Pure Storage aims to bring a cloudlike experience for storage management to its platform customers in the coming months, alongside a refresh of its hardware catalog.
The new software and hardware headlined Pure Storage's keynote Wednesday during the vendor's Pure//Accelerate 2025 conference in Las Vegas.
The hardware updates continue Pure's message that all-flash storage is the future of customer data centers by updating existing lines for greater IOPS and performance capability, alongside a new array offering that prioritizes performance.
Pure's forthcoming Enterprise Data Cloud software, however, represents a more fundamental shift in the company's strategy, according to vendor spokespeople in a media briefing prior to the conference. EDC uses the company's Pure Fusion software to manage and automate storage workloads across a customer's entire Pure Storage array fleet, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
The new cloud platform shows a maturation of the company over the past decade as it moves from simply providing storage hardware to more of a data center management play, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.
"A decade ago, Pure Storage was a one-product company, but now they've evolved into a whole portfolio," Robinson said.
Cloud data
EDC is a conceptual platform for storage workload and workflow automation using the storage-as-code Pure Fusion software and API connections built into the company's arrays, according to a news release from Pure.
The capability abstracts a customer's Pure Storage fleets into unified pools of storage with automated discovery tools and every array treated as an endpoint, said Chadd Kenney, vice president of product management at Pure Storage.
"We're building a platform that the enterprise can build entire data estates off of [and that] intelligently lands workloads where they need to be," Kenney said.
Bringing that cloudlike management to the hardware itself, and not through an external partner or SaaS, is a definite market differentiation, said Ray Lucchesi, founder and president of Silverton Consulting.
"Customers are used to having SaaS services that they can scale in the cloud, and Pure has done this architectural remake that can offer this in their arrays," Lucchesi said.
The first major capability coming to Pure Fusion that is intended to push the vendor's paradigm shift will be Workflow Automation, which offers preset and remote provisioning for file, block and object storage. Admins will no longer need to preplan storage deployments, as the software will instead automate and provision based on workload parameters, according to the vendor.
Getting the storage environment to integrate with the broader environment is still one of the biggest [storage management] challenges that organizations have.
Simon RobinsonAnalyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
Pure is taking an approach more focused on IT infrastructure administration over data management, as hybrid cloud fleet management remains a significant coordination challenge for many enterprises, he said. This is about the more intelligent management and mapping of the data resources and capabilities to the physical storage.
"They're recognizing this is a challenge," Robinson said. "Getting the storage environment to integrate with the broader environment is still one of the biggest [storage management] challenges that organizations have."
The data management capabilities centered by NetApp might be more feature-rich compared with Pure's EDC offering at launch, said Brent Ellis, an analyst at Forrester Research.
"EDC seems to add a more seamless storage management experience, especially when managing a fleet of devices, but doesn't seem to add Pure capabilities into cloud or the location abstraction that NetApp announced last fall with their universal metadata layer and global namespace additions to OnTap," Ellis said.
EDC is available now with additional capabilities coming later this summer, according to Pure Storage.
Meanwhile, Pure Storage previewed other management and supporting software in the keynote. Deeper partnerships with Rubrik and CrowdStrike are intended to bring better threat detection and logging capabilities to the platform. A new capability within Pure Protect called VMware to VMware Recovery enables customers to recover VMware workloads outside the cloud.
In addition, Pure Storage's AI Copilot, which was teased at last year's show, is now generally available.
New hardware
New software was only part of the company's keynote announcements during the show, which included three new hardware revisions and an architecture update to the FlashArray line.
The forthcoming Pure Storage FlashArray//XL R5 will double the amount of IOPS per array and increase raw capacity by 50%, according to Pure. The Pure Storage FlashBlade//S R2, the latest release for the high-performance file and object array line, gains new controller blades, the vendor said.
Pure will also launch FlashArray//ST, a new block storage line focused on speed and performance specifically for in-memory databases, log writing and scale-out NoSQL databases. Snapshots and replication features are available for data protection, but performance for the line is achieved by stripping out other parts of the platform, such as deduplication, according to Kenney.
The new FlashArray//XL and ST are available today. The new FlashBlade will launch in June. Object support for FlashArray is expected by the end of fiscal year 2026, according to Pure Storage.
Object is becoming a more common format for enterprise workload storage, and incorporating that capability into the platform helps position the FlashArray line as viable for a variety of workloads, Ellis said.
"Pure has not yet made the jump to full data services integration into the storage layer like NetApp has, but they have extended their object storage offering to the FlashArray products with the recognition that S3 object is increasing in popularity as a primary storage platform," he said.
Although a unified architecture is useful, most customers' object storage needs aren't likely to require flash memory, Lucchesi said. Traditional hard drives on-premises or cloud offerings will more likely hit the scale and price point that object customers want.
"Object is a vast, multi-petabyte play here, and I'm not sure flash arrays are the place to put it," he said.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
