Videos

Announcer: The following is an ESG on-location video.

Mark: Welcome to Austin and welcome to Pure Accelerate 2019. 2019 is a significant year for this company as it turns 10 years old. So it's gone all grown up. We're in a real conference center rather than some of the locations that Pure has used in the past.

More about that later. The big conversation this week, obviously a bunch of announcements, was all around The Modern Data Experience, Simple, Seamless and Sustainable. As you might expect from a decade old company, there's a lot of moving parts to this. So rather than me talk, let me hand it straight to my colleagues to see if they bought into that.

Scott: This week, Pure is talking about the Modern Data Experience. And while I don't think Pure or really anyone is quite delivering that quite yet, the foundation I'm fairly certain will be Flash and that's the technology that we're talking about today and that's the technology that Pure is innovating around with several new announcements at the show.

First, we have the FlashArray C. Okay, now this is a new array designed for QLC Flash. Right now is going to be TLC with QLC coming in the future. Pure is saying it has SATA disk-level economics and they're projecting at least a 40% price reduction compared to what they already have.

Christophe: We've learned quite a bit about data protection in this show. Number one, lots of partners are present here today. It's a great ecosystem and it really helps building this confidence for the end-users that they can leverage a platform in a way that would guarantee RPOs and RTOs. Also, the platform comes with lots of capabilities, and as a matter of fact, a recent announcement yesterday of a new Flasharray will help customers have even more options.

I also particularly liked the capabilities that come with the cloud storage capability, the block storage capability that can be deployed in public cloud, great new announcement. The experience of modern data management is really about data intelligence, how to leverage data for further purposes. Data analytics comes to mind and we had a couple of great examples of that.

Certainly, with the Accelerate theme, lots of work has happened in that space of acceleration of business, acceleration of results and also pure acceleration.

Scott: On the performance side, Pure is also introducing Direct Memory Cache. Now this is an SEM storage class memory component that can plug into your existing flash arrays and accelerate and reduce latencies. Pure is actually even delivering software to help people predict what those improvements will look like.

Mike: The announcement of AI data hub jointly with Pure and Nvidia really caught my attention. This is bringing to light something that's above the infrastructure that really matters in helping enable organizations get to AI faster and leverage AI to improve their businesses. It's really helping make the data pipeline more efficient. It's them recognizing, look, the infrastructure matters and is important and we have a solution that can help there.

But to truly enable the use of AI, we need to help across the entire data pipeline from end to end. So this AI data hub is really helping from integration to insights. So it's not just around the data and where it's stored, right? It's bringing that data to the people that matter, the data scientists to create the models and then operationalizing those models, deploying it at scale on hybrid-cloud environments.

The interesting piece here is the evolution of this story is going to be extremely important because once you start talking data pipeline, new features and new concepts really come into play here. They'll have to incorporate a data governance story. How are they ensuring high levels of data quality? It really starts bringing to light a lot of other technologies that are going to be involved across the data pipeline.

Scott: For the cloud, Pure is introducing Cloud Block Store. Now this is the same Pure experience, same data services, same API, same interface, everything Pure but on Amazon, Amazon web services, AWS. Now what's interesting is they've actually designed it for enterprise workloads. So it's got HA and high-performance, something that is often is quite unusual and really innovative for a block service on the cloud.

Pure is building this foundation for a modern data experience. Now what I'm fascinated to see, and this is I think something we should all be looking forward in the future, is seeing how Pure builds out its vision and how this evolves over the next few years.

Mark: So as we close Pure//Accelerate, I want to come back to a couple of things. First is the phrase, Modern Data Experience, and second I said I'd come back to the fact that we're in Austin. Modern Data Experience, three words clearly, but they all have I think important meaning. Certainly, you cannot fault what Pure is doing in terms of the modern data aspect of things.

They have bigger versions, they have faster versions, they have smarter versions, they have more of an ecosystem. It's the experience that I think is the really key thing. At the end of the day, Pure was founded to be as much as anything, a different experience, not necessarily a different product. The tagline of Austin, as we probably all know is "Keep Austin Weird."

I don't want to suggest that Pure is also built on something weird but it was always a little different. And to be in somewhere as vanilla and as antiseptic as a conference center in a big city is a massive change for the company. I don't think this is bad, it's part of growing up and achieving 10 years of success, but it's also something that they don't want to lose that edginess, that degree of being a differenct experience and not just better technology.