Flash storage and service vendor Pure Storage Inc. today announced a set of enhancements to its flagship platform, including file services that change in real time to adapt to underlying file system changes without extensive reconfiguration.

The company also announced a virtual machine assessment service that helps information technology organizations make better decisions about modernizing their virtualized operations.

Traditional file storage operations are burdened by rigid architectures and multiple layers of protocol and management complexity that make them hard to update, it contends. “We’re driving toward a common evergreen architecture, simplified for scale-up and scale-out management,” said Prakash Darji, general manager digital experience at Pure Storage. “We’re reinventing modern filesystems with a new set of capabilities based on zero-move tiering.”

Zero-move tiering is a storage management strategy that enables data movement across different storage tiers without the time-consuming process of physically relocating the data. Tiering is used to locate data to the most cost-efficient storage tiers and typically involves physical data movement between different storage devices or layers.

“Today, customers must pre-plan how much storage they need, how much space and what policies to apply. Once you configure it, data change management is impossible on most file systems,” Darji said. “We’ve built a virtual configuration where  you can scale as you need and change any of your configuration settings without having to re-architect every layer of your file system.”

Global storage pools

The technology uses what the company calls “global storage pools” that span multiple storage arrays, permitting fleet-wide operations with automated workload placement and rebalancing. That enables IT organizations to deliver required service level agreements without the need to physically move data between tiers. “They can set policies for what they want pinned to the hot tier versus the cold tier without moving the data because it’s pooling all of the resources,” Darji said.

Data can be placed, assigned an SLA and automatically adjusted as data requirements grow. Quality of service requirements and multiprotocol configurations are made automatically. The capability is provided as an over-the-air update to existing Pure Storage arrays although not to those from other vendors. AI Copilot for File, a natural language model, can be used for configuration management.

The new VM Assessment is a service that provides performance monitoring, enhanced scenario planning and rightsizing recommendations through Pure1, an artificial intelligence operations or AIOps platform that offers a single interface to manage multiple storage arrays. AIOps refers to the use of AI and machine learning to automate and enhance IT operations.

The VM Assessment integrates multiple IT tools, improves incident response, and enables proactive management of complex IT environments to allows administrators to identify opportunities to optimize their VM resources while also gaining insights into their utilization and potential subscription impacts. VM Assessment is available to all customers free of charge with their Pure1 subscription.

Darji said the product was developed in response to changes in VMware Inc. virtual machine licensing that Broadcom Inc. made after acquiring the company a year ago.

“You now get charged for the cores that could be used, and not the cores that are used,” he said. “Within the product, we have a VM agent that sits at vCenter an sees what you’re connected to and your unused cores.” VCenter is VMware’s management platform for centralized control of virtualized environments

“Users can choose their own Broadcom bundle and simulate savings from different costs per core,” Darji said. The service also simulates savings from moving from vSAN virtual storage to virtual disk containers or volumes and provides recommendations for the optimal use of cores, VMs, memory utilization and storage utilization across an entire VMware landscape.

Image: Pure Storage