Pure Storage wants to bring the cloud to the datacenter for its customers with two new product announcements.
Pure Storage has announced two substantial new products: Portworx Data Services—which it bills as a Database-as-a-Service offering for Kubernetes—and Pure Fusion, an expansion of the Pure1 SaaS management service to bring cloud-like operations to a customer’s Pure Storage fleet.
“We’re helping customers to not just manage individual hardware elements or appliances, but to be able to craft and deliver storage services internally to their teams, as if it were a cloud service,” said Rob Lee, Pure Storage CTO.
Portworx Data Services
Portworx Data Services is aimed at developers building on Kubernetes and making the bafflingly complex Kubernetes infrastructure ecosystem just that little bit easier to deal with. Developers want to use data services like an SQL, NoSQL or graph database without needing to know very much about the infrastructure that makes up that service.
“How do you put the power in the hands of developers to build their applications without having to become deep experts in each one of these stacks?” asks Lee. “That’s really what Portworx Data Services is built to solve.”
Consistency and ease-of-use are the main aims here: making Pure Storage the obvious default choice for developers that want storage infrastructure. That means having it work the way they prefer, which is as standard building block where they don’t need to think about the operations of the service underneath. Instead of building and operating infrastructure, it’s about picking a service out of a list of options and then getting on with the actual task of building a useful application.
Someone does need to worry about the operational details, though, and these are the enterprise infrastructure teams that Pure is selling to. Pure wants customers to trust it to handle more of these details on their behalf, just as they trust Pure to handle the way blocks end up on flash media inside the arrays.
Portworx Data Services is only available as an early access service at this stage, with general availability slated for early 2022.
Pure Fusion
Pure Fusion is a SaaS management plane that will pool storage arrays into storage services and automate fiddly operational tasks such as workload placement and fleet rebalancing. These are important operational management tasks for customers running large storage fleets, particularly those that want to provide storage services rather than just storage devices.
A new API framework will also be introduced with Pure Fusion, aimed at both storage teams and end users, and designed to interoperate with the tools developers have become used to using when dealing with cloud storage services. Pure is also adopting cloud nomenclature such as availability zones.
Pure Fusion will integrate with block-addressed storage systems first: FlashArray//X, FlashArray//C, and Pure Cloud Block Store. FlashBlade and Portworx integrations will come later.
Pure Fusion will be available in preview to select customers by the end of 2021 with general availability expected in the first half of 2022. This is partly about working with customers to fine-tune the way Pure Fusion works in real environments, and partly about getting prospective customers used to the idea of thinking in this new way.
"Pure Fusion represents a bit of a bigger process change and improvement we can make for customers," said Lee, "And so we thought it was important to get out a little bit earlier and start seeding this idea with customers, because it's gonna take them a little bit longer to fold this into how they think about managing their environments."
Analysis
These products will make Pure ‘stickier’ for customers. The combination of Pure Fusion with Pure’s Evergreen subscription model and portable licensing means it's just that much easier to stay using Pure Storage once you start. Portworx ensures that new and re-platformed workloads stay on Pure Storage even as the compute and orchestration infrastructure changes.
By choosing to self-cannibalize, Pure keeps the dollars flowing and bets on overall storage growth making up for any temporary dip in revenue from changing media use. Given customers don't seem to ever want to store less data, this seems like a reasonable bet. It also moves Pure closer to the applications and important data, and thus closer to the important decision-makers that sign the really big checks.
The key here is that Pure is making it easier for their customers to change their mind a little bit: moving data from FlashArray//X to cheaper FlashArray//C storage, for example, or moving to Pure Cloud Block Store for public cloud workloads. Whatever choice a customer makes, it’s okay if they stay within the Pure Storage family. Pure wants to ensure that changing your mind doesn't mean changing to a completely different vendor to get what you want.
More broadly, this is a validation of the “cloud is a state of mind, not a place” perspective. Enterprise customers are increasingly comfortable with converting their operations to be more-cloud like, now that they've had 15 years to get used to the idea.
On-site infrastructure remains a large market with a lot of inertia, and it’s looking like bringing the public-cloud mindset back on-site is going to prove easier than moving all the on-site workloads up into the public cloud. If Pure can copy just enough of the way cloud works without losing the things that customers like about being on-site, they could well be onto a winner.
More importantly, Pure Storage is expanding its options so that it doesn't need to care which way any one customer wants to move, provided they stay with Pure. While this reduces churn, the growth driver is in upselling customers to new Pure services and increasing share of wallet. It could also help Pure close more customers with smaller initial deals, safe in the knowledge that once they’ve checked out the Pure experience, they’ll never want to leave.
It’s not lock-in if you like it, after all.
Disclosure: Pure Storage is a PivotNine analyst client.
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