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!Pure Storage Delivers Critical Cyber Outcomes, Part Two: Fast Analytics
“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 tackled Layered Resilience in our first offering, but what about Fast Analytics? Fast Analytics refers to native log storage in an attempt to review and determine possible anomalies and other potential threats to an environment. This is a category of outcomes that has been moved, by the vendors themselves and, therefore, also customers, but is seeing a repatriation trend back to on premises. Why is repatriation occurring in this space? This is a trend that we are seeing in larger enterprises due to the rising ingest rates and runaway growth of logs occurring. It is important, more important than ever, to discover attacks as soon as possible. Rising costs of downtime and work time to recover are working hand in hand in making every attack more costly than the next attack. To discover anomalies quickly, logs must be interrogated as fast as possible. To keep up with this, vendor solutions have beefed up their compute functions in their cloud offerings. Next-Gen SIEM is moving the formerly, classic, static rules mode of their offerings to an AI-driven, adaptive set of rules, geared toward evolving on the fly, in order to detect issues as quickly as possible. To deliver that outcome, you need a storage platform to deliver the fastest possible reads allowed. As stated, vendors with their cloud offerings attempt to do this by raising compute performance. But what we see the enterprises dealing with is the rising costs of these solutions in the cloud. How is this affecting these customers? As organizations ingest more log and telemetry data (driven by cloud adoption, endpoint proliferation, and compliance), costs soar due to the vendor’s reliance on ingest-based and workload-based pricing. More data means larger daily ingestion, rapidly pushing customers into higher pricing tiers, resulting in substantial cost increases if volumes are not carefully managed. Increasing needs for real-time anomaly detection translate to greater compute demands and more frequent queries, which for workload-based models triggers faster consumption of compute credits and higher overall bills. To control costs, many organizations limit which data sources they ingest or perform data tiering, risking reduced visibility and slower detection for some threats. How does an on-premises solution relieve some of these issues? An on-premises solution, such as Pure Storage FlashBlade, offers the power of all-flash and fast read to provide faster detection of anomalies to support the dynamic aspects of next-gen SIEM tools, but also offer more control around storage growth and associated costs, without sacrificing needed outcomes. For example, our partnership with Splunk allows customers to retain more logs for richer analysis, run more concurrent queries in less time, and test new analysis and innovate faster. Visual 1: Snazzy, high level look at Fast Analytics with our technology alliance partners Customers at our annual user extravaganza, Accelerate, told us about their process of bringing their logs back on-prem, in order to address some of these issues. One customer in particular, FiServ, told their story in our Cyber Resilience breakout session, where we were speaking on what to do before, during, and after an attack, specifically in the area of visibility, where the race is on to identify threats faster. They told of their own desire to reign in the cost of growth, to regain control of their environment. There is nothing wrong with cloud solutions, but the economies of scaling those solutions have had real world consequences and bringing those workloads back on-prem, to a proven, predictable, platform for performance, is beginning to be a better long term strategy to battle the ongoing fight for cybersecurity and resilience. On-premises storage is a valuable tool for managing the financial impact of growing data ingestion and analytics needs, by supporting precision data management, retention policy enforcement, and infrastructure sizing, while reducing expensive cloud subscription fees for long-term, large-scale operations. Exit Question: Are you seeing these issues developing in your log strategies? Are you considering on-premises for your log workloads 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, nor the author himself, were injured in the creation of this post.Configuring 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.Pure Storage FlashBlade//S 100 Now Veeam Ready. Because Backups Deserve Better
Good news: Pure Storage has expanded our presence in the Veeam Ready database with two brand-new validations! 🎉 In addition to our existing platforms that already have Veeam Ready validations, FlashBlade//S 100 is now officially validated for both Repository and Object with Immutability use cases, solidifying our position as a trusted, high-performance platform for cyber resilience. But what does that actually mean? And why should you care? Let’s break it down. Why Use Object for Backups? Backups used to be simple, you’d write them to tape or a local disk and hope for the best. But today’s environments are more complex, distributed, and under constant threat from ransomware. That’s where object storage steps in. Here’s why object storage is becoming the go-to for modern backup: Scalability: Object storage can handle petabytes of data like a champ. Need more capacity? Just add more objects, no forklift upgrades needed. Simplicity: Flat namespace, no file hierarchies, and built-in metadata = less complexity for your team. Immutability: This is the big one. With S3 Object Lock features, your backups become tamper-proof, which is exactly what you need when ransomware comes knocking. So, if you’re backing up with Veeam Data Platform and you’re not using object storage, it might be time for a rethink. Enter: FlashBlade//S 100 Now, let’s talk about the star of the show: FlashBlade//S 100. This isn’t just any storage system. It’s unified fast file and object storage on an all-flash platform. That means it’s built to handle file workloads and the massive throughput of object-based backup and recovery, all from the same system at the same time. Here’s what sets it apart: 🚀 Performance: All-flash speed coupled with Pure’s ultra-fast object protocol mean backups complete faster and, as those backup datasets grow ever larger, that speed becomes essential for meeting tight recovery time objectives (RTOs). Traditional disk just can’t keep up when seconds count. 🧩 Unified access: File and object protocols on the same box? Yes, please. 🧱 Immutability built in: Ransomware can’t touch what it can’t change. FlashBlade//S supports object lock natively. 🔒 Enterprise security: End-to-end encryption, multi-tenancy, and API-driven operations come standard. 📈 Simple to scale: Whether you’re starting small or scaling up for multi-petabyte archives, FlashBlade’s scale out architecture lets you grow and non-disruptive upgrades from FlashBlade//S100 to FlashBlade//S200 or FlashBlade//S500, ensure continued investment protection and scalability It’s not just storage. It’s a future-ready data platform for backup, recovery, and beyond. So...What Is the Veeam Ready Program? The Veeam Ready Program is a qualification process designed to help Veeam’s technology partners (like us!) prove that their solutions actually work with Veeam Backup & Replication™. Think of it as Veeam’s stamp of approval. A way to separate the real-deal backup solutions from the “trust us, it works” crowd. Pure Storage already had Veeam ready validations but the new FB//S100 is designed for entry-level enterprise use cases. These new validations give customers the confidence that no matter what size their workloads are, whether it’s tens of Terabytes in a remote/branch office or multiple petabytes in the datacentre, Pure and Veeam have a solution that’s already been validated. ✅ Veeam Ready - Repository 🔗View Listing (Veeam Ready - Repository Certification) FlashBlade//S 100 passed Veeam’s tests as a primary backup repository. It’s fast, reliable, and perfect for ingest-heavy workloads, synthetic fulls, and instant recoveries. ✅ Veeam Ready - Object with Immutability 🔗View Listing (Veeam Ready - Object with Immutability Certification) This certifies FlashBlade//S as a Veeam-compatible object target, complete with immutability support. Use it for long-term retention and ensure your data is locked down and protected. Ready to Modernize Your Backups? Whether you’re dealing with backup sprawl, tightening your ransomware defenses, or just tired of slow recoveries, the Veeam + Pure Storage combo is ready for you. ✔️ Veeam Ready ✔️ Flash performance ✔️ Object immutability ✔️ Future-proof architecture What’s not to love? Let’s build something better. For your backups and your business.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.
