Flash, AI, and cloud: 3 IT takeaways from Pure Accelerate
Significant innovations in storage infrastructure from Pure and other major vendors have emerged recently, giving IT pros ways to lower costs and simplify systems.
For IT professionals, the event season provides an excellent opportunity to gauge the state of technology options and measure their own organization's progress versus their peers. With that in mind, this year's Pure Accelerate presented those IT leaders with three important lessons as we enter the second half of 2025.
1. As the cost of flash storage falls, hard drives must justify their existence in on-premises deployments.
On stage at this year's Pure Accelerate, John "Coz" Colgrove, founder and chief visionary officer, held up a 300TB DirectFlash Module and talked about a path to delivering 600TB and beyond. For those not familiar with Pure's DirectFlash technology, it is a custom-designed, NVMe-based flash storage component (SSD alternative) to support Pure's FlashArray or FlashBlade storage systems. The takeaway is that the cost of all-flash storage capacity is continuing to fall, and the density continues to increase significantly.
The rise of AI initiatives, along with an increased demand for accelerated recovery time in the case of a disaster or ransomware attack, has fueled increased demand for higher levels of performance and greater predictability for workloads, such as backups and archives, traditionally stored on hard drives. For CIOs and other IT decision makers, it is essential to lose any former preconception that important workloads should reside on flash, and less important workloads must reside on hard disk to save costs. With the cost and density of flash storage improving, the cost savings and operational benefits from consolidation can make using multiple tiers of flash storage the optimal option.
2. Now is the time to define how AI-based copilots will fit into your internal IT operations.
Pure Storage also demonstrated how its AI Copilot, announced at last year's event, can use natural language inputs to help IT administrators better understand their current storage environment. Example uses include assessing data security and protection, managing performance, capacity, and power, and serving as a knowledge search source to better understand the underlying technology.
Pure Storage is not alone in offering AI copilots of infrastructure. HPE Greenlake Intelligence launched this month, which, in a similar fashion, is designed to accept natural language to provide insights on an IT infrastructure environment.
Tools such as Pure’s AI Copilot offer tremendous potential to help administrators better understand, manage, and optimize their storage environment while also offering the ability to implement changes. Prior to implementing anything, Pure's AI Copilot asks for permission to act and logs the approval to ensure compliance and tracking.
Here is the bottom line: Generative AI technology is incredibly powerful but still new. Pure Storage is ahead of the game in integrating this technology to aid storage admins, and they should check out what is possible. Start with lower-risk operations, such as looking for optimization recommendations, and then use more traditional methods to verify the recommendations from AI. Moving forward, ensure that your organization has a formal plan in place for how to evaluate and integrate generative AI tools into internal IT operations.
3. Today, there are far more options to simplify on-premises infrastructure operations than there were just a couple of years ago.
The focus of Pure Accelerate was its Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) strategy. As part of this platform, Pure Storage offers an intelligent control plane for its storage systems using its Pure1 and Pure Fusion technology. Pure then enables storage admins to use controls, called "presets," to define workload characteristics in a declarative fashion. Then, using its Pure Fusion technology, the control plane is able to automatically implement those polices in what the integrated intelligence deems is the most efficient fashion for your specific environment. The control plane also provides automated self-tuning to improve efficiency as application and data requirements evolve.
The core idea is to be able to abstract many individual system maintenance and management tasks to reduce the burden on IT admins. Pure Storage is not alone in this endeavor; Dell Technologies, HPE, NetApp, Nutanix, and VMware all have made announcements in the past couple of months showcasing technologies to consolidate operations to provide greater simplicity. These efforts to improve the simplicity of on-premises infrastructure come at an excellent time, as businesses are actively looking to kick off new AI initiatives and they need to free up cycles from existing administrators to assist with the implementations. Research from Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, shows that 78% of organizations would prefer to run AI applications on premises.
The takeaway for IT decision makers is that the next several months offer an excellent opportunity to reevaluate your internal operations, including your process and organizational model. Then, work with your preferred vendor to best understand how their latest technology will help you streamline operations.
Most importantly, demand specifics from the vendors. What tasks will be improved or eliminated? How much will be saved? What data do they offer to verify the benefits? Significant innovation in on-premises infrastructure has occurred over the past several months. Ensure that your vendor offers a way for you to benefit from it.
Scott Sinclair is Practice Director with Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of Omdia, covering the storage industry.
Enterprise Strategy Group analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
