Getting Started: 5 Steps to Get the Most Out of the Pure Customer Community
Welcome! You've taken the first step and created an account here. What to do next you ask? Here's five simple steps to take after registering to ensure you're getting the most out of this community. Fill out your Profile: Let the community know who you are! Click on your avatar in the top right corner of this window and select 'My Settings' from that dropdown. Fill in your name, location, and bio information. Plus select from one of several default avatars or upload your own image. Write an Introduction post: Head over to the Social Space and write your intro post. Tell us about yourself, your role at your company, and your goals for participating in this community. What have you been thinking about a lot lately at work? (And we won't shy away from pictures of your pets either!) Follow a couple of Forum areas: Find the products you use most and solution areas you're most focused on in our Forums and be sure to click the bell icon in the upper right of those forums to be sure you get notifications on the latest activity in those areas. If you work in Finance, Healthcare, Public Sector, or Telco there's groups dedicated to the unique needs of your industry areas too. And if you're an open source or automation fan, Cloud Native and Kubernetes devotee, or a Pure Partner, there's dedicated group you can join for each of those areas too. Join your local Pure User Group: Click on Groups in the top nav and select Pure User Groups. (fka FlashCrew) Select your region & find the group for your local area. Click on that group and then click 'Join Group'. This will ensure you hear about any Pure events happening in your local area, including when & where the next meetup is. Pick 3-5 tags to follow: This community makes heavy use of tags. As you browse a forum, you'll notice each thread has tags. That is because we require them for every post. Find the tags most relevant to your interest areas and click the bell icon on those pages so you can keep up to date with the latest posts in those categories, regardless of what forum or group the discussion happens in. Finally, feel free to ask questions! Your friendly admins (bmcdougall and Ludes) are here to answer any questions you have and take suggestions. And we have deputized experts across Pure Storage to be on hand to answer deep technical questions. So don't be shy, there's always someone around to help you out.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 NetworkingComplexity Creeps. Let’s Audit It Before It Breaks You.
Complexity in IT isn’t built overnight—and it won’t be unwound that way either. This blog walks through a practical, no-fluff approach to auditing and simplifying your IT environment. From building a visibility map of your tools and integrations to prioritizing what to fix, executing cleanly, and proving the value with real metrics—this is about intentional, incremental change. Win big. Choose simplicity.
Pure's Founding 15 Architectural Decisions
When Coz and team set out to build the first Pure storage system they had a mission to "fix everything that was wrong with data storage." That's a rather bold task if you ask me, and having cut my teeth early in my career deploying and supporting some of the storage systems of the day I can tell you there was plenty to fix. Managing multiple tiers of drive types, RAID decisions, planned maintenance, which compromises to make between features and performance. Then on top of it all once every 4 years or so I would get to start planning a major migration project to retire old hardware and move to the shiny new stuff. I think back to those days and can't help but imaging what kind of projects I could have worked on with all that time wasted RMAing the weekly pile of failed HDDs. HDDs that by the way were typically just reset and sent right back out to me as referbs the next time I had a failure. But that's a different blog post. So what are the 15 decisions? These are the foundational architectural principles that drove the early development of Pure's technology and they still remain relevent today. I believe we can draw a direct correlation back to our consistently high NPS score (a measure of customer satisfaction) to these decisions and the impact they have on your day to day life as a data platform admin. When Ludes , andrew , and I sat down to brainstorm our offshoot of The Pure Report we pretty quickly realized this would be a great story to share. It's a story that takes a lot of time, not something that would typically get discussed in an EBC or FlashCrew user group presentation; and the podcasting format gave us the perfect opportunity to finally dig deep into these decisions and share those with the world. We took each of the 15 decisions and did a deep dive episode by episode; unpacking what it meant for our product development and what it means for you in terms of outcomes and experience. We started 3 years ago and tied a bow on it with the final recap episide published at the end of 2024. For those of you who joined us on this journey, thank you. It's been tremendously rewarding; and for those of you just discovering The Pure Report now, I present to you in it's entirety: The 15 Decisions on The Pure Report Podcast. Built in Simplicity Most Efficient Architecture At Scale Consumer Flash (MLC) Data Reduction Stateless Controllers Front End Active/Active and Back End Active/Standby Streamlined Code Paths Immutable, Usable Snapshots Realistic Efficiency Metrics Adaptive Flexible RAID Security & Encryption: All the Data, All the Time Metadata: The Secret Sauce Simple Install & Upgrade Proactive, Predictive Support Non-Disruptive Everything Recap EpisodeStorage Jailbreak! The Transformative, Operational Hope of Storage as a Service
May 6, 2025 | 11:00AM PT • 2:00PM ET -> Register Now! Details: For May, Principal Technologist Matthew Bednar will join Coffee Break host Andrew Miller. First, we’ll explore Matt’s career as a customer–what drew him to choose Pure Storage as a customer even before he joined the company (yes, this is partly about how he got out of storage jail). From there, we’ll dive into storage as a service (STaaS) from a practitioner perspective and how STaaS done right (Evergreen® is part of it) enables you to focus on items that matter to your company—freeing you from storage jail. The discussion will include: How STaaS affects traditional customer organization roles and responsibilities - It’s more than just a shift from purchase to consumption. SLOs vs. SLAs - If you don’t know the difference, you might be getting taken advantage of. Initial sizing and expansion planning - The shift in approaches. Overview of Evergreen//One™ (Pure Storage STaaS offering) New Evergreen//One capabilities, such as “paid power and rack” and the “cyber resilience SLA” (unique value in the case of a ransomware attack). As always, we’ll keep it educational while exploring how Pure Storage offers capabilities and products that benefit you. The speakers will stay on after the webinar to answer questions for those who want to learn more. LIVE RAFFLE: One lucky attendee will win a YETI Coffee Lover Set (approx. value $132.16). See Terms and Conditions. Register Now!
Finding predictions in the unpredictable
At Pure we are looking to make meaningful changes and bring value to the markets we serve. While our technology is second-to-none, we know that business problems in healthcare aren't always solved by throwing technology at it alone. If you are able to join us at our customer event: Accelerate you will notice we have a dedicated Healthcare day. We will be delivering high-impact, reasonable length sessions, detailing out some exciting new solutions and announcements for our healthcare customers. One of our solutions is EvergreenOne// Medical imaging (PACS/VNA). This solution is truly unique in the market in the way it solves for data management while also delivering predictable pricing. Billed "Per Study" we lock in a price for you, for up to 10-years and take on the risk of variability in study size growth, performance, privacy, and reliability. Organizations seemingly fall into two camps. Either they have moved to a "cloud-like" billing model(monthly cost per TB consumed), or continue capital purchase where you guess your next 5 years capacity needs and performance needs for your PACS/VNA data. Historically there are 3 data needs to address for your organizations PACS/VNA deployment: Burning through OpEx budget since every month your PACS/VNA data grows larger Running out of storage sooner (under provisioning) or overpaying ( over provisioning) with CapEx purchase Performance requirements change ( e.g. running 10 AI algorithms while servicing the human clinicians off the same data platform, simultaneously) With our EvergreenOne//Medical Imaging solution, we believe we have to answer to solve for all 3 above. If youll be able to join us at Accelerate in June, you will be the first to hear, otherwise stay tuned for our public announcement happening just after Accelerate ends.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 NetworkingNo Crystal Ball? You Won't Need One with a Flexible Storage Architecture
On Tuesday, April 29 | 10:00AM PT • 1:00PM ET | 6:00PM BST | Join us for an exciting webinar - No Crystal Ball? You Won't Need One with a Flexible Storage Architecture Dive in with Principal Product Manager Jon Carnes, and Technical Evangelist Don Poorman for an exclusive fireside chat as they discuss, the evolution of file storage and why now is the time to rethink your approach, common NetApp pain points—how Pure Storage solves them effortlessly, and more. Register Here!
