Pure Storage Powers Up for AI and Ransomware Defence

Pure Storage^® (NYSE:PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technologies and services, today announced new capabilities in the Pure Storage platform that are changing the game for how IT and business leaders can radically improve their ability to deploy AI, improve cyber resilience, and modernise their applications.

AI is revolutionising business, and not always for the better. Cybercriminals are increasingly using AI to increase the frequency and impact of cyber-attacks, especially ransomware. However, existing IT infrastructure generally lacks flexibility to react to the rapid pace of change required to protect data, and rapidly recover if needed.

The Pure Storage platform delivers agility and risk reduction to organisations with a simple, consistent storage platform and an as-a-service experience for the broadest set of use cases across on-premises, public cloud, and hosted environments. At the heart of the platform, the often imitated but never duplicated Evergreen^® architecture brings continuous and non-disruptive upgrades helping enterprises adapt to dynamic business environments. With the industry’s record number of concurrent SLAs, customers get the reliability, performance, and sustainability their business requires.

“Pure is redefining enterprise storage with a single, unified data storage platform that can address virtually all enterprise storage needs including the most pressing challenges and opportunities IT leaders face today, like AI and cyber resilience. The Pure Storage platform delivers unparalleled consistency, resilience, and SLA-guaranteed data storage services, reducing costs and uncertainty in an increasingly complex business landscape.” – Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage

Today, Pure Storage announced new innovations in the platform including:

• First-of-its-Kind Storage Automation: Pure Fusion™ unifies arrays and optimises storage pools on the fly across structured and unstructured data, on-premises, and in the cloud. Now fully embedded into the Purity operating environment designed to continually get better over time via non-disruptive upgrades, the next generation Pure Fusion will be available across the entire Pure Storage platform to all global customers.
• Industry-First Generative AI Copilot for Storage: Extending Pure Storage’s leadership position as the innovator in simplicity, the first AI copilot for storage represents a radically new way to manage and protect data using natural language. This leverages data insights from tens of thousands of Pure Storage customers to guide storage teams through every step of investigating complex performance and management issues and staying ahead of security incidents.

Accelerating AI Success in the Enterprise with the Pure Storage Platform

In the new Innovation Race survey of 1,500 global CIOs and decision makers commissioned by Pure Storage, nearly all respondents (98%) stated that their organisation’s data infrastructure must improve to support initiatives like AI. AI is evolving so rapidly that IT is struggling to keep up, much less predict what’s next. Companies large and small are realising that they are locked into inflexible storage architectures lacking enterprise-grade reliability, with the inability to resize or upgrade performance without complex and risky infrastructure planning.

Pure Storage is introducing new innovations in the platform that help businesses accelerate successful AI deployments today and future-proof for tomorrow. The Pure Storage platform empowers organisations to unlock the value of their data with AI while delivering agility to instantly scale capacity and performance up and down independently, without disruption.

• New Evergreen//One™ for AI – First Purpose-Built AI Storage-as-a-Service: Provides guaranteed storage performance for GPUs to support training, inference, and HPC workloads, extending Pure Storage’s leadership position for capacity subscriptions and introduces the ability to purchase based on dynamic performance and throughput needs. The new SLA uniquely delivers the performance needed and eliminates the need for planning or overbuying by paying for throughput performance.
• Secure Application Workspaces with Fine-Grained Access Controls: Combines Kubernetes container management, secure multi-tenancy, and policy governance tools to enable advanced data integrations between enterprise mission-critical data and AI clusters. This makes storage infrastructure transparent to application owners, who gain fully automated access to AI innovation without sacrificing security, independence, and control.

Pure to Expand and Accelerate Enterprise Adoption of AI with Planned NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD Certification

Pure Storage was among the first enterprise storage vendors to work with NVIDIA to achieve NVIDIA DGX BasePOD certification and NVIDIA OVX validation. Building upon this pioneering collaboration for AI-ready infrastructure, Pure expects to be a certified storage solution for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD by the end of 2024.

Pure Storage’s Ethernet-based storage solution simplifies the integration and deployment of large-scale training and inference and helps democratise AI to enterprises that are eager to accelerate their AI initiatives. Pure’s industry-leading energy efficiency, consuming up to 85% less energy than alternative all-flash storage solutions, can help customers overcome data centre power constraints in large AI clusters.

“Enterprises adopting AI need storage performance and flexibility as they architect their infrastructure to address AI workloads at scale. Pure Storage’s certification with the NVIDIA DGX and OVX platforms helps deliver highly-performant solutions for customers at every stage of their AI journey.”  – Charlie Boyle, Vice President of DGX Platform, NVIDIA

“As more businesses rely on automation and AI to make near-real-time decisions, at ServiceNow we are committed to meeting their needs. That starts with 24/7 performance and reliability. We couldn’t have chosen a better partner than Pure Storage to scale with our rapid growth. Projects that take other companies three years, take only three months using Pure’s enterprise data storage platform. With Pure, we can do it faster and we can make the enhancements needed to fuel our customers’ success.” — Keith Martin, Vice President of Global Cloud Engineering, ServiceNow

Ground Breaking New Cyber Resiliency Services and Capabilities

Also announced at Pure//Accelerate were new capabilities that advance Pure Storage’s existing cyber resiliency offerings, which include SafeMode for ransomware recovery:

• Enhanced Cyber Recovery and Resilience SLA: Building on the first-of-its-kind ransomware recovery SLA, Evergreen//One™ is expanding its coverage to include disaster recovery scenarios as well. This new and improved Cyber Recovery and Resilience SLA delivers a customised recovery plan, ships clean service infrastructure within a defined SLA, provides onsite installation, and supplies additional professional services for data transfer. In addition, Pure Storage will collaborate with organisations to build and maintain a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. Ongoing quarterly reviews are included to ensure best practices adherence, ongoing risk assessments, and operational security remediation. Organisations can rest assured knowing if an unforeseen disruptive event occurs, Pure Storage will help rapidly restore normal operations, guaranteed.
• New Security Assessment: The new assessment provides deep visibility into fleet-level security risks and offers actionable recommendations to maximise cyber resilience. Based on aggregated intelligence across 10,000+ environments, the Security Assessment presents numerical scores from 0 to 5 to benchmark the security posture of the entire storage fleet. It also delivers best practices to align with NIST 2.0 standards, advance regulatory compliance, remediate potential security anomalies, and rapidly restore operations if a security-related event occurs. Additionally, the new AI co-pilot leverages the security assessment to provide Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) with visibility into benchmarking their security posture against other Pure Storage customers.
• New AI-powered anomaly Detection Enhancement: Discover threats such as ransomware attacks, unusual activity, malicious behaviour, and Denial of Service attacks via performance anomalies. This expands on previously available ransomware detection based on data reduction anomalies. The expanded detection is built on multiple machine learning models running to identify unusual anomalous behaviour. The models analyse customer environments with historical data for anomalous patterns based on heuristics of performance as well as user context on how storage is used. Leveraging this capability, customers can identify the last known good snapshot copy to mitigate operational impact by quickly identifying recovery point targets to restore data, reducing risk and guesswork.

In today’s dynamic market and competitive landscape, it is imperative for IT to be able to rapidly adapt. As the only STaaS solution that allows both scaling up and down the service, today Pure Storage further distanced itself by providing even more flexibility:

• New Site Rebalance SLA: The Evergreen//One Site Rebalance SLA delivers service flexibility for organisations looking to adjust existing reserve commitments as their storage requirements evolve. If there are no longer capacity needs at a specific site, if a data centre is being consolidated, or if performance at one site was oversized and excess capacity exists that can be used elsewhere, the Site Rebalance SLA empowers organisations to rebalance reserve commitments once every 12 months for each Evergreen//One subscription.

“As Pure Storage continues to revolutionise enterprise data storage, our mission remains: to provide a simple, flexible, and resilient as-a-service storage platform that not only addresses current data and storage management needs but mitigates future risk and uncertainty. Through continuously improving services and the broadest set of outcome-driven SLAs, Pure is the only data storage platform future-proofed for innovation.” — Prakash Darji, GM, Digital Experience, Pure Storage

“Today’s enterprises demand more than just technology; they seek assured outcomes. Reliable, flexible consumption models for enterprise storage that scale with business needs are essential. Pure Storage’s STaaS platform offers a market differentiating, comprehensive set of guaranteed SLAs, striking a balance between flexibility and simplicity while delivering high performance and resilience – all in support of customer growth in today’s dynamic business landscape.” — Lara Greden, Senior Research Director, IT Infrastructure-as-a-Service Solutions, Flexible Consumption, and Circular Economy, IDC