Pure Fusion Expands Industry-First Autonomous Storage Delivery Platform

By Larry Touchette, director, technical product management, Pure Storage, Inc.

Pure Fusion is a self-automating, storage delivery platform that is redefining enterprise storage management.

The next iteration of Pure Fusion will deliver new capabilities for effortless unified management and first-of-its-kind storage automation.

Last year, we announced a new innovation in the storage industry with Pure Fusion. A fundamentally different way to manage data storage, it helps IT leaders deliver storage to developers with the same speed, agility, and flexibility of the cloud. Now, we are pleased to share that the next gen of Pure Fusion will be available on every Pure Storage array, fully integrated into the existing Purity OS. This means that every Pure Storage customer can take advantage of Fusion with a simple, non-disruptive Purity update. Unlike legacy clusters, which are rigid and require new empty arrays, Pure Fusion will create a global pool of storage for existing arrays, fully backward compatible without the need for external servers or licenses. This is the next step in the promise of Pure simplicity.

Cloud-like agility for your entire storage platform
Today, organizations face significant challenges managing storage resources due to the complexity and manual effort required to provision, scale, and optimize systems. For enterprises managing hundreds and even thousands of arrays, the complexity only gets worse. This makes it all but impossible to achieve a cohesive view and full control over the entire storage landscape. Even sophisticated IT teams struggle to automate in such fragmented environments.

Pure Fusion redefines enterprise storage management by automating the deployment and scaling of workloads across any environment. It integrates with existing infrastructures to convert complex, manual tasks into efficient, streamlined processes. This enables you to unlock cloud-like efficiency and scalability, minimize operational risks and overhead, and ultimately focus on innovation and growth.

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With this announcement, we are expanding the vision of the Pure Storage platform from managing individual appliances to creating a unified cloud of resources, where each appliance serves as an endpoint within. Whether you’re using Purity on premises or in the cloud, or Portworx with containers, these components will integrate and operate as one cohesive system.

What is Pure Fusion?
It is an enhancement to our storage OS that transforms your environment into a self-automating, storage delivery platform with operational efficiency and cloud-like scalability. It fully automates the process of provisioning storage while keeping administrators in full control. The system works by creating a single integrated control plane across all Pure Storage arrays. From there, you can define simplified storage policies – a bundle of storage settings – to apply across all storage arrays in your environment. Once policies are defined, the system does the heavy lifting for you. Learning from your policies, it begins the process of provisioning resources with simple storage policy selection and placement. It self-automates and optimizes how resources are provisioned along the way.

It will be protocol agnostic, supporting hosts connected with FC, iSCSI and NVMe, across all the products in our portfolio. As you make changes on one array, Pure Fusion will automatically adjust the workload configuration anywhere in the fleet.

Imagine you want to change the storage configuration for an Oracle or SQL database: volume size, number of snapshots, replication policies. Because every array is aware of where workloads are located, just change this on one appliance then Pure Fusion takes care of all the complexity in the background. We automatically standardize and enforce that change across the fleet no matter where the workload is. Set your policy, and the Pure Storage platform will manage the rest. This reduces time, the risk of human error, and automates change to speed things up.

And, with Pure Storage’s non-disruptive upgrade model, customers can get Pure Fusion on their existing systems, without a migration or the need to deploy any new infrastructure. Beyond this, as part of the Pure Storage platform, Pure Fusion will support data protection features like SafeMode, snapshots, asynchronous replication, ActiveCluster, ActiveDR, and snapshot offload.

How Pure Fusion transforms storage delivery?
Pure Fusion transforms storage delivery by creating a self-automating system, ultimately achieving the following benefits:

• Reduce operational overhead and increase IT productivity by 10x through built-in automation and AI workload placement assistance that simplifies storage provisioning – from one array to thousands of arrays.
• Minimize the risk of human error and misconfiguration by enforcing compliance automatically with your organization’s data protection requirements.
• Speed up storage automation and reduce manually written storage automation by up to 90%.
• Enable storage everywhere to operate like the cloud, by turning your on-premises data center into a cloud-like pool of storage resources.

How Pure Fusion works?
Later this year, Pure Fusion will deliver new capabilities for effortless unified management and first-of-its-kind storage automation, including fleet-wide management, remote provisioning, and built-in automation and workflows.

Fleet-wide management 
With Pure Fusion, arrays can be non-disruptively federated into a fleet – even existing arrays with workloads in place. Pure Fusion arrays communicate peer-to-peer rather than to a monolithic management system. Connections between arrays are secure and encrypted, and Pure Fusion integrates with AD/LDAP to ensure users have permission to perform operations on the desired array. 

Figure 1: Pure Fusion creates a single control plane that synchronizes configuration across an entire fleet.

Every array becomes a management endpoint that helps synchronize configuration and manage the entire fleet. Pure Fusion distributes critical capabilities, such as automation policies that simplify storage provisioning, to every array in the fleet, eliminating the dependency on a single control point for managing storage.

Remote provisioning
Taking advantage of our embedded and distributed control plane design, users can manage storage remotely from any array in the fleet. This simple but powerful user experience enhancement expands the seamless management experience that Pure Storage is known for from single arrays to entire fleets. 

When you connect to any array in the fleet, Pure Fusion allows you to provision, discover, and manage storage on that array, or any other array, without changing management endpoints. You no longer need to know which array an object is on to manage it.

Figure 2: Manage from any array in the fleet.

Built-in automation and workflows
Policies for provisioning are distributed across the environment automatically as arrays join the fleet – including requirements for data protection, DR, and configuration standards and compliance. These policies, called storage presets, are more than just simple configuration templates. They form the basis of a powerful built-in automation engine that drives storage management for you.

Figure 3: Policies are distributed across the fleet.

Pure Fusion’s built-in automation simplifies the storage provisioning process by entirely automating storage deployment according to requirements that you define in the storage policies. With a Pure Fusion automation engine on every array, users can connect to any array in the fleet to provision from a storage preset, and Pure Fusion automatically generates the configuration needed to deploy the storage according to the specifications designed in the preset.

Figure 4: Built-in automation generates configurations to deploy storage.

Pure Fusion integrates with Pure1’s AI-driven workload planning delivering real-time recommendations to optimize workload placement at the time of storage provisioning. This means you can simply provision resources without preplanning or complicated sizing and analysis exercises. 

Pure Fusion continuously monitors the configuration of your workload for changes. If you change your workload requirements, it reconfigures the workload, no matter where it is in the fleet. 

Figure 5: Pure Fusion monitors for configuration changes and applies automatically to the entire fleet.

It delivers this automation whether your organization manages storage via CLI, GUI, or API – with or without code. With automated provisioning, you can cut resource costs even if provisioning storage manually. 

If your organization automates storage provisioning with code, Pure Fusion can simplify your code and reduce tech debt in your code base. Simply define a storage preset, provision from that, and let Pure Fusion do all the heavy lifting for you. 

Get started with Pure Fusion
The next-gen of Pure Fusion will be available on every Pure Storage array, fully integrated into the existing Purity OS. It is not a separate management widget that has to be installed and configured – it’s always included. Because Pure Fusion is embedded in Purity, all of these capabilities are available with no new external control planes, licenses, or contracts, unifying arrays and optimizing storage pools on the fly across structured and unstructured data, on premises, and in the cloud. 

It’s time to unlock unprecedented efficiency and scalability so you can focus on innovation and growth while minimizing risk and overhead.

Resources:
Dive Deeper with the Automating Storage with Pure Fusion
Webinar: Introducing the Pure Storage Platform for the new era of data services. See latest innovations for AI, cyber resiliency, and application modernization on July 10, 2024 (registration required).