Pure Storage Delivers Critical Cyber Outcomes
“We don’t have storage problems. We have outcome problems.” - Pure customer in a recent cyber briefing No matter what we are buying, what we are buying is a desired outcome. If you buy a car, you are buying some sort of outcome or multiple outcomes. Point A to Point B, comfort, dependability, seat heaters, or if you are like me, a real, live Florida Man, seat coolers! The same is true when solving for cyber outcomes, and often overlooked is a storage foundation to drive cyber resilience. A strong storage foundation improves data security, resilience and recovery. With these characteristics, organizations can recover in hours vs. days. Here are some top cyber resilience outcomes Pure Storage is delivering. Native, Layered Resilience Fast Analytics Rapid Restore Enhanced Visibility We will tackle all of these in this blog space (multi-part post alert!), but let’s start with the native, layered resilience Pure provides customers. Layered Resilience refers to a comprehensive approach to ensuring data protection and recovery through multiple layers of security and redundancy. This architecture is designed to provide robust protection against data loss, corruption, and cyber threats, ensuring business continuity and rapid recovery in the event of a disaster. Why is layered resilience important? Different data needs different protection. My photo collection, while important to me, doesn’t require the same level of protection as critical application data needed to keep the company running. Layered resilience indicates that there needs to be different layers of resilience and recovery. Super critical data needs super critical recovery. We are referring to the applications that are the life-blood of organizations, order processing, patient services or trading applications. These may only account for 5% of your data, but drive 95% of the revenue. Many organizations protect these with high availability which provides excellent resilience against disasters and system outages. But for malicious events, such as ransomware, protection is needed to ensure that recoverable data is available if an attack corrupts or destroys the production data. Scheduled snapshots can protect that data from the time the data is born. Little baby data. Protect the baby! Pure Snapshots are a critical feature, providing efficient, zero-footprint copies of data that can be quickly created and restored, ensuring data protection and business continuity. Pure snapshots are optimized for data reduction, ensuring minimal space consumption. This is achieved through global data reduction technologies that compress and deduplicate data, making snapshots space-efficient. They are designed to be simple and flexible, with zero performance overhead and the ability to create tens of thousands of snapshots instantly. They are also integrated with Pure1 (part of our Enhanced Visibility discussion) for enhanced visibility, management and security, reducing the need for complex orchestration and manual intervention. Snapshots can be used to create new volumes with full capabilities, allowing for mounting, reading, writing, and further snapshotting without dependencies on one another. This flexibility supports various use cases, including point-in-time restores and data recovery. In events that require clean recovery, and secure recovery at that, it would be much more desirable to leverage snapshots for recovery, where you could scan and determine cleanliness and safeness, often in parallel efforts and the reset time for going to an earlier period of time is a matter of seconds rather than days. But not even these amazing local snapshots are enough. What if your local site is rendered unavailable for some reason? Do you have control of your data to be able to recover in that scenario? Replicating those local snapshots to a second site could enable more flexibility in recovery. We have had customers leverage our High Availability solution (ActiveCluster) across sites and then engage snapshots and asynchronous replication to a third site as a part of their recovery plan. Data that requires extended retention and granularity is typically handled by a data control plane application that will stream a backup copy to a repository. This is usually a last line of defense in case of an event, as the recovery time objective is longer when considering a streaming recovery of 50%, 75%, or 100% of a data center. Still, this is a layer of resiliency that a comprehensive plan should account for. And if these repositories are on Pure Storage, these also can be protected by SafeMode methodologies and other security measures such as Object Lock API, Freeze Locked Objects, and WORM compliance. And most importantly, this last line of defense can be supercharged for recovery by the predictable, performant platform Pure provides. Some outcomes of this layer of resilience involves Isolated Recovery Environments to incorporate even security and create those Clean Rooms to isolate recovery to ensure you will not re-introduce the event origin back into production. In these solutions, the speed benefits that Pure provides is critical to making these designs a reality. Of course, the final frontier is the archive layer. This is a part of the plan that usually falls into compliance SLA, where data is required to be maintained for longer periods of time. Still, more and more, there are performance and warm data requirements for even these data sets, where AI and other queries can benefit from even the oldest of data. One never knows what layer of resilience is required for any single event. Having the best possible resilience enables any company to recover, and recover quickly, from an attack. But native resilience is just one of the outcomes we deliver. Come back to read how we are delivering fast analytics outcomes in an environment that seeks to discover anomalies as fast as possible. Exit Question: How resilient is your data today? Jason Walker is a technical strategy director for cyber related areas at Pure Storage and a real, live, Florida Man. No animals or humans were injured in the creation of this post.
FlashCrew London & Glasgow May/June 2025 !!!! Register NOW...
I'd like to invite you to our upcoming FlashCrew Customer User Group in London on May 15th, from midday. Throughout May, we'll be taking our FlashCrew User Group on the road to share ideas, best practices and network on all things Pure over some drinks and food. Plus, as a thank you for your continued support and attendance we will of course have the latest FlashCrew branded gifts for you to take with you! If you can make it, please register at this link below. London 10-11 Carlton House Terrace Thursday 15th May: REGISTER HERE for FLASHCREW LONDON Glasgow Radisson Blu Hotel Thursday 5th June: REGISTER HERE for FLASHCREW GLASGOW These are user group meetings, targeted at a technical audience across Pure's existing customers. Not only will you hear the latest news on the Pure Enterprise Data Cloud, but will also get to network with other like-minded users and exchange ideas and experiences. Agenda: 12:00 - 12:50 Arrival, Lunch and Welcome 13:00 - 14:00 Pure Platform: Features and Roadmap: with demo 14:00 - 14:15 Break 14:15 - 14:45 SQL Databases and Pure 14:45 - 15:15 Voice of the Customer 15:15 - 15:30 Break 15:30 - 16:15 Portworx and the Enterprise Data Cloud 16:15 - 16:45 Modern Virtualisation 16:45 - 17:00 Open Floor Q&A, Raffle, Wrap Up 17:00 - 19:00 Drinks and NetworkingConfiguring Apache Spark on FlashBlade, Part 3: Tuning for True Parallelism
This post will explore how to diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks that are not related to storage I/O, ensuring you can take full advantage of the high-performance, disaggregated architecture of FlashBlade. We'll use a real-world scenario to illustrate how specific tuning can unlock massive parallelism.
Ask Us Everything Recap: Making Purity Upgrades Simple
At our recent Ask Us Everything session, we put a spotlight on something every storage admin has an opinion about: software upgrades. Traditionally, storage upgrades have been dreaded — late nights, service windows, and the fear of downtime. But as attendees quickly learned, Pure Storage Purity upgrades are designed to be a very different experience. Our panel of Pure Storage experts included our host Don Poorman, Technical Evangelist, and special guests Sean Kennedy and Rob Quast, Principal Technologists. Here are the questions that sparked the most conversation, and the insights our panel shared. “Are Purity upgrades really non-disruptive?” This one came up right away, and for good reason. Many admins have scars from upgrade events at other vendors. Pure experts emphasized that non-disruptive upgrades (NDUs) are the default. With thousands performed in the field — even for mission-critical applications — upgrades run safely in the background. Customers don’t need to schedule middle-of-the-night windows just to stay current. “Do I need to wait for a major release?” Attendees wanted to know how often they should upgrade, and whether “dot-zero” releases are safe. The advice: don’t wait too long. With Pure’s long-life releases (like Purity 6.9), you can stay current without chasing every new feature release. And because Purity upgrades are included in your Evergreen subscription, you’re not paying extra to get value — you just need to install the latest version. Session attendees found this slide helpful, illustrating the different kinds of Purity releases. “How do self-service upgrades work?” Admins were curious about how much they can do themselves versus involving Pure Storage support. The good news: self-service upgrades are straightforward through Pure1, but you’re never on your own. Pure Technical Services knows that you're running an upgrade, and if an issue arises you’re automatically moved to the front of the queue. If you want a co-pilot, then of course Pure Storage support can walk you through it live. Either way, the process is fast, repeatable, and built for confidence. Upgrading your Purity version has never been easier, now that Self Service Upgrades lets you modernize on your schedule. “Why should I upgrade regularly?” This is where the conversation shifted from fear to excitement. Staying current doesn’t just keep systems secure — it unlocks new capabilities like: Pure Fusion™: a unified, fleet-wide control plane for storage. FlashArray™ Files: modern file services, delivered from the same trusted platform. Ongoing performance, security, and automation enhancements that come with every release. One attendee summed it up perfectly: “Upgrading isn’t about fixing problems — it’s about getting new toys.” The Takeaway The biggest lesson from this session? Purity upgrades aren’t something to fear — they’re something to look forward to. They’re included with your Evergreen subscription, they don’t disrupt your environment, and they unlock powerful features that make storage easier to manage. So if you’ve been putting off your next upgrade, take a fresh look. Chances are, Fusion, Files, or another feature you’ve been waiting for is already there — you just need to turn it on. 👉 Want to keep the conversation going? Join the discussion in the Pure Community and share your own upgrade tips and stories. Be sure to join our next Ask Us Everything session, and catch up with past sessions here!
Minutes to Meltdown
Join Pure Storage and Commvault for... 💥 Minutes to Meltdown | Manchester This isn't your usual Cyber Security event! You'll take part in a LIVE simulated cyber-attack. Experience firsthand how security, infrastructure, legal, leadership and others must unite when the worst happens. Gain insights in how your business can be better prepared and learn from those that have been through this before. Register here: 👉 https://discover.commvault.com/event-minutes-to-meltdown-manchester-with-pure-storage-registration.htmlGeneral Availability of Purity//FB 4.5.6
We are excited to announce the general availability of Purity//FB 4.5.6 Purity 4.5.6 Release Highlights Introducing Purity//FB 4.5.6, designed to simplify managing a fleet of systems, optimize geographically distributed workflows, and expand the environments that can deploy FlashBlade. Key highlights include: Fusion for FlashBlade: Support for FlashBlade is available now on Pure Fusion, enabling FlashBlade to create, or join a fleet of arrays, simplifying deployments, scaling, and management of data across both FlashArrays and FlashBlades. Pure Fusion now also delivers a single consistent interface for deploying file and object workloads. Rapid Replicas: The remote fetching and caching capability enables file data to be distributed efficiently and allows collaborative development across multiple Data centers, remote sites or, increasingly, workloads in the cloud. QoS ceiling for File System: Purity//FB adds support for creating custom QoS policies defining ceiling limits for IOPS and bandwidth per filesystem. Storage administrators can leverage QoS ceiling to ensure predictable performance and mitigate resource contention. Legal Hold support for File System: Allows users to apply legal hold on files, folders and sub-folders. Once applied the file/folder can’t be deleted by the user until the legal hold is removed. This capability supports compliance for enterprises in regulated industries by providing mandatory legal hold capabilities for files and folders. 18.6TB QLC DFM Support for S100: provides lower entry-point (130TB raw) for customers to experience the power and goodness of FlashBlade//S and also provides heterogeneous expansion capability on //S100 systems with 18.6TB and 37.5TB DFMs. FlashBlade//S500 with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD: Purity//FB 4.5.6 introduces the integration of FlashBlade with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to provide a high-performance, scalable solution for AI and other high-performance computing applications. Object Secure Token Service: Secure Token Services helps FlashBlade to integrate with Single Sign ON (SSO) architectures (Federated Identity models). It simplifies management of user and group access to FlashBlade resources like buckets and objects. Increased Object Account and Bucket Scale: Scalability in FlashBlade Object storage is enhanced with the latest release. FlashBlade will be able to support up to 30K replication relations and up to 5K remote credentials while setting up replication. Object Active-Active Replication: Beginning with Purity//FB 4.5.6, Active-Active Replication between multi-site writable buckets is now Generally Available. No qualification document or approval for setting up replication is needed. However, active-active replication of classic buckets still requires PM approval. Please contact your Pure Storage Representative for assessment and approval for classic buckets. We recommend using multi-site writable buckets for all scenarios including single site deployments. Capacity Consolidation on FB//S & FB//E: provides support for upgrading smaller capacity DFMs to larger capacity DFMs in FlashBlade//S and FlashBlade//E systems. TLS Policy and Ciphers: TLS Policy allows customers to create and maintain custom TLS policies & Ciphers for FlashBlade network interfaces. TLS policy helps centralize management and controls for all inbound network traffic. The policy helps narrow down attack surface and vulnerability exploitation for transports over the network. Updates to Zero Move Tiering (ZMT): FlashBlade//ZMT system adds support for 1,2,3 and 4 DFM per blade configs in 1S:1E offering. New SKUs offer low starting capacity points for Hot storage class and large Cold archival storage. This indirectly improves TCO for customers with predictable performance and cost efficiency. ABE Support for File System: Access-based Enumeration (ABE) allows administrators to hide objects (files and folders) from users who don’t have permissions (Read or List) on a network shared folder in order to access them. MMC Support for File System: Administrators can now go into Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to list open inaccessible files and choose to close them. The full list of new features and enhancements can be found in the Purity//FB 4.5.6 Release Notes.Flashcrew Manchester
🤝 Flashcrew Pure Usergroup | Manchester | For our amazing customers! Connect with fellow Pure users and dive deep into the //Accelerate announcements. Learn how to extract even more value from the Pure ecosystem and get your technical questions answered by the experts. Register here: https://info.purestorage.com/2025-Q2EMEA-UKREPLHCOFY26Q3-FlashCrew-Manchester-LP_01---Registration-Page.html We also open these up to non-customers interested in Pure, helping you learn from those already benefitting from the Pure Enterprise Data Platform. Please DM me if you would like an invite.
