Pure Storage adds AI features for security and performance

Pure Storage is upping its AI game with a pair of announcements, including a new storage-as-a-service offering that’s designed for AI workloads and new AI-driven security features to detect and prevent ransomware.

The company bills its new Evergreen//One product as the first purpose-built AI storage as-a-service offering. It includes guaranteed levels of storage performance for GPUs in training, inferencing and high-performance computing workloads.

To power Evergreen//One, Pure has made its Fusion infrastructure-as-code service, which automates orchestration and workload placement, a part of the Purity operating environment that runs its arrays. It unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly across structured and unstructured data stored both on-premises and in the cloud.

Also new is a storage-oriented generative AI “copilot for storage,” which Pure describes as “a new way to manage and protect data using natural language.” It uses telemetry and knowledge gained from Pure Storage customers to guide storage teams to optimize performance and management.

Ransomware detection improvements, SLA tweaks

Pure also boosted its anomaly detection capabilities with AI functions. Anomaly detection is used to discover threats such as ransomware, atypical activity, malicious behavior and denial-of-service attacks, by looking for performance anomalies. Pure already had ransomware detection based on anomaly detection, but the new release builds on those capabilities.

The expanded detection is built on multiple machine-learning models that analyze customer environments with historical data to look for anomalous patterns based on heuristics of performance as well as user context on how storage is used. In other words, it learns what is ordinary behavior and looks for what is out of the ordinary.

On the service-level front, the company is introducing multiple SLA enhancements this week. Its Enhanced Cyber Recovery and Resilience SLA is being expanded to include disaster recovery scenarios, for example. Under the terms of the agreement, customers get a customized recovery plan that includes new storage infrastructure with onsite installation and additional professional services for data transfer.

A new security assessment offering provides visibility into fleet-level security risks and offers recommendations based on intelligence aggregated from more than 10,000 customer installations. The assessment provides numerical scores and best practices for the arrays that align with NIST 2.0 standards as well as advice on how to remediate potential security anomalies and rapidly restore operations if a security-related event occurs.

All these services are available now.