Pure launches Fusion cloud control layer for storage

Pure Storage has announced Fusion, a cloud-like control layer that manages storage across on-site, cloud and colo locations, and Portworx Data Services, which brings database access and management to customer Kubernetes clusters.

Fusion provides a cloud-resident control plane on top of existing Pure-as-a-Service and on-site storage deployments.

Customers can fold in their cloud and datacentre Pure Storage assets to Fusion and manage them according to performance profile, tenant/customer and availability zones.

Admins can manage Fusion via application programming interfaces (APIs) to handle deployment, workload placement and mobility and rebalancing.

Pure Storage dubs this “storage-as-code” and promises on-demand storage from their capacity wherever it is.

“Admins will be able to define classes of storage and manage and migrate workloads across on-site and cloud to meet performance needs without the application noticing,” said Pure Storage chief technology officer Alex McMullan.

Storage products from other suppliers cannot be managed from Fusion, at least not in the short term, said McMullan.

“To do that we’d need to bring down capabilities managed to the lowest common denominator,” said McMullan. “We’ve spent a long time building what Pure offers now so there’d be no interest in doing that. If other vendors want to become partners, we can look at that, but there are no immediate plans.”

Fusion provides a storage-as-a-service management layer for the existing Pure-as-a-Service, which unifies on-premise and public cloud storage resources in a single subscription to provide block, file and object storage.

Pure as-a-Service started out as Evergreen Storage but was renamed in 2020. Customers pay only for what they use in terms of effective capacity usage, not provisioned storage.

Portworx Data Services (PDS), which will be on an early access programme, will provide management to four (at least initially) databases that can be downloaded from the Docker Hub as container images and used in customer Kubernetes cluster deployments.

The four databases initially available to use with PDS will be Kafka, Cassandra, Redis and RabbitMQ.

Portworx – acquired by Pure in a $370m acquisition last year – is a software-defined container storage product.

It can build pools of storage, manage provisioning and provide advanced storage functionality – including backup, disaster recovery, security, auto-scaling and migration – on storage local to Kubernetes cluster servers, on external storage arrays and through capacity in the main cloud providers, Amazon Web Services, Microsof Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Portworx Data Services is essentially a software-as-a-service interface that allows customers to deploy databases for their Kubernetes cluster quickly and easily.

“We’re going slowly, just introducing the first four databases initially to meet customer requests during the early access programme. After that we will open it out more widely,” said McMullan.

“PDS provides an evolved set of data services – backup, disaster recovery, HA [high availability] – managed via a software-as-a-service experience,” said Portworx vice-president of product and corporate marketing Michael Ferranti.

Pure brings the ability to administer database management layers into the Portworx environment.

“The challenge is that customers and their developers are not just using one database,” said Ferranti. “If that was the case, they could do that easily. But customers use many databases, and they want a single playbook to manage all of them. So, the customer only has to interact with Portworx Data Services to manage migration, backup, DR, recovery, HA, etc by managing a single connection string.”