Data storage is dead, long live data management

Simplicity was the war cry ahead of Pure Accelerate 2025, and by all means it appears Pure Storage has come away from the conference with a huge win.

The storage vendor has made significant headway in recent years in its quest to build an all-encompassing ecosystem for customers, combining high-performance flash hardware with a broad software stack to manage and optimize infrastructure.

Notably, in recent months its storage as a service (STaaS) model has begun paying dividends, as I noted ahead of the conference, but the announcements last week highlight its razor sharp focus on even more simplicity - with a dash of automation, of course.

The flagship update from Pure Storage centered around the launch of its Enterprise Data Cloud, the firm’s new combined approach to data storage and management.

Underpinning this is the company’s Purity operating system, providing enterprises with a unified software platform, alongside Pure1 and Pure Fusion - the latter two now make up the ‘management’ layer, so to speak, within the Pure estate.

Pure Fusion was a point of particular focus for the storage vendor last week and forms a critical part of the Enterprise Data Cloud. The company has taken its time fleshing this out, having first announced this in 2021, and new updates mean that customers can now view their storage assets in a single pool.

No more disjointed environments and disparate datasets: it’s all there in front of you, visible and easily accessible.

Combined with Pure1, this is the ‘intelligent control plane’ of the EDC, and brings a level of automation to data storage that Pure has been striving for over the last few years.

During two extensive hands-on keynote sessions, attendees were shown how workflows and configurations can now be easily automated at the click of a few buttons.

It’s more than just simple automation, however. The company repeatedly emphasized that the automation features span an array of areas, with compliance and security of particular note.

Pure Storage is playing the long game

The EDC represents the fruits of more than a decade’s labor to consolidate the Pure Storage ecosystem, founder John ‘Coz’ Colgrove told ITPro at the conference. CEO Charlie Giancarlo waxed lyrical about the fact that this represented a “paradigm shift” in the data storage industry.

In pulling together a comprehensive, finely curated architecture, the company will no doubt make it easier for enterprise customers to optimize infrastructure, but more importantly, manage the data which now represents the lifeblood of their business.

Patrick Smith, Field CTO for EMEA at Pure Storage told ITPro ahead of the conference the company wants customers to essentially sit back and let Pure handle the drudge work with storage optimization while focusing on data management.

“Don’t manage the storage, manage the data,” he quipped in a call ahead of the annual event. Pure’s EDC launch certainly appears to hit the nail on the head on this front, but is it truly unique? Not exactly.

Prakash Darji, general manager at Pure Storage's digital experience business, told ITPro on the ground that the EDC is “evolutionary, not revolutionary” having previously hit out at a question from the press on the novelty of the approach.

It does bear some similarities to other options on the market - just don’t mention that to them - albeit with a more fleshed out portfolio that’s been made possible by Pure’s late-entrant status within the broader storage industry.

Simply put, it hasn’t had to contend with decades’ worth of legacy solutions, infrastructure, or most importantly, customers like competitors have.

That’s the advantage the company now has in the broader marketplace. With the EDC, the final building blocks are in place, all that’s required from here on out is to let customers tinker and experiment.

Pure Storage will take care of the hardware, whether enterprises can use the service to get their data in order will be the real test.