The reality in 2021 is that IT infrastructure must facilitate digital business strategies. For storage vendors, data sits at the heart of this model, and the challenge becomes delivering solutions that emulate the cloud experience to drive true business value.

Over the past year, Pure Storage Inc. has been following a course that reflects enterprise customer expectations in this regard. From its acquisition of the data service platform Portworx Inc. in September to the rollout of pay-per-use options for converged infrastructure and containerized apps this July, Pure is focused on delivering a cloudlike experience for data.

“How do we take that ease of use, which is at the heart of the cloud operating principle, and take it up to really deliver a modern data experience?” asked Ajay Singh (pictured), chief product officer at Pure. “The vision is to provide a connected and effortless data experience which allows customers to ultimately focus on what matters for them, their business. If you can mine data, get insights from it, and really drive a competitive edge in the digital transformation, you’re ahead.”

Singh spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed Pure’s strategy for delivering modern data services, the growth of all-flash storage at the expense of hard disk drives, a focus on delivering storage as code, and the future promise of an as-a-service model. (* Disclosure below.)

Multicloud data operations

Before joining Pure in January, Singh led VMware Inc.’s Cloud Management Business Unit. As VMware’s cloud general manager, Singh guided the company’s vRealize and vCloud product suites, an experience that has shaped his approach to the storage world.

“Half of the enterprises, even on-prem, want to consume things in the cloud operating model,” Singh said. “Not only are we driving agility in a multicloud data operation fashion, but we’re also taking it a step further. We’re on the journey to deliver modern data services.”

That journey involves positioning Pure as a key resource with all-flash storage for the modern datacenter, taking aim at the hard disk drive market. One year ago, Pure introduced FlashArray//C systems using lower-cost quad-level cell, or QLC chips, in capacity-optimized NAND memory technology.

Pure’s high-capacity flash arrays are built to lower the per terabyte cost to a level that matches or beats hard disk drives.

“Already the high end has been taken over by flash, but hybrid is next,” Singh said. “It’s pretty broad data coverage in that journey to the all-flash datacenter. Slowly but surely, we’re heading to the all-flash datacenter based on NAND economics.”

Disrupting the hard disk

Those economics appear to have placed Pure on path where new generations of flash chips and rising volumes will make solid state drives the preferred storage choice over hard disks within the next five years.

“Wikibon Research put out data effectively showing that by 2026, flash on a dollar per terabyte basis, the economics of the semiconductor versus the hard disk, is going to be cheaper than hard disk,” Singh noted. “This big inflection point is slowly but surely coming that’s going to disrupt the hard disk industry.”

What this disruption means for the future is the rise of storage as code. Pure’s acquisition of Portworx in September provided the company with developer-oriented technology for Kubernetes and cloud native workloads. Portworx offers cloud mobility for software containers along with a platform for persistent storage and data protection.

“Portworx today delivers true storage as code, orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes, in a multicloud hybrid situation,” Singh said. “The Kubernetes infrastructure allows one to deliver a great automation framework that reduces the labor required to manage the storage infrastructure and deliver it as code.”

Two years ago, Pure launched its as-a-service offering and expanded it last month to include FlashStack Cloud-Smart Infrastructure and a new Portworx Cloud Consumption model. These as-a-service offerings provide a glimpse into Pure’s service delivery strategy going forward, according to Singh, and data will still be the driving force.

“Imagine on a Pure on-prem infrastructure, along with different public clouds that you’re working on with Kubernetes, you could with a few clicks run Kafka as-a-service, TensorFlow as-a-service, MongoDB as-a-service,” Singh explained. “As a technology team, we can truly become a service provider, not just an on-prem service provider, but a multicloud service provider. Data plays a big role there; it should be what drives insights. And as you get those insights, you can really start to separate yourself from your competition.”

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