I caught up with Matt Oostveen from Pure Storage in August to talk about Pure as-a-Service. It’s been a while since any announcements were made, but I’ve been meaning to write up a few notes on the offering and what I thought of it. So here we are.

What Is It?

Oostveen describes Pure Storage as a “software company that sells storage arrays”. The focus at Pure has always been on giving the customer an exceptional experience, which invariably means controlling the stack from end-to-end. To that end, Pure as-a-Service could be described more as a feat of financial, rather than technical, engineering. You’re “billed on actual consumption, with minimum commitments starting at 50 TiB”. Also of note is the burst capability, allowing a level of comfort in understanding both the floor and the ceiling of the consumption levels you may decide to consume. You can choose what kind of storage you want – block, file, or object. You also get access to orchestration tools to manage everything. You also get access to Evergreen Storage, so your hardware stays up to date, and it’s available in four easy to understand tiers of storage.

Why Is It?

In this instance, I think the what isn’t as interesting as the why. Oostveen and I spoke about the need for a true utility model to enable companies to deliver on the promise of digital transformation. He noted that many of the big transactions that were occurring were CFO to CFO engagements, rather than the CTO deciding on the path forward for applications and infrastructure. In short, price is always a driver, and simplicity is also very important. Pure has worked to ensure that the offering delivers on both of those fronts.

Thoughts

IT is complicated nowadays. You’re dealing with cloud, SaaS, micro-SaaS, distributed, and personalised IT. You’re invariably trying to accommodate the role of data in your organisation, and you’re no doubt facing challenges with getting applications running not just in your core, but also in the cloud and the edge. We talk a lot about how infrastructure can be used to solve a number of the challenges facing organisations, but I have no doubt that if most business leaders never had to deal with infrastructure and the associated challenges it presents they’d be over the moon. Offerings like Pure as-a-Service go some of the way to elevating that conversation from speeds and feeds to something more aligned with business outcomes. It strikes me that these kinds of offerings will have great appeal to both the folks in charge of finance inside big enterprises and the potentially the technical folk trying to keep the lights on whilst a budget decrease gets lobbed at them every year.

I’ve written about Pure enthusiastically in the past because I think the company has a great grasp of some of the challenges that many organisations are facing nowadays. I think that the expansion into other parts of the cloud ecosystem, combined with a willingness to offer flexible consumption models for solutions that were traditionally offered as lease or buy is great. But I don’t think this makes sense without everything that Pure has done previously as a company, from the focus on getting the most out of All-Flash hardware, to a relentless drive for customer satisfaction, to the willingness to take a chance on solutions that are a little outside the traditional purview of a storage array company.

As I’ve said many times before, IT can be hard. There are a lot of things that you need to consider when evaluating the most suitable platform for your applications. Pure Storage isn’t the only game in town, but in terms of storage vendors offering flexible and powerful storage solutions across a variety of topologies, it seems to be a pretty compelling one, and definitely worth checking out.