Pure Storage Reimagines Enterprise Data Management with AI-Driven "Enterprise Data Cloud"

Pure Storage unveils the Enterprise Data Cloud, featuring AI-powered automation that transforms how organizations manage data through intelligent workflows.

Pure Storage is making a bold bet that the future of enterprise storage isn't about managing hardware - it's about managing data through AI-powered automation. At Pure//Accelerate 2025, the company unveiled its Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) vision, positioning itself as the bridge between consumer-grade simplicity and enterprise-scale complexity.

The announcement marks a significant shift in how organizations approach data infrastructure. Rather than managing hundreds of individual storage arrays, Pure's approach treats the entire storage fleet as a single, intelligent system that can automatically optimize itself based on workload requirements and business policies.

From Manual to Intelligent

The core premise is simple but revolutionary: legacy data storage management is at a breaking point. Traditional approaches create fragmentation, silos, and uncontrolled data sprawl, forcing IT teams into reactive, manual operations that drive inefficiency and increase risk.

"It's time to stop managing storage and start managing data," said Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO of Pure Storage, during the company's press conference. As AI increases the potential value of enterprise data, while cyber threats imperil it, traditional storage architectures have failed to keep pace.

At the heart of Pure's EDC vision is Pure Fusion, an intelligent control plane that unifies storage as a pool of adaptable resources. Arrays become self-discoverable and can automatically discover a broader fleet without requiring in-depth storage admin configuration. Administrators can manage the fleet from any system because every array becomes an endpoint. "Pure Storage's Enterprise Data Cloud vision, centered on its AI Copilot and Fusion control plane, addresses the legacy pain of fragmented storage and reactive operations. This shift to intelligent, automated data orchestration is vital for enterprises drowning in AI-driven data, turning storage from a costly complexity into a strategic, unified asset essential for innovation and resilience," said Mitch Ashley, VP and Practice Lead, Software Lifecycle Engineering at Futurum.

AI-Powered Automation Takes Center Stage

The company's newly released AI Copilot, now generally available, exemplifies this shift toward intelligent automation. During my interview with Prakash Darji, GM of Digital Experience, he demonstrated how the system can analyze fleet performance across thousands of arrays and provide actionable insights through natural language queries.

Rather than forcing administrators to investigate performance issues across individual systems manually, the AI Copilot can instantly identify bottlenecks, suggest optimizations, and even automate routine tasks. "We're collecting 70 petabytes annually from our fleet," Darji explained, noting how this massive dataset enables predictive insights impossible with traditional monitoring.

The platform's workflow orchestration capabilities take automation even further. Through pre-built "recipes" that integrate with thousands of third-party applications, including ServiceNow, VMware, and Slack, organizations can automate complex, multistep processes that previously required manual coordination across multiple teams. What once took months of cross-team coordination can now be completed in minutes.

Declarative Operations: The Netflix Model for Enterprise Storage

Pure's approach borrows heavily from consumer technology and public cloud models. Just as Netflix abstracts away the complexity of content delivery infrastructure, allowing users to select what they want to watch, Pure Fusion enables administrators to declare desired outcomes rather than manually configuring individual components.

The new workload automation features include presets and remote provisioning for fleet-wide file, block, and object storage. Administrators gain increased flexibility based on specific workload needs without having to pre-plan and tune deployments, reducing compliance risks and improving resiliency.

This declarative approach extends to data protection and security. The company announced deeper integration with Rubrik Security Cloud and CrowdStrike LogScale, enabling automated threat detection and response workflows. When Rubrik detects a threat, Pure Fusion automatically tags immutable SafeMode snapshots with ransomware scanning results, pinpointing clean data for fast restoration with near-zero recovery time objectives.

Hardware Innovation Supports Software Intelligence

Supporting this software-driven transformation are significant advancements in hardware. Pure announced next-generation FlashArray//XL R5 systems that double IOPS per rack unit while increasing raw capacity by up to 50 percent, the new FlashArray//ST targets ultra-low latency workloads with over 10 million IOPS per five rack units.

Perhaps most significantly, Pure is extending object storage support to FlashArray, creating a unified platform for block, file, and object protocols. This consolidation aligns with the EDC vision of managing data holistically rather than through protocol-specific silos.

The Bigger Picture: Storage as Strategic Asset

Pure's EDC announcement comes as enterprises struggle with the exponential growth of data driven by AI initiatives. U.S. data centers consumed approximately 4.4% of total electricity in 2023 and are expected to consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, with AI workloads driving a significant portion of this growth.

Matt Kimball from Moor Insights & Strategy noted that Pure's approach "represents a tangible shift in how enterprises manage data and represents real change at the architectural level. By abstracting the complexity of hybrid environments into a unified, policy-driven platform, Pure is enabling organizations to bring clarity and control to data management at scale."

The ultimate goal is to transform storage from a necessary complexity into a strategic enabler by applying AI and automation to eliminate manual workflows. Pure aims to free organizations from focusing on managing data storage, allowing them to extract value from their data instead.

As enterprises increasingly compete on data-driven insights, Pure bets that the winners will be those who can manage their data with cloud-like simplicity and intelligence, regardless of where that data physically resides.