12 Jul Highlights from the Pure Accelerate Conference: Beyond AFA and the Era of Intelligence for All
Pure Accelerate 2018, presented by Pure Storage and an array of industry-leading technology provider sponsors, took place in May and presented attendees with a variety of exciting and innovative announcements and insights.
Our Pinnacle team was there at the convention center in San Francisco, and we’re pleased to offer a few of the most important highlights from the event. Overall, the “Innovation Agenda” from Pure Storage revolved around two key insights: What’s beyond All-Flash array storage and the era of intelligence for all. Let’s take a closer look:
What’s beyond AFA?
In the current environment, All-Flash array storage, or AFA, has become a typical architecture in many infrastructure settings. However, with increasingly changing needs associated with several different application types, organizations require a storage solution that is more reliable and flexible, and which can deliver the reduced complexity, cost-effective and sharable storage that today’s enterprises are seeking.
This year’s Pure Accelerate conference included several key insights and announcements.
Pure Storage announced a new concept here: Shared accelerated storage. This strategy combines the best aspects of traditional networked storage (SAN/NAS) and direct-attached storage (DAS) to, as Gartner puts it, “help balance the performance and simplicity of DAS with the scalability and manageability of shared storage.”
The result is standardized, scalable, flexible and resilient data-centric storage that provides peak performance at an affordable cost in the form of Pure Storage FlashArray IIX family. This seventh-generation upgrade is faster, denser and simpler than its predecessors, offering the kind of evergreen storage that today’s infrastructures demand.
Intelligence for All: AIRI
Another exciting Pure Accelerate highlight came with the announcement of AIRI, the first, complete AI-ready infrastructure, enabling the use of artificial intelligence at-scale within enterprise infrastructure.
Currently, organizations are considerably spread out when it comes to their journey toward AI. Some have a single-server infrastructure supported by small data assets and a data scientist, while others have a more scaled-out infrastructure with considerable data assets and a large analyst team.
In order to address needs on both sides of this scale, Pure Storage and NVIDIA and ARISTA announced both the full-scale AIRI infrastructure, as well as the AIRI MINI. The MINI provides the support organizations need as they expand their capabilities from a single data scientist to a full-fledged team of analysts. This unique rack-scale architecture grows with each organization’s AI journey, and includes the most advanced compute and storage solutions currently available.
Advancements in data storage: Expert partner required
These exciting announcements may have decision-makers considering their own internal storage capabilities, and whether or not they have the systems and support required to enable scalable, manageable storage that allows them to take advantage of AI advancements. After all, these features and initiatives are quickly crossing over into the mainstream, and organizations with these types of storage technologies in place will be in the best position to leverage and innovate accordingly.
Thankfully, when it comes to storage and infrastructure upgrades, enterprises don’t have to go it alone. Partnering with an expert provider like Pinnacle can ensure that your company has all the tools and insights needed to take advantage of these advancements from Pure Storage and other industry leaders.
To find out more, connect with the experts at Pinnacle today.
