The challenge for enterprise IT is to stay at least one step ahead of the next technology wave. When it comes to data, that means preparing for the unstructured tsunami.

Unstructured data is predicted to grow for most enterprises by over 50% per year, reaching 80% of all data by 2025, according to IDC. This trend will transform not only how IT organizations handle data, but how the storage industry meets the challenge as well.

The answer, according to major industry players, such as Pure Storage Inc., is to transition from traditional models using file and block by combining them with object store to create a faster, more responsive platform that is better suited to workload-driven needs. Pure’s solution is Unified Fast File and Object, or UFFO, which it introduced as a new category last year.

“It’s a renaissance for unstructured data as we move away from general purpose NAS and file shares to things that focus on fast object,” said Matt Burr, vice president and general manager of FlashBlade at Pure Storage. “It’s taking advantage of S3, cloud native applications that need to integrate with applications on site. Artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads tend to rely on shared data across multiple datasets, and you really need to have a platform that can deliver both highly performant and scalable fast file and object from one system.”

Burr spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE, during today’s “The Convergence of File and Object” broadcast event. Vellante also spoke with Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group; Garrett Belschner, datacenter solutions architect at CDW LLC; and CB Bohn, principal data engineer at Micro Focus International PLC. The discussion during the event focused on the need for simplicity and speed to data insights, the evolving role of flash and disruption of the hard disk market, how software is changing the enterprise storage landscape, and the success of one customer in leveraging a unified file and object solution to dramatically speed business deliverables. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch theCUBE’s interview with Burr below:

Speed to insight

Up to now, file storage has accounted for the majority of data stockpiles. This has been the scenario primarily because file has been the solution of choice for high-performance workloads.

However, today’s enterprises crave simplicity and the ability to rapidly gain data insights that will add immediate value to the business. If the data team is mired in complex technical issues that impact speed to insight, the technology is not serving the business as it should.

“One of the challenges is the data science team, the people outside of IT, spend way too much time trying to get the infrastructure to keep up with their demands, predominantly around data performance,” Sinclair said. “They’ve started mitigating that by deploying flash across the data pipeline. Organizations are finding out that flash is essential technology to allow them to harness the value of their data.”

By bringing flash to object as part of its FlashBlade portfolio, Pure is creating a solution designed around the modern workload. This has become more significant as enterprises need enough throughput to handle workloads without worrying about latency.

Pure’s fast all-flash file technology boosts object storage when it is combined in a single environment and can take advantage of flexible, horizontally scalable features. The company envisions this as the technology of choice for an application-driven world.

“Greenfield applications are being built on object, generally not on file or block,” Burr noted. “It’s the rise of object as the next great protocol for modern workloads. As industries take the opportunity to modernize, they’re modernizing not on things that are leveraging archaic disk technology, but on object.”

Watch theCUBE’s interview with Burr, Sinclair and Belschner below:

Disruption of hard disk market

Burr’s reference to the demise of disk provides another subplot for the evolving storage landscape. The classic hard disk, with a motor, spinning plate, pivoting read/write arm and electronics, has been a part of the enterprise world for over 60 years.

There are clear signs that its run may be ending. Orders for solid state drives and flash storage have been outstripping hard disk sales for the better part of the past decade.

“We’re on a forced march to the eradication of disk,” Burr said. “You’ll start to see SSDs replacing HDDs at a much more rapid clip. We are seeing the creative, innovative disruption of an entire industry right before our eyes.”

What new picture will emerge from that disruption? Pure’s vision for UFFO is based on the assumption that it must deliver to customers the same characteristics of cloud computing. That will be driven by software as much as hardware.

“In the past, we were building out many servers, jamming them full with SSD and NVMe drives,” Belschner said. “That was great, but it doesn’t really scale. Being driven by software is where we’re seeing the world open up there.”

In addition, enterprise users will demand that storage reflect the flexibility they are experiencing with data itself. Instead of being concentrated in a central datacenter repository, business information will be generated and stored in multiple locations as edge computing becomes more prevalent.

“We just went through a 12-month period where the entire workforce for most of the companies in this country went distributed and business continued,” Sinclair said. “If business is distributed, data is distributed. It means you have to be able to extract and utilize data anywhere it may be.”

Improved speed and accessibility

An example of how this has played out on the user side can be found in the case of Micro Focus International PLC, a British multinational software and IT business. Using Vertica EON Mode to take full advantage of elastic compute and scalable storage capabilities in the cloud and employing FlashBlade as the backend storage, Micro Focus applied the solution to its business-critical reports.

The result was an improvement in speed and data accessibility that provided meaningful impact for the operations of the company.

“We had some reports which were running in SQL server which were taking seven days,” Bohn explained. “It went from seven days to two seconds to generate one report which had tremendous value to the company. Now it’s almost on demand, and that’s because of the way the data is stored.”

Watch theCUBE’s interview with Bohn below:

As it moved into 2021, Pure has demonstrated an ability to ride out the business disruption caused by the global pandemic. The company reported record revenue and sales for the year and for its fourth quarter, and its “keep it simple” approach through UFFO has resonated with enterprise customers as the new category tracks with the ascendancy of cloud.

“It’s being able to have all of the data concentrated in one place so you can share it from application to application,” Burr said. “We’re going to take the thing that you’ve had and we’re going to modernize it in place over time. It’s business model, innovation and technology.”

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

Image: Pure Storage