Pure Storage is travelling the world talking about its good news on a road show that recently left Mumbai and has now reached London. The roadshow will hit Melbourne on October 29 and has a tremendous speaker lineup.

The company has used the London road show to announce a raft of new features to its already advanced product line, as well as a new way to manage spend, and a new introductory appliance that can scale up as your demands increase.

These features include real-time enterprise files as a service, virtual machine assessments, natural language assistance, and cloud-like operations. The former helps deliver better outcomes, adjusting in real-time to dynamic changes such as agility across storage resources, zero-move tiering, and non-disruptive upgrades. The others similarly aid in achieving better outcomes. While separate, the announcements all come together in a way that shows deliberate thought in how to remove friction and give customers more capability with less effort. It also reflects an open ear to customer voices.

Financially, and operationally, Pure Storage reports a healthy total revenue of $US 763.8 million with 11% year on year growth along with a subscription annual recurring revenue of $US 1.51 billion with 24% year on year growth. The company has over 13,000 customers and a new promoter (NPS) score of 82. 62% of Fortune 500 customers are using Pure Storage products.

However, it's not complacent to sit on these laurels, explained Pure Storage Area VP ANZ Amy Rushall and Pure Storage VP and CTO APJ Mark Jobbins, pictured below.

The executives spoke with iTWire to explain the background behind the announcements. "The goal is to help company's reduce risk by eliminating risk and complexity of long-term storage core capabilities setting us apart from the competition," Rushall said.

"The platform continues to provide a unified storage platform, guaranteeing evolution without complex rebuys," she said. "It reduces the physical footprint, lowers the energy footprint, and allows time to be reinvested back into the business."

The ability to reinvest can't be understated in this time of AI explosion. It's a pivotal time and far from business as normal for institutions of all types and sizes. Gartner research finds 58% of all IT budget in Australia will be spent on AI efforts in the coming years, while 91% of Australian IT leaders say their budget could have been spent on innovation instead of the drudgery of typical operations and maintenance.

"Companies need a return on investment," Rushall said. "Pure Storage provides optionality and provides a better total cost of ownership."

Anything that Pure Storage can do to accelerate that return on investment, to flip maintenance spend into innovation spend, has vast benefits that magnify across each and every customer.

Here's where the new Pure Storage announcements come in, delivered today at its London stop on the Pure//Accelerate roadshow.

"We're re-inventing modern file," Jobbins said. "Legacy file storage is the natural enemy of agility."

Organisations worldwide have silos of data, here, there and elsewhere. It's happened organically, but is rigid and inflexible. These siloed data stores have capabilities that were locked at the time of purchase. They have clusters which are outdated for the new use cases the world is now demanding. They have multi-layer complexity, which brings increased risks of cyber threats. These different silos are on different platforms, and potentially redudant levels of capabilities and underutilised capacity. It's all a lot of work to manage. "We want to reduce that for our customers," Jobbins said.

"If we can reduce the silo challenges, organisations can pivot to innovation and focus on end user services," he said. "We want to reduce complexity and help customers focus on the good stuff."

Thus, the first and headline announcement is real-time enterprise file.

Pure Storage Enterprise File extends the Fusion orchestration layer to allow organisations to group data into availability zones. The Fusion automation was previously announced along with a four-pillar strategy, and Enterprise File continues that strategy.

What this means is customers can stipulate storage policies and hand over the reins to the Pure Platform to decide where the best place is for data pools, automating and simplifying the administration. Fusion began with block services, and is now moving into files.

"You define the policy you want in place to manage your data within your environment. Fusion will ensure it adheres to those policies, whether service levels, performance levels, or security policies," Jobbins said.

"Fusion determines the best place for your pools of data, whether flash array or cloud blockstore. You can have pools in different locations and the organisation can leverage the best tech for the workload placed there," he said. "There's no need to pre-buy expensive high-end services. You can have flexibility, and Fusion ensures service levels are met, optimising the tech you have."

"Everyone is under pressure to maximise their RoI. A lot of investment came in during the pandemic - huge investments. Now the C-suite, especially the CFO, is wanting to maximise their returns."

"Fusion is the tech that makes it happen."

Additionally, Enterprise File brings zero-move tiering. All storage platforms offer a trade-off between access speed and cost, with tiers typically labelled 'hot' and 'cold'. Typically an organisation has a tiering policy, moving data from a hot pool to a cold pool, or vice versa. This has to be managed, involving a human operator, and with both cost and performance ramifications.

"In Pure fashion, we've taken that complexity away," Jobbins said.

Specifically, the Pure platform will now offer automations to divert and focus resources on hot data / more active data, while reducing the resources allocated to the colder tier with no need to move data. Pure Storage is calling it zero-move tiering and it means literally that. Nobody needs to make the call to move data between tiers, and sit there and watch it shift. Instead, the platform recognises what's hot, what's not, and diverts resources. The data stays where it is. "It's unique in the industry," Jobbins said.

Zero-move tiering will be released in two phases. Initially, customers can tag file systems for hot or cold, but it will evolve to automate based on access time. "You'll be able to set a predefined period for the platform to tag a file system as hot or cold by itself."

"I'm excited by this feature," Jobbins said. "I have customers talking to me about tiering, but they don't like complexity."

"It's the typical Pure approach - we could have followed the pack and introduced software to move data between arrays but that's complex, and will break. Instead, we opt for simplicity and to provide automated services."

"It's a big area for the market. There's lots of data needed in the AI space, and zero-move tiering will help simplify managing resources for data accessed regularly."

"It's a really interesting area and we've had a lot of interest," he said.

Meanwhile, Enterprise File also brings always-on multi-protocol access for NFS and SMB protocols. "There's no need to pre-define; you can access the same file shares with either protocol," Jobbins said. "It takes away complexity and it takes away the chance of mistakes or risk."

Further, the new file storage capabilities include security logging for all file systems. "It will audit events for security and forensics by default," Jobbins said. "There's no need to configure typical file access events. Pure is changing the concept of logging so it's no longer an afterthought but the default configuration for all systems."

Additionally, FlashBlade will now provide an always-on quality of service (QoS). "This ensures consistency of app resources and makes sure all workloads are free from the 'noisy neighbour' problem," he said.

The announcement extends QoS across FlashBlades. "We've had it on flash array for some time, but now it'll be on flash blade too," Jobbins said.

This QoS will ensure all workloads on the blade have access to resources and can limit those that ramp up resource consumption significantly so the other workloads aren't strangled out. "This happens without any need to have additional management, tuning, or tweaking."

"All of these items are a logical extension to the Pure platform to ensure consistency, and make sure business has no surprises," Jobbins said.

The Purity FlashBlade will also now support servers which provide data access isolation for file workloads, enabling customers to service multiple untrusted domains, to present multiple shares or export namespaces, or share data between different untrusted domains.

Servers will be able to have different authentication methods while accessing shared, or different, file shares, and while servicing different clients.

When it comes to hardware, Pure Storage has announced a new FlashBlade//S100 product. This is a brand new, entry-level FlashBlade//S system with fast file and object storage sitting on the same proven Pure platform as its big brothers, the S200 and S500.

The S100 has DirectFlash Module support - which, incidentally, Pure Storage has also announced a doubling of capacity from 75TB to a crazy 150TB per module - and has a non-disruptive upgrade path to the S200 and/or S500 appliances.

"The S100 gives choice," Jobbins said. "You can start where the workload is currently, without concern of how to scale."

"It starts at 126TB and can go up to 3PB. It's AI ready, and is another thing to help open up the market here in ANZ."

"It partly arose from customer feedback to our team requesting another entry point. Our engineers are always listening."

Backing up, the DirectFlash Module (DFM) density increase now means a single 3RU chassis can provide over 4PB of capacity. A single namespace 52RU with 6PB per chassis can offer 60PB in a single cluster. It's an astounding engineering achievement that has doubled the density of the largest DirectFlash Modules within only one year. Having a 150TB DFM means you can regain data centre space, consolidate racks, and increase your energy efficient. And then, of course, you can leave it up to Fusion to automate the management of where your workloads sit on the storage.

Alongside these new product features, Jobbins said the company is seeing an increased uptake of its Pure Platform AI Copilot. It was launched earlier this year and again reduces complexity and risk within the customer environment.

"A generalist can ask pertinent questions around the environment and get deep knowledge and expertise fed back to them, allowing them to respond quickly," he said.

"I've seen customer demonstrations where they've asked simple questions like how did their fleet perform last week? Copilot gives a summary, and the operator can extend it and drill into it. What caused the performance issue in this area, for example?"

"The Copilot might identify a particular user accessed a particular file that consumed more operations than normal. The customer can drill-in to that workload to investigate. It simplifies how organisations can manage the environment, allowing generalists to run it, smartly, and reach out to SMEs when needed."

If you've been following the news, you know VMware is a hot topic right now, with customers considering their options whether to stay with Broadcom or move to other platforms.

"There can be benefits in moving, but also it's a huge risk," Jobbins said. "So customers need to optimise what's in their environment and understand it."

To help, Pure Storage announced it's extended its virtual machine assessment to provide visibility and clarity in host-level and cluster-level insights, showing where and how optimisations can be made, and suggesting strategies such as consolidating workloads.

"We want to give customers insights to make intelligent decisions around their next move," he said. "It's important for customers and Pure-like fashion its another service that is simply provided as part of PureOne."

"It gives customers greater insights, again allowing them to focus on their business, not on nuts and bolts."

Lastly, Pure Storage announced universal credits. This is a hyperscaler/cloud-like approach to spend which allows customers to maintain a spend committment without needing to determine where they will put that spend from day one. "You can universal credits to focus your spend whether on Evergreen//One, Pure Cloud block store, or Portworx software-defined storage," Jobbins said.

"Universal credits give choice on consumption-based models. We believe customers will be familiar with this universal credit concept, and will help give confidence in committing to Pure."

It's a lot of news, but at the end of the day, the items all dove-tail back to reducing complexity, automating and simplifying, and helping customers just get on with focusing on innovation and spending less time having to deal with manual storage management issues.

"We're pushing boundaries," Jobbins said.

"We're always listening to customers to respond quickly to their needs."