Pure1, a platform for storage management and support first introduced by Pure Storage Inc. in 2015, has received a significant update to help manage the demands of modern IT.

The company recently announced its new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. Pure Storage users can now take advantage of new automated monitoring and AI-driven recommendations with self-service management enhancements.

“We’ve had Pure1, which was largely used for monitoring and supporting our fleet like a SaaS company would do,” said Prakash Darji (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure Storage. “As we expanded beyond just observability and monitoring, we realized we could use this observability to do more for customers. We created the DX business unit to bring those things together, because frankly we’re using Pure1 to monitor, manage and allow customers to sign up for their service level agreements in a very digital way.”

Darji spoke with Lisa Martin, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed recent enhancements for ransomware security, a recommendation engine to help manage workloads, and how Pure Storage is expanding its customer base. (* Disclosure below.)

Threat assessment

Pure1’s AI engine Meta offers a predictive service that proactively spots problems and recommends solutions to avoid outages. This enhancement includes assessment for one of the significant pain points confronting most enterprises today: ransomware.

“Instead of just monitoring and watching what’s going on, we can give you a threat level assessment specific to ransomware,” Darji said. “We’re giving customers levels of ransomware security that they can actually implement for protection.”

Pure1’s AI capability is also designed to provide IT administrators with customized recommendations on managing the storage infrastructure, a key need as data expands and the overall network grows with it.

“If you’ve got thousands of volumes and hundreds of arrays, you could spend weeks trying to figure out what to do by running permutational combinatorics,” Darji said. “We create hi-fidelity recommendations for performance, capacity, placing new workloads, workflow rebalancing and even for Pure As-A-Service, which SLA to sign up for.”

Cloud experience

There is also a self-service set of options for Pure1 users, with an expanded catalog for ordering new services and managing subscriptions.

“We’ve introduced a partner persona where partners can manage things on behalf of a customer and see transparency in billing and order tracking,” Darji noted. “All of those things that you’re used to in a commerce and cloud experience, we’ve brought that to traditional storage.”

The enhancements for Pure1 reflect Pure Storage’s interest in playing a core role in the modern IT experience. Through the recent acquisition of businesses, including Portworx Inc. and its Kubernetes Data Services platform, Pure is also expanding its customer base beyond the storage administrator community and into DevOps.

“Part of the modern data experience is being cloud ready and container ready,” Darji said. “We lean very heavily into what we’re doing for DevOps and developers, not just storage administrators. We look around the landscape and there’s a lot of data technology, so we need to invent a future where people have a blueprint to copy. That’s our goal in modernizing the landscape.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE