The Pure Report

We welcome back Chad Kenney, VP Product Management, to explore the new definition of "Enterprise-ready" in data infrastructure. We discuss how reliability and uptime are more critical than ever, with downtime costs frequently exceeding $300,000 per hour for a majority of companies according to a recent survey. Kenney notes that while hardware fails less often today, the major causes of downtime—namely security issues and human error—still persist, accounting for a large portion of outages. Our discussion pivots to how Everpure addresses this by simplifying architecture to reduce points of failure by using proprietary data devices instead of traditional SSDs. The new standard for enterprise readiness requires a system built on first principles with a software-centric view of resilience.

We then explore how a key differentiator for modern enterprise-ready infrastructure is proactive support, which Everpure has always delivered through extensive telemetry and "fingerprints" that predict issues before they cause an outage. Our predictive technology is so effective that 70% to 75% of support calls are for problems that have not yet occurred. Architecturally, simplicity is critical, including the use of stateless controllers, which eliminates complex manual data management during upgrades, and limited error paths. Furthermore, our software-first mentality abstracts complexity, such as automatic management of RAID groups, to deliver autonomous systems. This frees storage administrators to become strategists and simultaneously reduces the potential for human error, enhancing overall system resiliency.

We also dive into cyber resiliency, performance, and the future of data management driven by AI. Everpure builds layered cyber protection through capabilities like SafeMode, native encryption, and partner integrations. This approach prioritizes near-instantaneous recovery from local snapshots, which is faster than recovering from backups. Looking forward, Enterprise-ready means a unified platform (the Enterprise Data Cloud) where diverse workloads, including AI inference processing, can run simultaneously with consistency, enabling "data as a supply chain". This vision is achieved through the API-first and Fusion-enabled platform, ensuring that new feature functionality is immediately available for automation, all while maintaining the simplicity and continuous innovation provided by Evergreen.

To learn more, visit: https://www.purestorage.com/platform.html

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

02:15 Chadd’s update on 2026 at Everpure

06:11 Stat of the Episode on Downtime

08:58 Proactive Support

12:32: Component Count Relative to Uptime

17:30: The Meaning Behind 6 9’s

23:28 Designing for Cyber Resilience

26:35 Consistent Performance for Tier 1 Apps

29:55 API First and Fusion First

In this episode, we sit down with Technical Evangelist Don Poorman for a deep dive into the most engaging and eye-opening questions from the past year of the customer-focused Ask Us Everything (AUE) webinar series. The AUE forum has proven to be an invaluable resource for the Everpure community, driving real-time feedback and high-quality, practical discussions directly with experts. Tune in as we revisit the most pertinent topics and customer use cases, revealing how these community interactions are shaping the Everpure roadmap and delivering tremendous value.

The conversation recaps the biggest AUE sessions, starting with Fusion, where customers were focused on the operational reality of managing fleets, automating data placement across data centers, and multi-tenancy. Next, we discuss the highly attended session on Purity Upgrades and the success of the self-support upgrade model, emphasizing Everpure’s commitment to building confidence and providing tools like AI Copilot to make storage OS upgrades a non-event. The review moves into Cyber Resilience, highlighting the shift from prevention to recovery, the role of SafeMode snapshots, and the importance of ecosystem integration with partners like Rubrik and Superna to address ransomware attacks holistically.

Finally, our discussion covers the rapid evolution of FlashArray File, including the much-anticipated ActiveCluster for Files use case, and a look at the comprehensive value delivered by the Evergreen portfolio—from the included features in Evergreen//One to the Cyber Resiliency SLA add-on and its role in hybrid-cloud environments. The episode wraps up with the highly relevant session on the Nutanix integration, exploring how the Everpure Platform helps decouple storage growth from hypervisor licensing and enables modern container-based workloads with features like NVMe/TCP. This recap provides a high-level overview of the technical and strategic conversations defining the Everpure platform today and what’s coming next.

To learn more, visit https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/category/events/events/webinars

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

02:25 Ask Us Everything Webinars

06:25 Fusion

10:05 Self Service Upgrades

16:19 Cyber Resilience

24:29 File Services

29:23 Evergreen//One

38:42 Nutanix and Everpure

47:45 Observations on the AUE Program

It’s the Pure Report annual predictions episode! We welcome Shawn Rosemarin to dive deep into the world of tech in 2026, including a look back at 2025 predictions on AI becoming a strategist, Multi-Cloud 2.0 requiring a unified data platform, and end-to-end security ramping up. Shawn holds himself accountable for last year’s bets, particularly noting that the expected "operating model transformation" driven by AI has yet to fully materialize, arguing that many organizations are still grappling with the hard changes to people, process, and technology required for true transformation.

Our conversation pivots to what’s next, starting with the evolution of AI from simple co-pilots to autonomous agents that will soon become mature process owners capable of completing end-to-end workflows. This shift will require a greater emphasis on verification, changing the industry's focus from time to answer to time to trust (or time to truth) as enterprises build verification stacks to ensure AI accuracy, recognizing that every mistake costs money and customer satisfaction.

Finally, Rosemarin forecasts that growing energy scarcity will drive new AI economics, forcing serious programs to run AI like a business system by routing queries to the most efficient models. Furthermore, he predicts that data stops being an asset and evolves to a supply chain, necessitating a manufacturing-like process to refine structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data for uniform consumption by training systems. This new landscape will ultimately punish infrastructure complexity and reward the platform mindset that simplifies operations and removes friction through automation and orchestration.

To learn more, visit https://blog.purestorage.com/perspectives/2026-ai-predictions-data-storage/

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

09:30 Look back at 2025 Predictions

17:33 William Gibson Quote on the Future

22:20 2026 Predictions - Copilots Become Agents

26:48 Verification and Time to Trust

30:30 Energy Scarcity and AI Economics

34:13 Data as a Supply Chain

38:50 Relevance Engines

42:10 Platform Mindset

45:43 Content Authenticity

49:37 Cyber as an Executive Imperative

52:35 Workforce Productivity

55:21 Summary of 2026 Predictions

We welcome back Andrew Sillifant, Solution Director at Pure Storage, for a deep dive into the concept of data gravity. We start with the traditional 2010 definition coined by Dave McCrory—that data accumulates, making it harder to move, and forcing dependent systems to cluster nearby. However, Andrew presents his core thesis, arguing that this foundational principle is no longer sufficient in a world of exploding complexity. Our conversation emphasizes the need to re-examine data gravity through a modern lens, acknowledging the massive shift to cloud computing and the proliferation of interconnected systems over the last decade.

Andrew introduces five crucial dimensions that now describe data's impact: Volume, redefined by context and classification; Dependency, now accelerated by API calls, integration points, and AI agents; Criticality, which includes regulations, security, and implicit SLAs; Velocity, measured by how many functions data is used for; and Latency, complicated by geographic requirements that skew response times. These dimensions highlight how non-physical constraints, like egress fees and data sovereignty laws, create artificial friction that compounds the problem beyond sheer data size.

Our discussion concludes with a new framework of five sources of data gravity that IT leaders must address: Technical Gravity (the physical component and mobility), Economic Gravity (the costs of hosting and moving data, like egress fees), Regulatory Gravity (compliance and legal restrictions), Institutional Gravity (the dependency on a small number of people who know how to manage old systems), and Measurement Gravity (budgeting and decision-making risks). Finally, Andrew connects these challenges to Pure Storage, noting how platform features like deduplication and continuous innovation are actively working to lessen the effects of data gravity for customers.

To learn more, visit https://blog.purestorage.com/purely-technical/the-economics-of-data-gravity/

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

01:05 Andrew Observations About the USA

04:19 Defining Data Gravity

07:30 Challenges Caused By Data Gravity

09:01 Real World Data Gravity Examples

17:15 Data Gravity Impact Vectors

33:02 New Dimensions of Data Gravity

40:30 Where Pure Helps with Data Gravity

The Pure Report welcomes two key members of Pure’s Technical specialist team, Principal Technologist Joey Clark and Field Solution Architect Drew Kessel (who covers Cyber Resilience). Our conversation begins with a look at their backgrounds, including their surprising common start in healthcare IT, and the value of professional development, like Pure’s EBC speaker training. We quickly pivot to the successes Pure is seeing in the areas of file, object, and unstructured data, driven by innovative products like FlashBlade and FlashArray.

The core of our discussion centers on why Pure is successfully tackling the toughest challenges in unstructured data, noting the significant shift to object storage for backup, which provides benefits like immutability via object lock. Joey and Drew highlight how Pure’s unique approach—focusing on simplicity and eliminating "tech debt"—is resonating with customers and leading to major business breakthroughs. This success is made stronger by strategic partnerships with data protection leaders like Rubrik, Commvault, and Veeam, creating a connected ecosystem that delivers layered resilience against modern threats.

Finally, we explores the powerful narrative of the Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC), with Fusion acting as the intelligent control plane. We discuss how Fusion is the vehicle for EDC, helping customers mitigate risk and human error through automation. This includes using presets to enforce protection policies (like SafeMode snapshots and replication) and delivering audit and compliance alerts when security settings are changed. Drew shares a powerful, real-life customer success story of an 8-hour recovery from a cyber event using Pure snapshots, emphasizing that cyber resilience is a unified team sport that requires both infrastructure and security teams to collaborate.

To learn more, visit https://www.purestorage.com/products/storage-as-code/pure-fusion.html

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

09:02 File and Object Momentum

16:45 SLA-Backed Cyber Recovery

20:20 Fusion Presets and Cyber

27:33 Cyber and Enterprise Data Cloud

34:06 Bridging Cyber IT to Security Teams and CISOs

38:11 Pure Tech Summit Events

42:11 Hot Takes Segment

This week we welcome Paul Joyce, who leads one of Pure Storage's largest Field Solution Architect (FSA) teams. Our discussion begins by exploring the philosophy behind building a team of super technical specialists and key capabilities for this specialized role. Paul highlights that in addition to deep technical expertise in areas like databases and virtualization, he seeks candidates who demonstrate passion, a willingness to be vulnerable to build their personal brand, and, most critically, empathy for customers. This empathy should be rooted in a foundation of hands-on experience, where the architects have "lived the pain" of IT operations and can truly understand the challenges faced by customers, allowing them to focus on delivering time and value back to the business.

We then move to what's top of mind for Paul, focusing on two major industry dilemmas. First is the ongoing virtualization dilemma, the continuing need for customers to re-evaluate their virtualization strategy following changes to VMware licensing. Paul emphasizes that the key challenge is not just the technology conversion (like moving to another hypervisor) but the business risks involved—including the cost of retraining entire staff on a new enterprise-ready platform and the complications of creating complex, high-risk migration pipelines between different environments. The second dilemma, around Big Iron, covers the massive shift in mission-critical storage. Paul contrasts the legacy multi-controller, spinning-disk systems of the past, built primarily for high availability, with Pure Storage’s all-flash, two-controller architecture, which he attests delivers equal or greater availability with a simpler architecture and superior performance. This simplified approach enables massive consolidation for complex database environments.

Finally, Paul shares his hot takes on database trends. He points to the growing importance of vector embedding, noting that major enterprise databases like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server 2025 are building native vector capabilities into their platforms to bring AI/data lake functionality directly to the data. He also discusses the implications of Oracle's 23ai release, which has focused on cloud and engineered systems, prompting on-premises customers to consult with their FSA teams on their future database strategy. The episode concludes with a classic IT mess up story from Paul’s early career as a jack-of-all-trades network administrator, recounting a failed, all-weekend core switch replacement in a freezing data center.

To learn more, visit https://www.purestorage.com/databases

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

01:44 Building a Specialist Team

05:53 Prior Experience in IT

09:45 Working with Rockets

15:15 Virtualization Dilemma

24:09 Enterprise Storage for Databases

37:01 Hot Takes Segment

The world of IT is becoming increasingly complex, making the need for real-time visibility and intelligence more critical than ever. In this episode, we sit down with Principal Technologists Michael Sasse and Matthew Bednar to explore the expanding field of data observability. We dive deep into defining observability—moving beyond basic latency graphs to equating system metrics and machine data with actual business outcomes. Hear their perspectives on why observability is now at the forefront of every IT leader’s mind.

Our conversation then veers to tackle the current state of "Shadow Observability," where an accumulation of different tools and creation of siloed teams leads to data fragmentation across cloud, data center, and security platforms. They underscore the necessity for a centralized, single point of truth and a unified strategy that prevents individual team decisions from negatively impacting the broader environment.

Finally, our guests reveal how Pure Storage is participating in the movement toward standardization and centralization. We detail the evolution of Pure1 and a strategic shift from pull-based Open Metrics to real-time, push-based Open Telemetry, ensuring seamless integration across Pure’s platform of storage array products.. Learn how this foundational platform approach, championed by Fusion and the Enterprise Data Cloud vision, empowers IT to move from being a cost center to a critical business partner that can tangibly link infrastructure efforts to financial results.

To learn more, visit https://blog.purestorage.com/products/enhance-visibility-with-our-new-data-observability-and-monitoring-service/

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

08:30 Defining Observability

13:52 Stat of the Episode

25:49 Pure1 and Observability

28:25 Using APIs for Open Telemetry Output

32:49 Key Native Observability Integrations

39:25 Hot Takes Segment

It’s all about Data Pipelines. Join Pure Storage Field Solution Architect Chad Hendron and Solutions Director Andrew Silifant for a deep dive into the evolution of data management, focusing on the Data Lakehouse architecture and its role in the age of AI and ML. Our discussion looks at the Data Lakehouse as a powerful combination of a data lake and a data warehouse, solving problems like "data swamps” and proprietary formats of older systems. Viewers will learn about technological advancements, such as object storage and open table formats, that have made this new architecture possible, allowing for greater standardization and multiple tooling functions to access the same data.

Our guests also explore current industry trends, including a look at Dremio's 2025 report showing the rapid adoption of Data Lakehouses, particularly as a replacement for older, inefficient systems like cloud data warehouses and traditional data lakes. Gain insight into the drivers behind this migration, including the exponential growth of unstructured data and the need to control cloud expenditure by being more prescriptive about what data is stored in the cloud versus on-premises. Andrew provides a detailed breakdown of processing architectures and the critical importance of meeting SLAs to avoid costly and frustrating pipeline breaks in regulated industries like banking.

Finally, we provide practical takeaways and a real-world case study. Chad shares a customer success story about replacing a large, complex Hadoop cluster with a streamlined Dremio and Pure Storage solution, highlighting the massive reduction in physical space, power consumption, and management complexity. Both guests emphasize the need for better governance practices to manage cloud spend and risk. Andrew underscores the essential, full-circle role of databases—from the "alpha" of data creation to the "omega" of feature stores and vector databases for modern AI use cases like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Tune in to understand how a holistic data strategy, including Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud, can simplify infrastructure and future-proof your organization for the next wave of data-intensive workloads.

To learn more, visit https://www.purestorage.com/solutions/ai/data-warehouse-streaming-analytics.html

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

03:15 Data Lakehouse Primer

08:31 Stat of the Episode on Lakehouse Usage

10:50 Challenges with Data Pipeline access

13:58 Assessing Organization Success with Data Cleaning

16:07 Use Cases for the Data Lakehouse

20:41 Case Study on Data Lakehouse Use Case

24:11 Hot Takes Segment

In this exciting episode of The Pure Report, we sit down with Ketan Shah, VP Products at Nutanix, and Cody Hosterman, Sr. Director, Product Management at Pure Storage, to celebrate the General Availability (GA) launch of our joint solution. Driven by recent market disruption and the need for virtualization optionality, this partnership is founded on a mutual culture of customer-centricity and innovation. Our guests discuss how their teams achieved this milestone in just over a year, highlighting tight engineering collaboration, allowing them to build an architecture that will serve customers now and into the future.

Our conversation dives into the core technical capabilities, which are focused on simplicity and a "better" solution, not just an alternative. The joint platform integrates the Nutanix Cloud Platform with Pure Storage FlashArray via the low-latency NVMe/TCP protocol. This integration delivers a highly efficient, VM-centric experience, where provisioning, snapshots, and cloning are automatically managed through the familiar Nutanix Prism interface, abstracting away the complexity of traditional management. A key takeaway from the early access program was the overwhelming positive feedback on the solution's resilience and the surprisingly easy adoption of IP-based storage.

Shah and Hosterman also detail the solution's comprehensive cyber resiliency features, combining Nutanix capabilities like Flow micro-segmentation and disaster recovery orchestration with Pure’s data-at-rest encryption and SafeMode immutable snapshots to offer end-to-end resilience. For customers looking to transition, the Nutanix 'Move' tool is fully supported, providing a non-disruptive migration path. Looking ahead, our guests note that this is just the beginning, with an exciting roadmap planned to integrate more sophisticated array-level features, positioning the platform as a long-term investment for not only virtualization needs but also for future AI and cloud-native workloads.

To learn more: go to https://www.purestorage.com/partners/alliances/nutanix.html and https://www.nutanix.com/purestorage

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

02:35 Corporate Culture Similarities

04:54 Origin of the Partnership

06:13 Working Together on Innovation

09:08 Stat of the Episode on Future of Virtualization

14:10 Feedback from Early Access Program

18:00 Deeper Dive into Technical Capabilities

30:41 Closing Thoughts & CTA

Data sovereignty is a hot topic of the year, driven by the massive proliferation of data, the rise of multinational hyperscalers, and the increasing use of AI. The Pure Report podcast welcomes Pure Field CTO for EMEA, Patrick Smith, to define this critical concept—data being subject to the laws and governance of the country in which it is created or stored—and to explain why enterprises must now focus not just on location, but on who manages, accesses, and controls their data. We discuss how a confluence of circumstances, including recent cloud provider outages, has highlighted the interconnected world and the risks inherent in where data resides, propelling this issue to the forefront for IT leaders globally.

Patrick dives into the three prevailing factors driving the need for a data sovereignty strategy: increasing data sensitivity and regulation (like GDPR), the massive growth and reliance on public cloud environments, and unpredictable geopolitical issues that create risk. He shares key findings from the recent University of Sydney survey, revealing a heightened sense of urgency: 100% of respondents are reconsidering their data’s location due to sovereignty concerns, and 78% are actively adopting strategies for sovereign capabilities. We also break down the strategic options available, ranging from doing nothing or too much (and accepting the risk) to the preferred middle-ground approach of a thorough risk assessment to guide placement decisions.

Our conversation shifts to actionable steps, with Patrick emphasizing that good data governance is the essential underpinning for any successful sovereignty strategy. We explore the necessity of a hybrid multi-cloud architecture that embeds sovereign capabilities, allowing organizations to run the right application in the right location based on its risk profile and move it easily if regulation changes. Finally, Patrick explains how Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud—focused on simplicity, automation, and industry-leading energy efficiency—directly intersects with and helps solve the challenges of delivering sovereign capabilities, leading to the crucial, easy win: understand the domain, track regulation, and above all, don't ignore the changing data landscape.

To read the report about Data Sovereignty, visit https://www.purestorage.com/resources/type-a/data-sovereignty-a-new-era.html

Check out the new Pure Storage digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts:

https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/

00:00 Intro and Welcome

02:17 A Day in the Life of a Field CTO

05:15 Defining Data Sovereignty

08:22 Trends around Data Sovereignty

11:36 Results from a User Survey on Data Sovereignty

16:25 Options for Managing Data Sovereignty

19:24 Getting Started with Data Sovereignty Actions

23:40 Evaluating Sovereign Data Providers

26:10 How Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud Helps