It's time for another edition of Unplugged with Andrew Miller and JD Wallace bringing you the 15 Pure Architectural decisions and more. We start out with a quick recap of Pure's recent Accelerate industry event and some of the key highlights and takeaways. Then hear about how Pure addresses security and encryption via the Purity operation environment. We finish with a quick lookback at the significance of Pure's unified block and file announcement for FlashArray and plug a few upcoming fun webinars around disk replacement. To send feedback on Unplugged and the Pure Report, email: [email protected].

Back after a brief hiatus, we're picking up with a spirited discussion around the changing nature of Data Protection. Hear from two Pure Storage field data protection experts - Ben Kendall and Chris Sprague - all about the history of data protection and different tradeoffs that were required with various media types - tape archive, cloud and even floppy disks (remember those?). Learn what "Modern" in modern data protection really means - greater access to all backup data, ability to restore at VM and application level, and native data services, just to name a few. Pure Storage delivers the best options for protecting and securing all your data and partners with key alliances such as Veeam and Commvault, to develop integrations that make it even easier for you to adapt to the changing demands in data protection. For more info on Pure Storage's end-to-end spectrum of solutions, go to: https://www.purestorage.com/solutions/data-protection.html

Data protection strategies designed for disasters, accidental deletions, or data corruption don't always hold up against ransomware and cyberattacks. in short, backup and recovery is no longer enough to keep your business online and ensure access to critical data. Hear from Matt Bradford, Digital Experience Technical Marketing Director, about a new set of offerings to help enterprises mitigate and assess risk with multi-layered strategies. First, hear about a new Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service ransomware recovery SLA that guarantees a clean storage environment to recover to following a ransomware incident. In addition, we discuss new features that enhance AIOps capabilities in Pure1 to offer customers early anomaly detection to reduce recovery time, a data protection assessment to drive leading practices, plus easy and secure self-service config and administration of SafeMode, with self-service upgrades to get Purity releases quicker. For more information, https://www.purestorage.com/products/staas/evergreen/one.html

The notion of as-a-service or utility is often something promoted as a commercial and reflects more of a buying option. But the truth reveals that it's far more than that. Tune in to hear from Pure's Director of Subscription Portfolio, Abraham Barnes, as we take on the myths and the reality of what Storage as-a-Service means for business transformation and operations. What's revealed is that lines of business and business owners are truly the beneficiaries of an as-a-Service data consumption model. But this also requires a vendor/supplier that can effectively combine the underlying non-disruptive architecture with flexible and agile consumption to deliver outcomes directly aligned to business objectives, and that must scale up or down quickly as required. Hear about a typical customer example and how moving to "cloud" does not always solve the real business need. For more information on Pure Storage and flexible consumption aligned to your business SLAs, go to: https://www.purestorage.com/products/staas/evergreen/one.html

The Unplugged crew is back with Andrew Miller and JD Wallace continuing to take you through the 15 Pure Architectural Decisions. On this episode, we tackle Pure's adaptive flexible RAID, including a spin thru the history of RAID and how took out the need for user intervention to provide a more intuitive solution. Then we hit on the field perspective for the recent FlashBlade//E announcement and implications for data repositories and the inefficiencies of disk. Finally, it's Tip of the Week to remind everyone that Pure's ransomware mitigation feature, SafeMode, is now auto-on for arrays that go out. Better protection from hacks, right out of the box. To send feedback or topic suggestions, email [email protected] and check out www.purestorage.com/flashblade for more on the new FlashBlade//E product and how we can help you take out spinning disk with flash at the same cost with way better TCO.

70% of IT organizations will be unifying their storage and data protection infrastructure to make it more cost effective and add new capabilities. Historically, consolidation has always represented trade-offs and compromise… until now. Hear from Don Poorman, FlashArray Technical PMM about Pure's first truly unified block and storage platform built from the ground up with unified as its goal. Don discusses the history of separate protocols and how legacy platforms struggle to provide the efficiencies and consolidation that users need today. We also dive into the host of use cases that FlashArray unified block and file addresses - solving customer challenges in user shares, repositories, VMware NFS datastores, PACS, general file, and many more. All of this comes with our future proof Evergreen architecture, Purity storage services built natively for file (data reduction and multi-protocol for example) and the simplicity in operation that's always been a hallmark for Pure. Learn more about Pure's zero compromise unified file and block FlashArray offering at: https://www.purestorage.com/file-services

Dive into the latest on what's going on with Pure integrations for VMware with Jason Langer, Pure's Cloud Solutions Marketing lead. Jason has great insights about Pure as a former partner and spent a few years at VMware before arriving here. We discuss the current state of the market with VMware and how VMware has pervaded every workload in the datacenter (databases, data protection, and analytics) - plus how VMware has moved aggressively into the hybrid cloud space. Jason highlights his favorite aspects of Pure's solutions for VMware, including Virtual Volumes (vVols), vSphere integrations, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and more. For more on Pure and VMware solutions, go to www.purestorage.com/vmware.

Our own Puritan Sales Leader Adam Apps recently published a book designed to share guidance and best practices for sales leaders to build, nurture and run high-performing teams. Tune in to hear Adam discuss the motivation behind the book, his experience writing and dealing with a publisher, and some of his personal views and insights on strong leaders he has worked with during his career, including the Pure leaders that impacted him most. We dig into some of the highlights of the book including Touchstone leaders, his 40 Secrets (my favorite part), and his chapter on introspection that revealed a great deal of personal vulnerability. Sh*tty Sales Leaders is a great read and a wonderful book that any leader should read, whether or not you are in sales role. To purchase Sh*tty Sales Leaders, go to: https://a.co/d/0pCBo7n

Unplugged returns with a Volume 11 edition hitting another of the 15 architectural decisions - this time it's a look at realistic efficiency metrics. Join co-hosts JD Wallace and Andrew Miller for a look into the reality of data reduction, snapshots, CPU utilization, and monitoring relative to evaluating the performance and value of your storage solution. Andrew and JD also go a bit deeper in reviewing the latest Purity 6.4 updates including Auto-On SafeMode by default and ActiveWorkload. To send feedback or make topic suggestions, hit us up at [email protected].

The partnership between Pure Storage and Veeam makes choosing the right storage for highly-efficient, enterprise-grade recovery easy. With Veeam's recently announced Veeam Backup & Replication v12 update, we invited Mark Polin, Veeam Solutions Architect, and David Huskisson, Pure Solutions Manager covering Data Protection. to join the program to cover all the details. Thanks to the collaboration and joint engineering between Pure and Veeam, automating snapshots and backups has been a breeze for Pure customers using Veeam for several years. And now with v12, it gets even better with the addition of enhanced snapshot orchestration, improved ransomware protection and recovery, cloud and S3 object updates, and much more. All of these exciting features have a common thread around the joint engineering and integration work that exemplifies the strong partnership between Veeam and Pure. For more information on the announcement: https://blog.purestorage.com/news-events/major-update-to-veeam-backup-replication-to-benefit-pure-customers/