Hi welcome back to Part 2 of Pure Accelerate conference coverage. 

By the Book
One of the things that came with the swag bag at the show was this book, “Flash Was Only The Beginning. The creators of Pure Storage who reimagined data storage and built the fastest growing enterprise technology company in history.

It walks through the history of Pure. Probably really for the extreme fanboy crowd, but I did enjoy the pictures. They highlight a lot of the folks who were there in the early days and have some pictures and a little blurb.

They also gave away a really nice water bottle that has gone missing, so I am missing out on becoming a VSCO girl. If you don’t know what that is ask you kids.

Security Overload
There was a lot of security on this even. Certainly a lot more than was in place for SXSW which was held in the same location. Not sure what that was all about, but maybe they had a good reason.

Weezer
Another great thing that happened was the Weezer concert at the end of the show. I really would have liked to see that show, as I have never had the opportunity to see Weezer live, but I had to jump on a plane and head back, but the reports are that it was a great show.

Orange People Everywhere
Pure Storage has done a phenomenal job of marketing over the years, and some have even called it cultish. Much like Apple or Harley Davidson. While it might be a bit cultish, it says a lot about how great their marketing was that people everywhere were dressed in Pure orange. I will say that I have been know to wear a bit of orange at some of these events myself.

Social Media
In line with a company that has very successful marketing, they have embraced social media and influencers. I must have missed my invitation to some of the influencer events, but they had a lot of stuff targeted to this crowd. It is a really great way to extend your brand, and they continue to do it well. One of the key criteria for a startup being successful is great marketing, and a lot of companies can take a lesson from Pure on this since they were the fastest growing enterprise technology company in history.

Announcements

Cloud Block Store
Pure Storage in the cloud. This currently works with AWS, and brings much of that great Pure functionality to the cloud, and helps you move workloads between on-prem and cloud. It features the same APIs as the on-prem arrays. The licenses are transferable between on-prem and cloud.

Pure as a service
Pure is now offering STaaS for both on-prem and cloud. This allows companies to take advantage of Pure Storage as a managed service with an OpEx model in their data center or in the cloud. It allows for the scaling up or down of resources. There is a bit of a premium for this, but it offers a lot of flexibility, and depending on your needs, it could be just what you need.

Cloud Snap
Pure’s CloudSnap backup product product that was previously announced for AWS has been expanded to Microsoft Azure

Rapid Restore
F2F2C Which integrates Pure’s Flashblade and CloudSnap to build out the full data lifecycle story. In addition to being a high performance data protection solution, it could be the stepping stone to creating an effective data lake or hub.

Encrypt Reduce
This is a really exciting product. We have for a long time now had encryption at rest. And this solves for a handful of security challenges around physical media. The problem has been that most enterprises want the entire data path secured, and this often eliminates the benefits of data reduction on the storage side. By integrating Thales Vormetric Transparent Encryption onto their platform, Pure gives you the best of both worlds, encrypt at the source, perform data reduction on the array and then re-encrypt the data on the drives.

NVMe oF
NVMe has been a part of the Pure product line for a while now, but there is a growing need for a faster pipeline, and that is DirectFlash Fabric enabled //X arrays. They have brought NVMe/RoCE access directly to the storage modules, which can solve for DAS challenges. So let me break down some of these acronyms. NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express which is a controller interface and storage protocol to accelerate the transfer of data. Then you can ad in oF to make NVMe oF which stands for NVMe over fabrics like ethernet, fiber channel or infiniband. RoCE stand for RDMA over Converged Ethernet. Man, Acronyms embedded in Acronyms. RDMA is Remote Direct Memory Access. Which basically means this is a really fast way to access the storage in an array.

Storage Class Memory
There has been a ton of talk about 3D Xpoint over the years. Intel has finally realized this vision into Optane, their non-volatile memory product. This has the persistence of flash memory, with speeds approaching those of DRAM. In fact it is in the DRAM form factor. This allows for very fast caches for now, but I would expect to see technologies like these evolving to be the basis of fast storage arrays.

//C arrays
Another big announcement was the introduction of the //C arrays. These use NAND that is based on QLC technologies, or quad-level cells. Which allows for a denser storage chip. The trade off is that it is slower and not as resilient as the NAND that is currently being used in arrays. It is however denser and cheaper, which can be very attractive in the right scenarios. When paired with Storage Class Memory as a cache, this could lead to high performing, inexpensive arrays.

Flash Stack
There was a lot of cool tech on display, they had the FlashStack converged systems on display, the FlashArrays and Flashblades were on display as well, but I think the coolest items was the AIRI platform. There is certainly a lot of cool industrial design showing up in these devices.