The storage industry is experiencing a transformation driven by a simple fact: Enterprise users need storage to do a whole lot more. What propels this need is complexity of the data pipeline. Every organization is filled with data today. What’s missing is a fast path to insight from that mass of business-critical information.

To address this dilemma, Pure Storage Inc. introduced unified fast file and object, or UFFO, as a new category last year. By bringing fast file and fast object under one hood, Pure believes it can meet an enterprise need for real-time insight, data reuse, performance demanded by throughput-hungry applications, facilitation of analytics-powered workflows, and enhanced security.

UFFO also plays into another key enterprise trend: Organizations want to abstract away tech complexity and focus on running the business.

“By bringing the simplicity and economics of object together with the ubiquity and performance of file, UFFO makes life easier for organizations evolving into digital businesses, which, by the way, is all businesses,” said Dave Vellante, co-founder and chief research officer at Wikibon and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio. “We see this as an evolutionary trend that further simplifies the underlying technology infrastructure and does a better job supporting the data flows for organizations so they don’t have to spend so much time worrying about technology details that add little value to the business.”

Storage unification and abstracting away complexity will be the key themes highlighted during Pure Storage’s The Convergence of File and Object event, broadcast by theCUBE on April 28 at 11 a.m. EDT. The event will feature interviews from thought leaders and industry analysts, including executives from Pure Storage and its customers who will discuss recent product news, how Pure is giving new life to object storage, and ways that a unified solution can manage unstructured data and provide much-needed enterprise insights. (* Disclosure below.)

FlashBlade as a platform

The lineage of enterprise storage can be traced from block in the earlier generations of computers to file, which emerged with the advent of PCs, to object and its ties to the connected web. The key transformational technology was flash storage, which hastened the decline of the spinning disk that spanned decades.

The foundation for UFFO was built in 2017 when Pure announced general availability of FlashBlade, its all-flash storage solution. Pure bills FlashBlade as the “world’s first UFFO storage platform” and makes its case that the technology delivers multi-dimensional file and object performance using parallelized architecture for modern workloads.

Why is this important? Application workloads drive many enterprises today, and if dissonance between file and object can be eliminated, the choice of where to find and run the data becomes simpler. Let the workload decide.

“Organizations are struggling to get insights from data, and the complexity associated with the data pipeline and data lifecycles is overwhelming,” Vellante said. “The answer is to abstract the underlying infrastructure complexity and create a layer with which the business can interact that accelerates instead of impedes innovation. Unifying file and object is a simple example of this.”

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Scaling compute and security

Examples of how this approach is benefitting enterprises shed new light on the evolving role of storage to contribute more to the business.

Micro Focus Inc., an enterprise software provider, has been grappling with the problem of data being spread over the corporate landscape. Using Vertica Inc. as its enterprise data warehouse and Pure’s FlashBlade, the company provided its customers with a unified analytics platform and made fast object store a reality. Vertica’s EON Mode allowed Micro Focus to scale compute independently of storage. By providing the backend storage for the firm’s data warehouse efforts, FlashBlade brought improved economics and flexibility at scale.

Pure’s UFFO capability can also play a key role in combating ransomware attacks. In February, the company unveiled FlashBlade updates, which provided security across file, block and cloud-based apps, along with granular, user-level performance monitoring.

Pure’s bet on FlashBlade has paid off to date. The company noted in an earnings report last year that its offering had become a $500-million business in only three years. The research firm IDC has found that end users have consistently adopted object stores for high-performance workloads and estimated that the UFFO category could easily be twice as large as the earnings reported by Pure.

Pure’s UFFO business offers an important shift for a storage industry inexorably tied to a cloud-based world. By consolidating file and object-based workloads on a scalable platform that offers operational simplicity and consumption models tailored for the end-user, storage providers can now match solutions against those of cloud providers as well.

“Pure’s ‘keep it simple’ approach coincided perfectly with the ascendancy of cloud, where technology organizations needed cloud-like simplicity for certain workloads that weren’t going to move to the cloud,” Vellante said. “Pure forced the industry to respond, and when it achieved escape velocity and went public, the entire industry was forced to react.”

Livestream of Pure Storage’s ‘The Convergence of File and Object’ event

Pure Storage’s The Convergence of File and Object event is a livestream event with interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can watch theCUBE interviews here live during the event, as well as watch interviews on-demand after the event ends.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of Pure Storage’s The Convergence of File and Object event, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during Pure Storage’s The Convergence of File and Object event include Garrett Belschner, datacenter solutions architect at CDW LLC; CB Bohn, principal data engineer at Micro Focus International PLC; and Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. TheCUBE will also speak with Pure Storage’s Matt Burr, vice president and general manager of FlashBlade.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Pure Storage “The Convergence of File and Object” event. Neither Pure Storage, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Pure Storage