Pure Storage – Pure1 Makes Life Easy

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 22.  Some expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Pure Storage recently presented at Storage Field Day 22. You can see videos of the presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

 

What You Need

If you’ve spent any time working with storage infrastructure, you’ll know that it can be a pain to manage and operate in an efficient manner. Pure1 has always been a great tool to manage your Pure Storage fleet. But Pure has taken that idea of collecting and analysing a whole bunch of telemetry data and taken it even further. So what is it you need?

Management and Observation

  • Setup needs to be easy to reduce risk and accelerate delivery
  • Alerting needs to be predictive to prevent downtime
  • Management has to be done anywhere to be responsive

Planning and Upgrades

  • Determining when to buy requires forecasting to manage costs
  • Workload optimisations should be intuitive to help keep users happy
  • Non-disruptive upgrades are critical to prevent disruptions

Purchasing and Scaling

  • Resources should be available as a service for on-demand scaling.
  • Data service purchasing should be self-service for speed and simplicity
  • Hybrid cloud should be available from one vendor, in one place

 

Pure1 Has It

Sounds great, so how do you get that with Pure1? Pure breaks it down into three key areas:

  • Optimise
  • Recommend
  • Empower

Optimise

Reduce the time you spend on management and take the guesswork out of support. With aggregated fleet / group metrics, you get:

  • Capacity utilisation
  • Performance
  • Data reduction savings
  • Alerts and support cases

[image courtesy of Pure Storage]

Recommend

Every organisation wants to improve the speed and accuracy of resource planning while enhancing user experience. Pure1 provides the ability to use “What-If” modelling to stay ahead of demands.

  • Select application to be added
  • Provide sizing details
  • Get recommendations based on Pure best practices and AI analysis of our telemetry databases

[image courtesy of Pure Storage]

The process is alarmingly simple:

  • Pick a Workload Type – Choose a preset application type from a list of the most deployed enterprise applications, including SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL, and more.
  • Set Application Parameter – Define size of the deployment. Attributes are auto-populated based on Pure1 analytics across its global database. Adjust as needed for your environment.
  • Simulate Deployment – Identify where you want to deploy the application data. Pure1 analyses the impact on performance and capacity.

Empower

Build your hybrid-cloud infrastructure your way and on demand without the headaches of legacy purchasing. Pure has a great story to tell when it comes to Pure as-a-Service and OpEx acquisition models.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

In a previous job, I was a Pure1 user and found the overall experience to be tremendous. Much has changed with Pure1 since I first installed it on my phone, and it’s my opinion that the integration and usefulness of the service have both increased exponentially. The folks at Pure have always understood that it’s not enough to deliver high-performance storage solutions built on All-Flash. This is considered table-stakes nowadays. Instead, Pure has done a great job of focussing on the management and operation of these high-performance storage solutions to ensure that users get what they need from the system. I sound like a broken record, I’m sure, but it’s this relentless focus on the customer experience that I think sets Pure apart from many of its competitors.

Most of the tier 1 storage vendors have had a chop at delivering management and operations systems that make extensive use of field telemetry data and support knowledge to deliver proactive support for customers. Everyone is talking about how they use advanced analytics, AI / ML, and so on to deliver a great support experience. But I think it’s the other parts of the equation that really brings it together nicely for Pure: the “evergreen” hardware lifecycle options, the consumption flexibility, and the focus on constantly improving the day 2 operations experience that’s required when managing storage at scale in the enterprise. Add to that the willingness to embrace hybrid cloud technologies, and the expanding product portfolio, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for Pure. Finally, shout out to Stan Yanitskiy for jumping in at the last minute to present when his colleague had a comms issue – I think the video shows that he handled it like a real pro.