A common question I get is, “Where do you think we are in the development cycle of AI?”—which sometimes comes with the request that I say which “inning” we are currently in. I think it is very early days for most enterprise AI customers—the top of the second inning, maybe. Baseball analogies aside, I can say that enterprises are working toward realizing value from AI, which has ushered in an infrastructure build-out phase to support it.
AI, however, does not fit the paradigm of traditional workloads such as, say, SQL Server, where customers are able to scope out storage requirements with some headroom baked in. AI is a different animal; customers typically don’t know how much storage will be needed because the use case requirements are often unknown initially.
The sound thinking here is that data agent deployments typically use containers. Combining Kubernetes container management, secure multitenancy and policy governance tools will enable data integration between enterprise mission-critical data and AI clusters.unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly across structured and unstructured data, both on-premises and in the cloud.
When Fusion had been in the market for about a year, Pure realized that adoption was slow because customers wanted it to work fortheir existing data, not just new storage pools. The news at Pure//Accelerate 2024 was that Pure Fusion will be backward-compatible through a simple software update. Thanks to the magic of SaaS, this enhancement will be available as a non-disruptive update for all environments, with the ability to create a single control plane for all appliances.
I expected this announcement, and it’s nice to see it become real. I am looking forward to next year’s Accelerate to hear about the efficiencies that end customers are experiencing in the real world.At Pure//Accelerate 2024, the recurrent theme was the convergence of application modernization with cybersecurity, hybrid cloud and AI. This should be no surprise to anyone who has not lived in a cave for the past year—and anyone familiar with how Pure operates.