Pure Storage Unifies Data for AI Control

Pure Storage has announced significant upgrades to its platform, specifically engineered to help businesses harness the full potential of artificial intelligence. These enhancements focus on unifying data management, ensuring that critical information is readily accessible and manageable across hybrid environments, from on-premises data centers to the public cloud. This strategic move addresses a fundamental challenge in the AI era: the need for seamless data control to fuel innovation and maintain a competitive edge.

According to Rob Lee, Pure Storage Chief Technology Officer, the ability to manage data effectively, not just store it, has become the bedrock of AI readiness. He emphasizes that success hinges on having data secure and easily accessible everywhere, supported by a unified and consistent operational experience that operates in real time and at scale.

A cornerstone of this announcement is the major expansion of the Enterprise Data Cloud into the public cloud with Pure Storage Cloud. This offering is designed to unify hybrid cloud storage infrastructures, ensuring data is positioned exactly where it is needed to power new innovations. A key new service, Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native, is now generally available. Built for Azure VMware Solution, it allows customers to reduce overhead, migrate seamlessly without refactoring, and decouple storage from compute, all as a fully managed Azure native service.

To combat chaotic data control that can derail AI projects, the platform introduces an intelligent control plane. This acts as the central brain, automating how data is provisioned, protected, and governed across the entire data estate. A significant development here is the upcoming integration of Portworx by Pure Storage with Pure Fusion, scheduled for the first half of fiscal year 2027. This integration will provide a single, unified platform for managing data and storage for all workloads, extending powerful fleet management capabilities to modern containerized and cloud-native applications.

The Pure1 AI Copilot, which uses natural language to simplify storage management, is also receiving expansions. The new Portworx Pure1 AI Copilot, available now, acts as an AI-powered platform engineering assistant, allowing users to query Portworx clusters conversationally. Later in 2026, an integration with Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers will enable IT teams to troubleshoot and optimize systems without requiring deep technical expertise, creating a context-aware intelligence layer.

For improving the efficiency of resource-intensive AI operations, Pure Storage announced the Key Value Accelerator integration with NVIDIA Dynamo for AI Inference. This high-performance caching solution is designed to accelerate inference workloads in multi-GPU environments, aiming to improve scalability, increase speeds, and lower computational overhead. Another innovation on the horizon is Purity Deep Reduce, a next-generation data reduction engine that uses advanced pattern recognition to deliver high data reduction ratios without compromising performance.

The company also highlighted updates to its Next-Gen FlashArray Portfolio. The architecture is designed to allow organizations to run both enterprise applications and modern AI/ML pipelines on the same scalable foundation. The expansion includes the FlashArray//XL 190, coming in late 2026, and the FlashArray//X R5 and FlashArray//C R5, which are available now.

Collectively, these advancements reinforce Pure Storage’s vision of an Enterprise Data Cloud. This approach unifies block, file, and object data management under a single policy-driven framework, where every system contributes to a shared pool of capacity and performance, all controlled through a single console.

(Source: MEA Tech Watch)