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.
The Spokane Pure User Group is coming Sept. 22nd
Join us for a dynamic Pure Storage Customer Event on September 22 at Uprise Brewing Co! This exclusive gathering brings together Pure Storage experts, featured speakers, and fellow customers for an afternoon packed with learning, networking, and fun. Explore our featured talk tracks: Accelerate Updates: Get an inside look at the latest enhancements to Pure Accelerate. Our experts will share what’s new, showcase the most impactful features, and provide guidance on how to take advantage of these updates to drive innovation and boost operational efficiency within your organization. Virtualization & Cloud: Dive deep into best practices for optimizing your virtualization stacks and seamlessly integrating Pure Storage with today’s cloud environments. Learn strategies for simplifying management, ensuring data protection, and enabling flexible, high-performance hybrid cloud solutions. Space is limited, so mark your calendar for September 22, 3:00 PM – 5:30 PM, and get ready for an engaging, informative event you won't want to miss. We look forward to seeing you at Uprise Brewing Co. Register Now!
How can I help?
Hey Pure Community, I’m Brian Heck, and I get to be your Senior Systems Engineer if you’re in Alaska, Washington, or Oregon (yup, that’s me—the person behind the emails!). I’m part of the SLED team at Pure, which just means I spend my days helping schools, local governments, and all sorts of public organizations like Tribal make the most of their data. I’ve always believed the secret sauce at Pure isn’t just our tech (though I’m pretty biased about how rock solid flash storage is). It’s actually the people on our team and in this community. There’s zero ego, just lots of curiosity and a drive to solve real problems for real folks. So if you ever just want to ask a question, vent about a challenge, or swap stories about your favorite upgrades, trust me, you’re speaking my language. If you’re wondering: What’s it really like working at Pure (spoiler: the culture here rocks) What new tech or trends I’m excited about in storage, cloud, or AI How to get the most out of your SE team (or what the heck SEs actually do behind the scenes) …please shout! I love sharing tips, diving into rabbit holes, and figuring out better ways to do things together. I’m always up for good conversation, honest feedback, or brainstorming sessions, whether it’s in the forums or over coffee (virtual or real). This community means a lot to me, and I’d really love to hear your stories, see your questions, and learn from your experiences. I've been a part of the VMUG for quite awhile, so things like this are my jam. I’ll do my best to share the good stuff—tech advice, a peek at life at Pure, and maybe a few dad jokes if you’re lucky. How can I help? What’s on your mind?The Seattle Pure User Group is coming Sept. 17th
Join us for a dynamic Pure Storage Customer Event on September 17 at The Collective! This exclusive gathering brings together Pure Storage experts, featured speakers, and fellow customers for an afternoon packed with learning, networking, and fun. Explore our featured talk tracks: Accelerate Updates: Get an inside look at the latest enhancements to Pure Accelerate. Our experts will share what’s new, showcase the most impactful features, and provide guidance on how to take advantage of these updates to drive innovation and boost operational efficiency within your organization. Virtualization & Cloud: Dive deep into best practices for optimizing your virtualization stacks and seamlessly integrating Pure Storage with today’s cloud environments. Learn strategies for simplifying management, ensuring data protection, and enabling flexible, high-performance hybrid cloud solutions. Space is limited, so mark your calendar for September 17, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM, and get ready for an engaging, informative event you won't want to miss. We look forward to seeing you at The Collective. Register Now!Don’t Wait, Innovate: Long‑Life Release 6.9.0 Is Your Gateway to Continuous Innovation
How Pure Releases Work (and Why You Should Care) Pure Storage doesn’t make you choose between stability and innovation: Feature Releases arrive monthly and are supported for 9 months. They’re production‑ready and ideal if you like to live on the cutting edge. Long‑Life Releases (LLRs) bundle those feature releases into a thoroughly tested version which is supported for three years. LLR 6.9.0 is essentially all the innovation of those Feature releases, rolled into one update. This dual approach means you can adopt new features as soon as they’re ready or wait for the next stable release—either way, you keep moving forward. Not sure what features you’re missing? Not a problem as we have a tool for that. A coworker reminded me: Pure1’s AI Copilot can tell you exactly what you’ve been missing. Here’s how easy it is to find out: Log into Pure1, click on the AI Copilot tab, and type your question. My coworker reminded me of this last week, so I tried: “Please provide all features for FlashArray since version 6.4 of Purity OS.” Copilot returned a detailed rundown of new capabilities across each release. In just a couple of minutes, I saw everything I’d overlooked—no digging through release notes or calling support required. A Taste of What You’ve Been Missing Here’s a snapshot of the goodies you may have missed across the last few year releases: Platform enhancements: FlashArray//E platform (6.6.0) extends Pure’s simplicity to tier‑3 workloads. Gen 2 chassis support (6.8.0) delivers more performance and density with better efficiency. 150 TB DirectFlash modules (6.8.2) boost capacity without compromising speed. File services advancements: FlashArray File (GA in 6.8.2) lets you manage block and file workloads from the same array. SMB Continuous Availability shares (6.8.6) keep file services online through failures. Multi‑server/domain support (6.8.7) scales file services across larger environments. Security and protection: Enhanced SafeMode protection (6.4.3) quadruples local snapshot capacity and adds hardware tokens for instant data locking which is vital in a ransomware era. Over‑the‑wire encryption (6.6.7) secures asynchronous replication. Pure Fusion: We can't talk about this enough Think of this as fleet intelligence. Fusion applies your policies across every array and optimizes placement automatically, cutting operational overhead . Purity OS: It’s Not Just Firmware Every Purity OS update adds value to your existing hardware. Recent improvements include support for new NAND sources, “titanium” efficiency power supplies, and advanced diagnostics. These aren’t minor tweaks; they’re part of Pure’s Evergreen promise that your hardware investment keeps getting better over time. Why Waiting Doesn’t Pay Off It’s tempting to delay updates, but with Pure, waiting often means you’re missing out on: Security upgrades that counter new threats. Performance gains like NVMe/TCP support and ActiveCluster improvements. Operational efficiencies such as open metrics and better diagnostics. Future‑proofing features that prepare you for upcoming innovations. Your Roadmap to Capture These Benefits Assess your current state: Use AI Copilot to see exactly what you’d gain by moving to LLR 6.9.0. Plan your update: Pure’s non‑disruptive upgrades let you modernize without downtime. Explore new features: Dive into Fusion, enhanced file services, and expanded security capabilities. Connect with the community: Share experiences with other users to accelerate your learning curve. The Bottom Line Pure’s Evergreen model means your hardware doesn’t just retain value it continues to gain it. Long‑Life Release 6.9.0 is a gateway to innovation. In a world where data is your competitive edge, standing still is equivalent to moving backward. Ready to see what you’ve been missing? Log into Pure1, fire up Copilot, and let it show you the difference between where you are and where you could be.Hyper-V: The Municipal Fleet Pickup: Familiar, Capable, and Still Worth Considering
Hyper-V remains a practical, cost-efficient option for Windows-centric environments, offering strong features and seamless Azure integration. This blog explores where it shines, where it struggles, and how Pure ensures enterprise-grade data protection no matter which virtualization road you take.Cincinnati PUG Launch
Thank you to all who helped make the 1st Cincinnati PUG meeting a success. A special thank you to charles_sheppar​, who presented how Pure Storage has transformed his data center over the past 10 years (for the positive). After Charles, dstevens​ shared his thoughts on the changing virtualization landscape. David made the most of his time in Cincinnati, from meeting with customers, attending the PUG, as well as partaking in some Cincinnati classics, Skyline and Graeters. In User Group fashion, Charles is taking the lead and already thinking of topics and ideas for the next meeting. Charles has a "scary" idea that I think is perfect for the next user event. Leave a comment if you want to get involved in helping plan and organize the next event.
