Innovation @ Pure Accelerate 2025
After five months at Pure Storage, I just attended my first Pure//Accelerate Conference. Pure//Accelerate is our annual gathering of esteemed customers and partners, where we learn from each other how to improve ‘everything data’ with advanced, performant, secure, and resilient storage. A major highlight of Pure//Accelerate 2025 was the announcement of the Pure Storage Enterprise Data Cloud. This represents the next generation of storage capabilities, helping organizations leverage their data for operational excellence and efficiency. Enterprise Data Cloud delivers a unified, AI-driven control plane—via Pure Fusion—that allows organizations to manage and govern data across hybrid estates with cloud-like automation, built-in cyber resilience, and global observability. With my focus on cyber resilience and cybersecurity, I found the cyber resilience announcements especially exciting. First, we announced an integration with Rubrik’s Security Cloud to deliver the first-ever near-zero RTO solution. Rubrik and Pure Storage now combine immutable snapshots with threat analytics for rapid, trusted cyber recovery. Second, we announced integration with CrowdStrike LogScale. Pure Storage and CrowdStrike now offer on-prem storage with LogScale for fast analytics, threat hunting, and secure log retention. These announcements were extremely well received by both customers and partners. Another innovation generating buzz was our new Pure Protect capabilities. At Pure//Accelerate 2025, Pure Storage unveiled enhancements to Pure Protect, advancing cyber resilience and disaster recovery with a layered architecture that includes secure snapshots, isolated recovery environments, and cloud-based clean-room orchestration. The solution introduces policy-driven automation to streamline operations and reduce dependence on professional services, while optimizing VMware environments for increased efficiency and cost control. These advancements aim to simplify recovery, accelerate response, and strengthen data protection across hybrid infrastructures. In summary, Pure Protect can serve as the control and automation plane for layered resilience. On that note, many of my discussions with customers centered around how to leverage SafeMode Snapshots for immediate return to operations following an incident—whether from a disaster, technology outage, or cyberattack. Coming from a cybersecurity background, I was genuinely impressed by our customers' security acumen. Their expertise goes far beyond storage architectures, protocols, capacity planning, and performance. Many demonstrated strong knowledge of preventative and zero-trust controls, along with a deep understanding of immutability and indelibility. There was also strong interest in logging, anomaly detection, and especially our integrations with SecOps and UEBA. I fielded many questions about Varonis, Superna, and CrowdStrike, and how these powerful solutions help safeguard critical data assets. Superna, a sponsor of the event, also had strong attendance and interest in their breakout session. Our data protection partners—Rubrik, Commvault, and Veeam—also generated significant interest and hosted well-attended breakout sessions. Customers were particularly eager to learn how our solutions integrate seamlessly with these partners to enhance the capabilities of the Enterprise Data Cloud through robust, automated data protection workflows. The combination of our high-performance storage architecture and Pure Fusion automation impressed attendees by enabling streamlined management, rapid recovery, and enhanced security for enterprise-critical data. These integrations reassured customers that they can rely on a comprehensive, scalable solution that supports evolving data protection needs while simplifying operational complexity. This was an impressive event that made me proud to be part of Pure Storage. Resorts World was a fantastic venue, the Pure Storage event team executed flawlessly, and the keynote presentations were outstanding. If you didn’t make it this year, be sure to join us in 2026 back at Resorts World! Learn more about the Pure//Accelerate 2025 announcements at: https://www.purestorage.com/accelerate.htmlDisaster Recovery for Your VMware Environments: Pure Protect
Hey everyone, I wanted to share some exciting news about updates to Pure Protect. We know how critical it is to protect your VMware environments, and our product is designed to make disaster recovery simpler and more efficient for you. We have added support for VMware as a recovery target, new interface, along with many other updates. If you are not familiar with Pure Protect, here are a few things that it offers to protect your applications in the event of a disaster. What Pure Protect Offers You: Flexible Recovery: You can choose to recover to AWS or a secondary VMware site. Application-Aware Protection: It protects common Microsoft applications like SQL, Active Directory, and Exchange. If you have VMware Tools installed, it takes application-consistent snapshots; otherwise, it takes a crash-consistent snapshot. Broad Compatibility: You don't need to be an existing Pure Storage customer or have FlashArray, Cloud Block Store, or FlashBlade. Pure Protect supports both Pure and non-Pure environments. Pure1 Integration: The service is managed through Pure1. If you're not already a Pure1 user, we'll get you set up. Your Data, Your Control (Cloud): You use your own AWS account for the service, and AWS will bill you directly for your usage. This approach ensures you maintain full ownership and control over your data, addressing concerns about data custody, residency, and sovereignty. For VMware, you already have control of that environment, so no concerns about control there. Automated AWS Setup: Pure Protect automates the entire AWS target site installation process with a single click, setting up things like VPCs, subnets, firewall rules, and S3 buckets. Multi-Site Protection: If you have multiple VMware vCenter sites, Pure Protect can protect them all to a single AWS account, secondary VMware location. Manual Failover: Failovers are initiated by you, on-demand. There's no automatic failover feature. This means you are in total control of your environment, run tests on-demand to ensure everything runs as expected. This gives you the peace of mind that when a disaster happens, you can fail over with confidence. Things to Keep in Mind: Pure Protect is a disaster recovery service, is not a backup software. It focuses on getting your application infrastructure back up and running, rather than performing log backups. We use orchestration for network mapping, resizing as needed, and scripting will be available soon. Licensing is based on the front-end application capacity of your protected VMs, measured in TiBs as reported by VMware. How to Learn More: Demos or PoCs: If you're interested in seeing Pure Protect in action or trying it out, please reach out, or check out the page on www.purestorage.com/draas. Have Questions? We're here to answer your questions. We're really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Pure Protect and how it can benefit your operations. -Lance
