Pure Storage optimises AI platform, enhancing performance and reducing e-waste: Krithika Bhat, CIO, Pure Storage

In a recent interaction with Express Computer, Krithika Bhat, Chief Information Officer, Pure Storage, discusses how the company is adapting its infrastructure to meet the growing demands of AI and machine learning. Bhat highlights Pure Storage’s focus on delivering scalable, efficient, and AI-optimised solutions while embedding sustainability into its product offerings. She also shares the company’s role in hybrid cloud adoption and the evolution of its Evergreen program, which provides customers with flexible storage models. Additionally, Bhat addresses data security advancements in response to rising cyber threats and the company’s commitment to sustainability by reducing energy consumption and e-waste in data centres.

AI and machine learning continue to drive the next wave of digital transformation. How is Pure Storage adapting its infrastructure to support the enormous data demands these technologies require? Are there any specific advancements in your products or cloud integration that are particularly focused on AI workloads?

At Pure Storage, we’ve designed a platform that’s perfectly tuned for the needs of AI. It’s consistent, reliable, and easy to manage, giving businesses the performance and scalability they need to grow their AI initiatives without unnecessary complexity. Plus, it’s built with sustainability in mind, helping us cut down on over-provisioning, avoid costly upgrades, and reduce e-waste, thus contributing to the company’s ESG goals.

Our approach to AI is focused on three key areas. Firstly, transforming ourselves with AI, making life easier for customers, and powering AI projects. We’re using generative AI internally to boost productivity, enhance customer satisfaction, and streamline compliance, essentially building an AI-powered enterprise. Secondly, innovations like Pure1, our AIOps-driven storage platform, take the hassle out of storage management, freeing up IT teams to focus on bigger challenges. Additionally, our technology is built to help customers succeed with their AI workloads, whether it’s rapid data access, scalability, or reliability.

Our platform is optimised for AI’s data-intensive demands, delivering unmatched performance, scalability, and simplicity. Key advancements like Pure1 Meta, our AI-powered storage platform, and AIRI, developed with NVIDIA, support high-performance AI training and inference seamlessly. Our GenAI Pod further simplifies generative AI deployments, reducing complexity and costs while accelerating innovation.

We’re also embedding intelligence directly into our infrastructure with the industry’s first generative AI copilot for storage, offering proactive insights to streamline operations.  With an end-to-end approach that covers every stage of AI, from data preparation to large-scale training and inference, we’re enabling businesses to unlock AI’s transformative potential while staying efficient, sustainable, and future-ready.

Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are becoming the norm. How does Pure Storage position itself in the context of hybrid cloud adoption, and what differentiates your all-flash storage solutions when it comes to seamless integration across on-premises and cloud infrastructures?

Hybrid and multi-cloud adoption is now essential for organisations seeking agility and scalability, but integrating on-premises and cloud infrastructures remains a challenge. At Pure Storage, we simplify this with a unified approach that brings the cloud experience everywhere. Our solutions deliver cloud-like agility on-premises, ensuring consistent performance and management across environments.

What sets us apart is our ability to enable seamless hybrid cloud mobility. With tools like Pure Cloud Block Store and Pure Data Services, we make data migration, disaster recovery, and hybrid app deployment easy and disruption-free. Our Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offerings, such as Evergreen//One, allow businesses to consume data centre resources on demand and automate storage delivery.

For cloud-native applications, Portworx integrates storage, security, and data protection for Kubernetes, speeding up app development without compromising standards. Additionally, Pure Cloud Block Store enhances public cloud storage, delivering enterprise-grade performance and cost efficiency.

Pure Storage bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud, making hybrid cloud adoption faster and simpler, so businesses can focus on innovation, not infrastructure. With the next-generation Pure Fusion, we’re taking this mission further by delivering cloud-like agility and scalability across every Pure Storage array. Fully integrated into the Purity operating system, Pure Fusion automates storage deployment and scaling, transforming fragmented environments into a unified, cohesive system, without disruption or complexity.

The Evergreen Storage program has been a key differentiator for Pure Storage. How has this model evolved in the last year, especially in light of customer feedback? What new capabilities or features can we expect to see in the Evergreen program as we move into 2025?

Pure Storage’s Evergreen program has redefined how businesses consume storage, offering a level of flexibility and seamless scalability that customers have long been asking for. From the very beginning, Evergreen transformed the storage experience by eliminating disruptive upgrades, scheduled downtimes, and the traditional refresh cycle. Once a product is purchased, it remains perpetually up-to-date, always leading-edge and never requiring a forklift upgrade or data migration.

Over the last year, Evergreen has continued to evolve based on customer feedback, expanding into more flexible consumption models and enhancing the STaaS experience. Pure’s Evergreen stands apart because it is built on the foundation of engineering excellence. It’s not just about offering a financial model, it’s about delivering a true service, backed by the reliability of 6-nines (99.9999%) availability, future-proof designs, and the ability to scale smoothly and non-disruptively.

Pure’s Evergreen portfolio includes three unique offerings, designed to cater to different customer needs. Evergreen//One is an SLA-driven service designed for customers who want cloud operations and economics for their on-premises or hybrid data centres. It comes with seven concurrent, guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs), setting it apart from competitors who only offer repackaged financial models. Evergreen//Flex provides customers with ownership of hardware, while giving them the flexibility to pay based on actual usage of their purchased capacity, therefore making it perfect for businesses that need a balance of control and flexibility. Evergreen//Forever is the traditional ownership model, where customers subscribe to ongoing software and hardware updates, ensuring their storage stays always modern and continually improving.

In addition, last October, Pure Storage introduced an industry-first commitment in its Evergreen//One and Evergreen//Flex offerings, covering customers’ power and rack space costs, demonstrating our dedication to comprehensive, as-a-service solutions. Building on this, the new Evergreen//One for AI extends our leadership in capacity subscriptions by offering guaranteed storage performance for GPUs, tailored for AI training, inference, and HPC workloads. With an SLA that allows purchasing based on dynamic performance and throughput needs, it eliminates overprovisioning, ensuring efficiency and scalability without unnecessary costs.

Looking ahead, Evergreen will continue to push the boundaries of flexibility and scalability, offering customers the ability to consume storage when, how, and where they need it,  without compromise. It’s this engineering-first approach that truly sets Evergreen apart in the industry.

With the rising sophistication of cyber threats and ransomware attacks, how is Pure Storage enhancing its data security measures? Could you share insights on any new features or innovations in your products designed to safeguard data, especially in mission-critical environments?

With the growing sophistication of cyber threats and ransomware, Pure Storage is dedicated to enhancing data security for mission-critical environments. Our SafeMode feature ensures robust ransomware protection by enabling immutable snapshots of data that cannot be deleted or altered, even by administrators, allowing rapid recovery of clean copies in the event of an attack.

Complementing this, our Purity software offers granular access controls, comprehensive audit logs, and automated policy management to enforce consistent security measures across storage environments, proactively mitigating risks.

For disaster recovery, FlashBlade Rapid Restore provides unmatched recovery speeds of up to 270TB/hr, ensuring organisations meet strict RTO and RPO requirements. Additionally, our Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS) 1.1 empowers customers to deploy disaster recovery environments in just 15 minutes or less via Pure1, with automated VM enrolment for seamless protection in VMware and AWS environments.

These innovations reflect Pure Storage’s commitment to securing data while ensuring operational resilience at scale.

Sustainability is becoming a significant factor in technology purchasing decisions. What steps is Pure Storage taking to reduce the environmental impact of its products, and how are you improving energy efficiency, recyclability, and overall sustainability within your storage solutions?

At Pure Storage, sustainability is deeply embedded in our technology development. We believe that sustainable solutions are vital in combating climate change, and we are continuously working to reduce the environmental impact of our products. 

Our flash-optimised systems consume up to 5x less power compared to traditional SSD-based systems and up to 10x less than hard disk systems, making them highly energy-efficient. By replacing hard disk storage with our flash-based solutions, customers can reduce data centre power usage by as much as 20%. Additionally, our products are designed to minimise e-waste. They are built to last, with upgrades that can extend their lifespan for over a decade, helping to significantly reduce the turnover of hardware. Through our modular upgrade approach, we prevent over 20 tons of e-waste from ending up in landfills annually.

Furthermore, our Evergreen//One subscription model enhances sustainability by ensuring customers only use the exact amount of capacity and performance they need, eliminating unnecessary over-provisioning. This contributes to a more efficient use of resources and supports our customers in achieving their environmental goals. Through these initiatives, we are committed to driving sustainability not only in our products but also in the broader technology ecosystem.

The storage market is more competitive than ever, with established players like Dell EMC, NetApp, and HPE also pushing all-flash solutions. How does Pure Storage differentiate itself in terms of performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, especially as the industry increasingly moves toward AI-driven applications and data-intensive workloads?

At Pure Storage, we stand apart by prioritising simplicity, scalability, and exceptional performance. Our all-flash solutions deliver unmatched ease of use, with non-disruptive upgrades that eliminate the need for costly forklift refreshes. The Evergreen Storage model offers a flexible, subscription-based approach that removes over-provisioning and reduces e-waste. With seamless hybrid cloud integration and a focus on energy efficiency, our products deliver future-proof solutions that meet today’s demands while supporting growth for years to come—something that traditional storage systems just can’t match.