At this week’s Pure//Accelerate 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Pure Storage released Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC), a new architecture that enables AI workloads to operate efficiently regardless of the underlying architecture. It establishes a virtualized cloud of data across public and private clouds, as well as on-premises, with unified control and automation.
Fueled by AI, data volumes are rising, and business demands are evolving faster than ever. Legacy approaches to storage are struggling to keep up.
“Traditional storage models create fragmentation, unpredictable demands, data silos, and uncontrolled data sprawl,” said Rob Lee, chief technology officer of Pure Storage. “Administration is typically manual and reactive, and there is a lack of data governance and control. We have taken lessons from the consumer and public cloud worlds and brought them into the enterprise.”
The idea is to transform storage infrastructure for the AI era by making it possible to manage an entire fleet of storage arrays rather than one array or system at a time. If data is siloed, added Lee, data utilization is generally quite low.
When managed at an EDC level, a high rate of utilization can be maintained via policy-driven workflows and IT operations automation. This allows organizations to understand how, where, and why their data is used, thereby reducing risk, cost, and minimizing operational inefficiencies. As a result, storage infrastructure can keep pace with AI and high-performance computing (HPC) — without becoming bogged down in infrastructural headaches.
Understanding Pure Fusion
At EDC’s heart is Pure Fusion, which is natively built into Pure Storage arrays. Pure Fusion is essentially a storage virtualization and management system that helps enterprises operate a storage pool of adaptable resources that are self-discoverable. This makes it possible to automatically discover a fleet of systems without requiring in-depth configuration by a storage administrator. Pure Fusion now includes presets and remote provisioning for fleetwide file, block, and object storage systems.
The Pure EDC architecture is underpinned by its Evergreen approach to storage infrastructure, which provides organizations an easy way to consistently and nondisruptively upgrade their storage gear. At the top layer lies an intelligent control plane.
“Uniformity and complete integration across hardware and software is the key as opposed to having a whole lot of point products that are stitched together,” said Lee. “EDC offers consistency from top to bottom to enable storage administrators to manage hundreds of storage systems as though they were managing one system.”
He added that orchestrated workflows can be deployed across IT environments built on thousands of existing connectors to third-party applications. Software and systems from Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, ServiceNow, Slack, and others can be deployed rapidly across storage, compute, network, database, and application configurations.
Taking integration to a deeper level
Pure Storage is working closely with several vendors on partnerships that enable tighter collaboration between software platforms. For example, the Rubrik Security Cloud can integrate with Pure Fusion to streamline cyber recovery across data environments. When a threat is detected by Rubrik, Pure Fusion automates the tagging of SafeMode snapshots with Rubrik’s ransomware scanning; this simplifies the process of pinpointing clean data for fast restores. Rubrik also provides backups as a secondary recovery path.
CrowdStrike and Pure Storage have partnered to deliver storage for Falcon LogScale. This adds log analytics, instant search, and security capabilities to Pure systems for accelerated threat detection, hunting, investigation, and response.
“Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud represents a tangible shift in how enterprises manage data and represents real change at the architectural level,” said Matt Kimball, vice president & principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. “By abstracting the complexity of hybrid environments into a unified, policy-driven platform, it enables organizations to bring clarity and control to data management at scale.”
