After rebrand, Everpure extends high availability to files
The company formerly known as Pure Storage is opening new competitive fronts with ActiveCluster for files and plans to add data intelligence from its 1touch acquisition.
With unstructured data management in the spotlight in the age of generative AI, Everpure is expanding its high-availability architecture to include file and object data, while data intelligence features from its acquisition of 1touch wait in the wings.
Data quality and security are emerging as a top blocker to building and operating AI agent platforms among enterprises, according to IDC's "Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey" conducted in August 2025. In that survey, 45.9% of 570 respondents named it their biggest AI implementation-related concern. The next two concerns on the list, integration with existing systems and high costs, were named by 34.3% and 31.6%, respectively.
Last month, Everpure, formerly known as Pure Storage, was the latest data storage vendor to place big new bets on data intelligence to address this challenge. In addition to changing its name, the company disclosed its intent to acquire 1touch, a data intelligence vendor. The acquisition will add AI-driven data discovery and classification features to the Enterprise Data Cloud data management system that Everpure launched last year.
This week, Everpure extended its ActiveCluster active-active high-availability architecture to support file data, with object support on the roadmap. With this move, ActiveCluster will bring the same highly virtualized fleet-level management to unstructured data that it offered for block storage in the past.
'Managing data, not storage,' … overall is where customers want to head. Obviously, files are right in the crosshairs because of AI.
Simon RobinsonAnalyst, Omdia
"Customers specify what the outcome is, specify the policy, and when they change the policy, we change all the underlying semantics and mappings under the covers to make that thing come to pass," said Shawn Hansen, vice president and general manager of core platforms at Everpure.
Both the rebrand and expansion to virtualized fleets of file storage follow the theme of "'managing data, not storage,' which overall is where customers want to head," said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
"Obviously, files are right in the crosshairs because of AI. … Like NetApp, Vast Data and others, [Everpure] seems to be saying that in this AI era it makes more sense to run certain functions that used to be a separate part of the data management stack, such as ETL, vectorizing data and data guardrails, in a more tightly integrated fashion with the storage stack."
Storage competition shifts with data intelligence
NetApp, which has its roots in file data storage, does appear to be in Everpure's crosshairs. Hansen characterized NetApp's approach, along with other competitors in the unstructured data space, as "array-bound," tied to pairs of hardware controllers, whereas Everpure abstracts that layer of the high-availability architecture. By contrast, Everpure ActiveCluster offers "n-way" high availability, which can move data and failover between more than two active arrays.
But as of last October, NetApp began to move beyond that controller-based architecture with its disaggregated AFX all-flash array and its partnerships with public cloud vendors, according to Brent Ellis, an analyst at Forrester Research.
"NetApp still has a controller-based architecture, at least for its on-premises appliance, so it has some limitations that Everpure doesn't have with regards to [n-way] scaling, but the flip side of that is NetApp also has first-party integration and SLAs with all three of the major hyperscalers," Ellis said.
NetApp is also further along with its AI Data Engine for data intelligence, also launched in October.
"The reality is, [NetApp and Everpure] appeal to different buyer needs," he said. "Everpure right now is probably going to focus on on-premises deployment, whereas NetApp is going to be more attractive for a global enterprise that needs to address data governance and scaling across multiple platforms on-prem and in the cloud. … NetApp also has additional options within their storage portfolio to address other needs, like, for instance, cheap and deep object storage."
Everpure will also likely cross paths with Vast Data as enterprise buyers weigh data intelligence options for storage systems, especially since Vast added new support for block storage to its DataStore systems this week.
Vast, which made a pivot toward AI data intelligence last year with its AI OS, now builds in a compute and large language model runtime layer that could limit its appeal to enterprises seeking a more modular approach similar to that of Everpure and NetApp, Ellis said.
"Vast essentially wants to replace the entire middleware layer for AI intelligence, as well as the data storage layer, in one big blob," he said. "That's a pretty big Lego brick within your tech stack to replace, should you ever want to, and while it can accelerate AI workload adoption, I wouldn't see a very large enterprise as wanting to double down on it, because then they could be limited as far as flexibility in the future."
Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. Have a tip? Email her.
