Most IT teams would be familiar with the scene – a developer needs capacity for a new feature, a DBA wants faster recovery, security is waving about a fresh threat and somewhere a spreadsheet is being updated to “plan” storage. Pure Storage’s H2 launch comes as a pointed answer to this very scenario.
It’s less about shiny boxes and more about making the messy, human work of running data estates simpler, calmer and crucially, safer. As Fred Lherault, Pure’s Field CTO for EMEA & Emerging Markets, puts it: “The legacy operational model – manual, reactive and siloed; simply cannot meet today’s expectations for speed, resilience or governance.”
He’s not talking in abstractions. He’s thinking about the developer who expects to self-serve in minutes, the platform engineer who’s tired of hopping tools, and the security lead who never wants to say “we think the backups are clean” again.
Why does the old way stop people from doing their best work
Most enterprise estates are a scrapbook of decisions made over the years. The result is silos that turn simple questions into detective work. “If your data estate is scattered across technologies, you miss signals and make it materially harder to protect, detect and recover,” said Lherault.
Day-to-day, it looked like delays for product teams, fire drills for operations, and creeping costs for finance. The H2 story is a push for a single operating model that behaves the same in your racks, at the edge or in a hyperscaler.
Enterprise Data Cloud in plain terms
Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud is a three-part promise: an intelligent control plane that enables people to see and automate more, a unified data plane that ensures the technology under the hood behaves consistently, and cyber resilience woven through rather than stitched on.
“It must remove friction, eliminate silos with one way to serve any data anywhere and be secure by design while connecting to the security ecosystem,” said Lherault. “Whether you purchase arrays or consume them on demand, the same control plane federates everything so IT can offer a real internal cloud without creating two worlds.”
The control plane: a calmer cockpit for busy teams
Know what you have. New Data Intelligence answered the basics quickly: what data you have, where it resides, and whether it is stored and protected correctly. It arrived as a software update.
The Pure1 Workflow Orchestrator turned a great engineer’s runbook into a button. Raise a ticket, carve storage, deploy a VM, configure the database, and notify in chat. “We provided templates and connectors across ticketing, applications, messaging and automation so you capture a task once and execute it consistently,” said Lherault.
With Fusion, estates functioned as a single fleet. You defined classes of service and let the platform place data. The goal was dynamic rebalancing, so performance and capacity were adjusted to follow demand.
An embedded AI Copilot let teams ask natural language questions about capacity and performance. With Model Context Protocol support, it could, with your approval, query virtualisation, networking and automation tools. “It was the new user interface for infrastructure, conversational, context-aware and extensible,” said Lherault. “The next generation did not want a CLI, they expected natural language.”
FlashArray//XL//XL 190 brought lower latency and higher aggregate performance for critical databases and scale-up systems. FlashArray ST targets ultra-low latency use cases, achieving a latency of around 100 microseconds.
R5 updates to FlashArray//C and //X refreshed capacity, optimised and performance optimised tiers. “Across the family, you spanned from cost-efficient capacity to the fastest transactional tiers with the same software experience and life cycle,” said Lherault.
Virtualisation and Kubernetes without drama
Some estates remained with VMware, while others adopted Nutanix, and many ran VMs and containers under Kubernetes. With Portworx Plus Fusion, classes of service defined once are applied across both old and new stacks. “Define a class once, apply it everywhere, that was how you brought cloud discipline to mixed estates,” said Lherault.
Pure’s block technology was available as Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated and Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native, integrated with Azure’s control plane and commercial model. “You could run critical applications in hyperscalers while keeping enterprise efficiency and often reduce storage spend thanks to our software efficiencies,” said Lherault.
AI where people feel it
Most organisations served models rather than trained them. Pure added key value caching for model serving, so storage remembered token computations and GPUs avoided repeats. “We saw up to twenty times faster responses in chatbot interactions and better GPU utilisation, doing the same work with fewer GPUs,” said Lherault. Deeppreduce brought next-generation data reduction, yielding a near-term win for backups, allowing you to keep more copies at a lower cost. “Features like Data Intelligence, Workflow Orchestration, Deeppreduce and the Copilot arrived through software updates, not disruptive migrations,” he added.
Cyber resilience that respects real incidents
Baselines rose with Trusted Platform Modules, UEFI Secure Boot, post-quantum-ready encryption, Bring Your Own Key for multi-tenant setups, and SafeMode immutability. The stack is integrated with ICAP malware scanning, CrowdStrike for real-time signal sharing and Superna for data layer threat detection.
The control plane surfaced richer events and threat hunting views. “No one vendor could do it alone, true resilience meant aggregating signals across storage, networks, endpoints and users and responding dynamically,” said Lherault.
Pure Protect allows teams to spin up Isolated Recovery Environments on demand and includes a community edition for rehearsal. ActiveCluster with ActiveDR added layered continuity across sites. If you wanted an outcome, Evergreen//One offered Cyber Resilience as a Service, including a SLA-backed, fresh recovery environment within 48 hours of an attack.
“A compromised primary became a crime scene, you needed somewhere clean to recover to, fast,” said Lherault. Integration with Veeam extended orchestration beyond Pure so the whole estate had a plan.
How you consume it
Buy systems or subscribe through Evergreen//One, the control plane experience was the same. “Copilot and Data Intelligence arrived through Pure1, and customers decided how it connected to third-party systems to honour their security posture,” said Lherault. “We reinvested around twenty per cent of revenue into R&D, and the ecosystem still mattered.”
Pure framed storage as a calm data operating model. One control plane, one data plane and resilience throughout. For developers, it meant faster access without tickets. For operators, it meant fewer tools and more precise answers.
For security, it meant prevention, detection and recovery that worked together. “Prioritise simplicity with insight,” Lherault concluded. “Know what data you have, where it lives and how it is protected, then treat cyber as a continuum with rehearsed recovery. Get those foundations right and you can adopt new patterns, AI included, without rebuilding the house every six months.”
