efficient hardware, and an underutilisation warning. Based on their needs, users can decide if taking the recommended action would work for their technical and business needs to allow for an improved sustainability score. That is a critical element to consider when reviewing the sustainability score. Changes will need to be made based on insight from multiple parties, similar to the FinOps approach in this article.
Next to the appliance overview, is the annual power usage projection with a power-saving metric. Users also get a tuneable carbon usage meter based on their organisation’s renewable energy utilization.
Focusing on Sustainability at a Data Center LevelUsers can get a datacenter focused view by selecting the map view at the top of the page or the datacenter view icon on the right side of the page. The image below shows both views on the screen. The map view shows the geographical location and the number of appliances on a map.
From here, users can drill into the individual locations. On the right is the broader breakdown at the datacenter level. This breakdown gives users key metrics like total peak power and heat, total actual power and heat, alongside the number of rack units in use. This view offers a high-level status of each of the arrays with the ability to drill down further.
Drilling further into the information gives an individual breakdown of each appliance at the bottom of the page. From here, users can see configuration, versioning, load, power and heat metrics, and the efficiency score.
One area worth highlighting is the ability to automate report creation. Usually, those responsible for sustainability within an organisation aren’t the same as those managing the appliances. Automating the report creation allows those in need to have quick access to the required information. This allows the required business and technology discussions to be undertaken where relevant. Reports can be preconfigured and scheduled, and sent via email to the required participants.
Pure Storage has already well-documented its focus and goals regarding the sustainability of its products. For example, a recent ESG report found that Pure Storage products use less power, space, and cooling than existing and competitive solutions. I believe including a proactive tool, such as the Pure1 Sustainability Assessment, puts vital information and insight in the hands of people who can make the changes.
Final ThoughtsThis is only the beginning of this tool within the Pure ecosystem. In the future, there’ll be more options allowing users to opt into a carbon offsetting programme or offer intelligent movement based on business and performance needs and renewable energy availability. Whilst these features are not included today, it’s not hard to see such features now being a possibility at some point in the future.
Pure Storage’s FinOps, and AIOps approaches tie neatly into the subject of Sustainability Assessment. From a FinOps perspective, this tool could give further information regarding energy costs and green credentials that could be used within an organization’s FinOps assessments. AIOps could automate the movement where desired, based on energy cost or green energy availability.
The Pure1 Sustainability Assessment and the already green credentials of Pure Storage’s offerings are exactly what some organisations are looking for when making technology selections. Increasingly, organisations need to ensure that technology investments deliver tangible business outcomes, and being able to help prove or improve green credentials will be precisely the areas that will be considered.
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In November, Pure Storage gave a presentation at the Storage Field Day event (where I was a delegate) on the efficiency and ease of their Evergreen subscription-based services. The presentation focused on the power and cooling savings available, and explained how in-place upgrade eliminates the need for a managed migration of data.
There’s a lot of material out there about Pure’s array offerings and supporting software services, but I wasn’t familiar with how these could be wrapped up in an Evergreen subscription, primarily aimed at setting up and evolving cloud-like services within an organization.
Storage Subscription MethodsThe point of Pure’s Evergreen subscriptions is to provide the ability to update storage as new features and capabilities become available. Pure’s slogan for this is “Modernize as you go.” Another reason to look at subscription models is to have a growth roadmap that matches the organization. Whether an organization has a 3-year infrastructure budget or a pay-as-you-go model, the subscription models are designed to keep on top of changes.
Evergreen subscriptions can be consumed in several different ways. The original subscription was Evergreen//Forever, first released as Evergreen Gold. In this model, arrays and software are purchased as a unit, with the subscription providing upgrades to newer software and controllers as they become available. Users can add capacity to Evergreen//Forever any time.
The entirely cloud-based subscription is Evergreen//One, previously sold as Pure-as-a-Service. In this offering , all hardware and configurations are owned by Pure and are delivered as Storage-as-a-Service to the customer. In contrast with Evergreen//Forever, which offers organizations traditional appliance ownership with a subscription to software, ever-modern hardware, and customer support, Evergreen//One is entirely subscription-based, with Pure taking on the responsibility of delivering storage where it is required, offering on-demand storage service with the flexibility of on-premises deployment. This provides both ends of the spectrum, depending on an organization’s needs and how their business is structured.
Evergreen//FlexTheir newest subscription-based model is Evergreen//Flex, intended as a middle ground combining the best of both worlds. Evergreen//Flex is aimed at customers who want or need to own their own hardware, but like the ability to consume as they go.
The idea is that an organization determines how many array instances they need and then buy that hardware at a discounted rate. The subscription rate is based on the amount of storage used. Capacity and additional controllers can be added as needed, and is covered by the subscription.
The Evergreen//Flex subscription has a minimum 36-month term and requires 30% reserve capacity. The amount of storage used is aggregated across the entire Evergreen forest. (Pure uses the term “fleet-wide.” In any case, all arrays are covered by the subscription). This means some arrays (like those for file services) can run below the 30% reserve, while other systems used (for say test and dev) might run well above—all while not incurring overage penalties at the individual array level.
Pure measures the daily capacity usage and generates monthly recurring bills. This is normally done through Pure’s phone-home capability in the arrays. For dark sites or places that don’t use phone-home capabilities, a built-in report generator allows the customer to report usage to Pure.
As Flexible as a Pine BoughEvergreen//Flex provides some flexibility in a few ways. First, it allows capacity to be moved from one array to another, as needed. This allows individual arrays to be built or torn down based on seasonal or ephemeral needs. And capacity that is no longer needed isn’t left stranded in an underused array.
Secondly, it allows organizations to own their own equipment but only pay for the capacity they use. This comes in handy when there are individual projects that demand their own systems, but don’t need the entire capacity of an array. In this way, the organization can get the several arrays it needs, but only ends up paying for one array’s worth of capacity.
Finally, Evergreen//Flex provides the flexibility to have the storage reserve needed for occasional spikes, but not pay for it when it’s not in use. This means transient workloads can be run when they come up without the up-front expenditure to provision for them.
Why Should We Care?The Evergreen//Flex model is designed to work for a variety of organizations.
If an organization needs the capabilities of an all-flash array, but not necessarily the full capacity of it, subscribing only for the capacity used keeps costs down. Service providers, asset-heavy companies and regulated environments often have requirements for on-premises owned equipment that can’t be provided “as-a-service.” At the same time, cloud-like provisioning and not having to pay for stranded capacity keeps Evergreen//Flex economical.
Service providers can avoid paying for capacity when their users aren’t buying it. Asset-heavy companies get depreciable assets on the books and the ability to run their own private clouds. Regulated industries and agencies can securely maintain their own data, and don’t even need a phone-home capability. And in each case, the Evergreen program provides a Customer Success Engineer to make the best of the //Flex experience.
If this is interesting to you, you can find out a lot more about Pure Storage’s Evergreen/Flex subscription from their website.
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IntroductionRansomware is one of the biggest threats facing any company today, and for good reason. The raw numbers of ransomware attacks are going up- Symantec reported that infections in 2021 doubled from the previous year, and that pace shows no signs of slowing down. Similarly, the sophistication of ransomware payloads and attack strategies is going up at least as fast. Modern ransomware attacks do not just attempt to lock down a single infected server. Instead, they attempt to lock down the entire IT operation. And the main target of these modern attacks is not systems- it’s data.
Solving The Problem of Data Sprawl Data storage requirements are growing faster than ever. Gartner warned of exponential data growth a decade ago, and that trend is also showing no signs of slowing down. In many companies this need for space has led to a pattern of buying storage systems such as SANs and NAS devices ad-hoc. And the old systems don’t just go away- just because you’ve bought a new SAN, the thinking goes, doesn’t mean that the old SAN is no longer usable. But this has significant downsides when it comes to data management and protection. More places data is stored means that there is more surface area for ransomware to attack. This is doubly dangerous if those old SANs are no longer supported with updates or security patches.
It is more important than ever to consolidate storage systems for data analysis purposes. A large inventory of storage systems makes it hard to know what data truly matters, meaning that many organizations keep a lot of data on disk that is no longer of any value. Smaller, more manageable footprints of data storage systems means that data can be analyzed in real-time, from one platform. This makes it easier for an organization to merge old and new data together based on defined use cases, and only keep the data that they truly need.
Protecting Your Data With Pure Storage Solving for these problems is the heart of Pure Storage’s Consolidate, Connect & Protect strategy. In short, Pure’s solutions enable you to:
- Consolidate all your data together on one performant and flexible platform
- Connect your new and old data and analyze it for health and viability to your business
- Protect it from threats like ransomware using industry-leading security features
The Importance of BackupsOnce you’ve consolidated all your data (and fine-tuned it to ensure that it is in the finest shape it can be in), you will certainly want to protect it. The first line of defense when it comes to protection is backups- and unfortunately, bad actors know this too. PurityOS has specific security features to protect your backups, no matter what backup software vendor you use. Two of them that work extremely well together are Immutable Snapshots, and SafeMode.
Immutable Snapshots First up is Immutable Snapshots. Ordinarily, a backup software will store the first days/weeks of backup snapshots on a separate part of the Data Storage device. This asynchronous copy of your data means that it can be recovered quickly if required. It also means that snapshots on the SAN (or NAS) are a prime target for ransomware. Making your snapshots Immutable means that once a snapshot is taken, it cannot be modified or deleted by anyone- including someone with administrative access to the PurityOS console. When you set up your system, you enable the policies that dictate deletion schedules. Once those policies are set, those snapshots are untouchable outside of the preset policy.
SafeModeThe next level of protection that PurityOS has available is called SafeMode. This takes the idea of Immutable to the next level by requiring two specific and independent storage administrators to work in concert with Pure’s Support team to make changes to things such as Immutable Snapshot policy. This separation of control function makes it nearly impossible for a malicious attacker of any kind to delete the policies that protect the snapshots.
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Figure 1 – SafeMode works on the PurityOS level, freeing you to use whatever backup software/method you want and still get industry-leading protection.Additionally, if Pure Support does receive requests that are deemed suspicious to be immediately reported back to the storage admins at the site that is being attacked.
ConclusionThe scope and scale of modern ransomware attacks means that the IT Security mindset has to focus on “when” they will suffer an attack, not “if.” Much like zero-trust in the network and identity space, we need to take every possible precaution against attacks in the Data Storage and Backup/Recovery space. Pure Storage’s Consolidate, Connect & Protect strategy is a great place for any organization to start.
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Cloud is not always “pay for what you consume”. For enterprise storage underneath demanding I/O-driven workloads such as databases, to get the most speed out of the underlying platform, the model shifts to “pay for what you allocate”. Each VM must allocate more storage capacity than is necessary to maintain the required storage speed for a given workload. For these types of workloads, especially at a larger scale, this model is simply too expensive, but Pure Cloud Block Store is here to help you reduce your monthly storage OPEX, improve database performance, and consolidate storage management.
Performance Ceilings Mean Thick EverythingPublic cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), offer simplistic storage for your IaaS workloads. Provision a virtual machine, attach a few virtual disks with the speed characteristics needed to sustain your workload, and you can start configuring your server. This architecture works at a micro-level. However, these disks each come with a performance ceiling, as do the virtual machines themselves. Every virtual disk provisioned is thick provisioned, meaning that you pay for all of the space – and performance – that you allocate, even if you do not consume all of it for your applications.
For example, your current VM has a time sensitive nightly process that consumes roughly 11,000 IOPs as it chews through the previous day’s sales data while it runs each morning. The peak space consumed on disk is a not insignificant 500GB. Take the Azure E8s_v5 virtual machine scale. This scale contains eight vCPUs and 64GB of RAM, and can attach up to 16 data disks. The VM itself has an uncached cumulative storage performance ceiling across all connected virtual disks of 290MB/s and 12,800 total read and write IOPs.
Now, add the performance ceilings of the individual virtual disks. A PremiumSSD P30 one-terabyte performance-oriented virtual disk has a performance ceiling of 5,000 IOPs and 200 MB/s. A P40 two-terabyte virtual disk has a performance ceiling of 7,500 IOPs and 250MB/s. If your workload needs the ability to maximize the I/O performance for this VM scale, the ideal configuration is to provision two P40 disks and try to split up the I/O workload across both disks.
If your workload only requires half a terabyte of space, but needs the performance characteristics only present in larger disks, you’re now overprovisioning the virtual disks you deploy just to maintain the performance. Overprovisioning costs start to stack up. Even “Ultra” disks will be held back by the performance ceilings of the VM itself, even though you can provision disk space allocated separately from the IOPs and throughput ceilings, and costs significantly more for this privilege than premium SSDs.
Now, do this for ten virtual machines. Or one hundred. Or a thousand. Your monthly cloud bill is growing exponentially larger, all because you are overpaying for space allocated just to maintain the necessary performance.
Take a real-world example from a manufacturing organization. Eleven servers’ performance metrics were reviewed to show storage read demand. Note that not all workloads are stressing their storage at the same time.
If each VM has their attached virtual disks sized for the peak I/O demand from each workload, the following chart illustrates the maximum read IOPs required each business day of the week.
Each VM must have provisioned a significant amount of storage just to have the performance ceilings high enough to keep up with the demand. Sized together, this represents a minimum provisioned IOPs storage of almost 124,000 IOPs of virtual disks! The monthly storage costs are most likely now exceeding the cost of the compute for these servers.
Stacking the read demand from each workload shows that most of the workloads are not firing high read rates at the same periods of time.
Thin vs. Thick Aggregate ProvisioningEnter Pure Cloud Block Store. Pure Cloud Block Store is constructed on top of native cloud resources and purpose-built to bring the Pure Storage experience to the public cloud.
Pure Cloud Block Store can allow you to provision storage based on cumulative consumption rather than individual VM-level consumption rates. In essence, you can thin-provision your cloud storage rather than thick-provision it. All of the enterprise features that Pure customers are accustomed to are now present in the cloud, such as data deduplication and compression, snapshots and LUNs provisioned from snapshots (think production to pre-production database refresh), encryption at rest, and replication.
In the example listed above, the VMs are connected to the Pure Cloud Block Store via 10GbE networking, working around the VM-scale storage I/O performance ceilings. While the individual components underneath the Pure Cloud Block Store are subject to the individual ceilings imposed by the cloud providers, the performance of the storage connected to the VMs is limited simply by the amount of networking throughput present on each VM. The Pure Cloud Block Store is now sized for a peak demand of just 50,000 IOPs, an almost 2.5x reduction in peak I/O handling. The cloud costs are reduced, the performance and efficiency are improved for the cloud workloads, and because the VM-scale storage performance ceiling are no longer a problem, the individual workloads will benefit from the higher ceilings.
Additionally, for certain workloads that have multiple copies of the same data (such a databases in a highly available configuration, or preproduction copies of production workloads), the data savings present in Pure Cloud Block Store allows the administrator to provision far less storage than was previously required. Data savings features of inline compression and deduplication are built into Pure Cloud Block Store, and copies of the same data are reduced to zero, which means you save even more money. Network ingress and egress costs for SAN LUN-level replication to different regions are much lower than native cloud storage since the underlying blocks copied are already deduplicated and compressed, and will only replicate blocks that have changed since the last replication.
ConclusionThe value of Pure Cloud Block Store is impossible to ignore. As your business grows and your demand on storage increases, the value is amplified. To learn more about Pure Cloud Block Store, head over to https://www.purestorage.com/products/cloud-block-storage/cbs.html.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Scaling Native Cloud Storage Only Scales Your Monthly Cloud Bill
Portworx made a flurry of announcements at KubeCon 2022 in Detroit, MI last week. As Gestalt IT was attending the event, we took the opportunity to have a vis-à-vis interview with Portworx and learn more about their upcoming technologies. Venkat Ramakrishnan, VP of Engineering and Products at Portworx by Pure Storage who was the spokesperson for the announcements gave us a quick rundown.
The interview kicked off with the list of announcements which included the Portworx Enterprise – Portworx’s flagship Kubernetes storage and data management platform and the most recent Portworx Managed Enterprise, which, put simply, is Portworx Enterprise as-a-service.
PX-Enterprise’s Fully Managed ServicePX-Enterprise is already a widely deployed product from the Portworx family. A cloud-native storage platform for Kubernetes, Portworx Enterprise is multi-cloud compatible and comes with a breadth of data management and security capabilities. Container-granularity is where it truly shines giving users the option to tune and mange capacity automatically on Kubernetes. Zero RPO disaster recovery and ultra-fast failover ensure high service availability and reliability.
Now all of this is coming as a fully managed service with Portworx Enterprise’s fully managed service. Ramakrishnan informed, “As we work more with our customers, we see there’re much larger deployments of Kubernetes – Portworx being deployed on hundreds of K8s clusters. So we wanted to deliver a much more simplified user experience for our customers so that they don’t have to be concerned with managing Portworx at large scale. So we abstracted the some of the Portworx control plane and management plane aspects. We run it in the cloud and help manage these clusters for our customers.”
The full managed service for Portworx Enterprise includes single-click deployment with auto-discovery, proactive monitoring and observability through a single pane of glass, and automation of Day 2 operations.
The new managed service is built around simplifying operations on Kubernetes with the aim to empower DevOps while at the same time, let operators have a hands-off management experience.
Portworx Enterprise Platform 3.0Next in line is another big news which the rest of the announcements are surrounding. The third generation of the Portworx Enterprise Platform is here. Launched officially in October, Portworx announced it to the Kubernetes community at KubeCon. Taking stock of what the earlier iteration of the platform had, Portworx took its capabilities a step further with this new one. The Portworx 3.0 reaches new thresholds of performance and low latency, all thanks to PX-Fast. PX-Fast is a new capability that delivers “high throughput and lower latency for persistent Kubernetes apps”, enabling faster data ingestion with sky-high performance.
“The Portworx core platform is a complete data management and storage suite that has worked well for our customers managing large scale applications. So with version 3.0, we have taken a closer look at our data management stack and added more performance than enhancements on top of that,” Ramakrishnan says.
“With that, we’re enabling more performance-intensive apps to run in K8s clusters.” He continues. “Customers running high frequency trading platforms or high-speed real time analytics that take split-second decision making can now bring those applications into Kubernetes and run them on scale, and combined with our managed service, they can manage the clusters literally in a zero-touch manner.”
Another new thing on the Portworx Enterprise Platform 3.0 is the Near-Sync DR capability. Near Sync-DR takes the DR capabilities of Portworx to new heights. With this DR feature, users can get “sub-second RPO in failover” between datacenters or cloud in two different regions, for ensured business continuity.
The third interesting thing about the v3.0 is the Object Storage Service. Portworx Enterprise Platform 3.0 has a scale-out object storage, which integrates with its block and file storage control plane. This gives users an additional storage interface for containerized workloads. But the best part is that it automates steps like “bucket creation, policy management and all of the object related enforcements” for the developers, delivering simplicity and speed.
Wrapping UpThe complexity of Kubernetes is notorious, and even through that has helped set our expectations, it has caused a lot of hiccups in the day to day operation. Thankfully, a vast number of companies have stepped forward to do their part to dial down the complexities and make Kubernetes more user-friendly, and Portworx is definitely one of the forerunners in that league. With its gamut of new releases, running containers on Kubernetes is likely to be simplistic, and a lot faster.
Watch the full video interview above and check out more interesting interviews from KubeCon 2022 and others on Gestalt IT.
GuestVenkat Ramakrishnan, VP, Engineering and Products at Portworx by Pure Storage
ModeratorStephen Foskett
LinkedInTo learn more, you can connect with Venkat Ramakrishnan on his Linkedin Page.
Twitter@SFoskett
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Pure Storage began as a provider of popular midrange all-flash storage arrays, expanded into unstructured data, and is now boldly venturing outside the traditional storage market. This is the challenge and the opportunity for the company, and one that was obvious during their Pure Accelerate techfest22 event in Los Angeles. From the FlashBlade//S to Portworx Data Services, Accelerate showed Pure looking to new markets while still focused on their traditional buyers.
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In this interview presented by Portworx and Pure Storage, Calvin Hendryx-Parker meets with Venkat Ramakrishnan to discuss a variety of announcements Portworx made at KubeCon 2022.
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In this article presented by Pure Storage, Gina Rosenthal discusses how FlashBlade//S is a the future of building architecture for modern applications.
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In this article presented by Pure Storage, Karen Lopez discusses how Pure Storage is developing the next generation of AI with Flashblade.
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In this article presented by Pure Storage, Gina Rosenthal dives deep into Pure Evergreen Flex and how it's making us rethink on-prem storage.
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In this article presented by Pure Storage, Max Mortillaro breaks down how FlashBlade is purposely designed to support mission-critical research and AI/ML environments.
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In this article presented by Pure Storage, Craig Rodgers discusses what exactly Portworx is and how it simplifies Kubernetes workloads.
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In this article presented by Pure Storage, Craig Rodgers details how Pure Fusion has been built not only to scale, but to help make self-service on premise storage become a reality.
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Barry Coombs sits down with Prakash Darji, General Manager of the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure Storage, to discuss Pure1 Edge Services and how it can deliver a smart connected control plane for your Pure Storage Arrays.
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In this interview presented by Pure Storage, Calvin Hendryx-Parker interviews Rajiv Thakkar about Portworx BaaS version of PX-Backup on AWS and how Kubernetes has simplified the deployment aspect of launching applications in the cloud.
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