Pure Storage did not go over the top with AI discussion at its Accelerate user conference, instead focusing on a data protection partnership and sustainability.
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Published: 24 Jun 2025
At Pure//Accelerate 2025 in Las Vegas, against a backdrop of growing data volumes, increasing cyberthreats and the impending impact of AI workloads, executives from Pure Storage and Rubrik elaborated on the strategic partnership between the all-flash array vendor and the data protection company.
The partnership reflects a shift in how enterprises approach data management and cyber-resilience. The result delivers a unified platform that addresses cyber-resilience and data protection.
In addition, it was evident at the show that Pure's commitment to sustainability remains steadfast.
From manual to autonomous: The evolution of data management
According to Rob Lee, CTO at Pure Storage, we're witnessing a fundamental transformation in enterprise data architectures.
"We're moving from manual driving to autonomous and automated systems," Lee explained, highlighting the shift from managing storage to managing data itself.
This evolution encompasses three critical areas: storage management through fleet management and virtualization, IT ops through automation and policy-driven operations, and comprehensive data set management transformation.
At the core of this evolution is Pure Storage Enterprise Data Cloud, designed to support enterprise data architectures, including AI data, for the next five to 10 years. The platform's intelligent control plane, Pure Fusion, delivers enhanced observability and AIOps capabilities, enabling organizations to gain deeper insights into their data environments and reduce management complexity and guesswork.
Building in cyber-resilience
"Built-in cyber resilience" isn't just a feature -- it's the foundational element of the joint Pure Storage-Rubrik platform. Brian McCarthy, president of global field operations at Rubrik, emphasized that this partnership stands apart through full technical integration rather than mere marketing alignment.
The integration delivers near-zero recovery time objectives by addressing the two questions that typically consume 90% of recovery time during an incident: What was impacted, and where is the last clean copy? By using Rubrik's threat intelligence feeds and Pure Storage's rapid recovery capabilities, organizations can identify incidents of compromise and determine the last clean point in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.
McCarthy reminded us that "the enemy is downtime," and the partnership between Rubrik and Pure Storage directly targets this challenge.
Sustainability at the core
Alex McMullan, CTO of international at Pure Storage, highlighted the critical importance of energy efficiency in modern data centers. With 40% to 50% of generated power lost to transmission and conversion and individual GPUs potentially consuming as much electricity as a four-person household, sustainability has become both an environmental and economic concern in most parts of the developed world.
As organizations continue to face evolving cyberthreats and growing data volumes, the Pure Storage-Rubrik partnership offers a blueprint for modern data management.
Pure Storage's commitment to sustainability is evident in its engineering achievements, including Evergreen//One, which enables customers to upgrade and maintain storage infrastructure without a rip-and-replace approach, thus avoiding substantial electronic waste.
In addition, Pure's AI Copilot has a dedicated sustainability assistant feature that helps organizations manage their environmental impact. The assistant identifies an organization's carbon footprint, highlights efficiency gaps across the storage infrastructure and provides guidance for implementing sustainable operations across the Pure Storage infrastructure.
Going forward
As organizations continue to face evolving cyberthreats and growing data volumes, the Pure Storage-Rubrik partnership offers a blueprint for modern data management. The platform unifies governance, reimagines hardware lifecycle management and uses telemetry through Pure1, which one customer has with 1,400 arrays in production. This integrated approach delivers the intelligence, performance and perhaps the confidence organizations need to face data protection, data management and cyber-resiliency head-on.
While I didn't hear anything about post-quantum cryptography and the AI hype was kept to a refreshing minimum, what Pure Storage is delivering today is a high-performance data management and cyber-resilience stack. The platform offers enterprise scalability and performance, and it simultaneously addresses the increasingly important areas of sustainability, security and operational efficiency.
Jon Brown is senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, where he researches IT operations and sustainability in IT. Brown has more than 20 years of experience in IT product management and is a frequent speaker at industry events.
Enterprise Strategy Group is part of Omdia. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
