How Software and Innovation Have Evolved at Everpure

Jon Carnes, Senior Product Manager, leads Everpure's cross-functional file offerings for unstructured data (FlashArray™ and FlashBlade®). He’s spent nearly a decade building the software that defines how the world stores and accesses its most important data and knows exactly why that work matters.

A colleague put it plainly after talking through everything that had changed on the File side since Jon's team took ownership of the protocol stacks. “Man, I'm so jealous. You're literally going to change how files are used. For decades.”

Jon took a beat. “He was right. And I think that's something even the people building it don't always stop to step back and appreciate that the products we build aren't going to be used for two or three years. These are decade-long devices. That concept lives on.”

That's the lens through which Jon approaches everything: not just shipping products, but setting the direction for how data gets managed for years to come and delivering better business outcomes for the customers who depend on it: faster operations, reduced risk, and the freedom to focus on what matters most.

Point A to Point B isn't enough

Before joining Everpure, Jon spent years inside the storage industry, learning what it takes to ship at scale and developing a sharp instinct for what customers actually need. But there was a question he kept wanting to ask that rarely had the room to breathe.

Not just: are we getting from A to B? But: is B actually where we should be going? Is there a C — a better destination entirely — that nobody's considered yet?

“It's not a criticism of where I worked. It's just the nature of moving fast in a competitive industry. You're heads down, you're shipping, and the priority is getting to B.” At Everpure, that constraint doesn't exist in the same way. The difference wasn't that the question suddenly became easy to answer. It was that it was genuinely expected to be asked.

“Innovation isn't just optimizing,” Jon continued, “It's setting new destinations for your customers to go to, ones they'd never thought to go. It's hard to validate, because you're asking customers to trust a direction they didn't know they needed. But once you actually get something in their hands? You see them light up. You see them realise something they never thought was possible has become possible. When you do it right, you create a market where there was no market because nobody else thought to go there first.”

How file accelerates scaling and moving

The File protocol stack is the software layer that controls how unstructured data is stored, accessed, and managed across Everpure FlashArray and FlashBlade products. Jon's team owns it, and while it sounds like a narrow technical domain, the decisions made here directly determine how organisations experience speed, scale, and operational simplicity.

“My team's success is entirely based on how customers perceive the innovation around the protocols,” Jon said. What that means in practice is going beyond whether the technology works, to whether the experience around it works, how people operate, manage, and consume these systems in a way that's genuinely different from before.

One of Jon's favourite examples is file system sizing. For years across the industry, file systems came with hard limits, hit the ceiling, and you'd have to reorganise data, move shares around, and disrupt users. “I used to be a storage admin. I didn't enjoy having to move people's data.” When FlashArray and FlashBlade were built, the team made a deliberate choice: no physical limit on file system size. Just keep going.

“I talk to customers, and they're just like, ‘what? I never have to move this again?’ I say, ‘no. Just keep going.’” It's a small decision that turns out to be enormous in practice. “That concept, as simple as it sounds, is huge in the marketplace. It changes the way people think about their data.” The team backed it before the proof was there. It worked. Everpure has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for twelve consecutive years.

And then there's Everpure Fusion, Everpure's intelligent control plane, a software layer that lets organisations manage their entire data estate as a single, policy-driven system rather than array by array. Everpure Fusion brings that principle to File, turning what Jon describes as an inherently "snowflake-ish” challenge into something standardised, governed, and scalable.

“Instead of making a change on one workload and hoping you didn't forget one, you set a policy. It applies everywhere. You don't have to question whether the script ran right last night. You just know.” Jon speaks from experience. “Five different admins covering a 24-hour shift, all writing slightly different scripts? You just update the preset and everything follows. I would have dreamed about that.”

How EDC is solving the unstructured data challenges

The EDC is a company-wide effort, and Jon's team sits squarely at the centre of it. “The unified platform has three pillars, and we represent one of those core foundations”. 

The challenge is unstructured data. People have spent years scattering it across different devices, different vendors, and different silos in what Jon calls, “little shoeboxes in different closets.” The EDC is about bringing that together without the upheaval.

“When customers come to Everpure and start adopting the platform, they don't have to reorganise everything when they arrive. But they now can, in a non-disruptive way. Somewhere else, you'd have to take things offline. Huge business impact. Come here, and you can leave it live while you do stuff.”

With AI reshaping how data gets used, governance is becoming critical fast. Jon sees acquisitions like 1touch as evidence of that thinking in action.

The Everpure Platform runs some of the world's most critical systems, including hospital infrastructure, retail environments, and missile defense. “When you change how people do that job, when you change how they react and respond,you're actually changing the world,” Jon said.

AI from the inside out

Jon is direct about the distinction between talking about AI and actually building for it. “Early on, the most common approach was straightforward: create a share, expose it to an engine, and connect it to your AI workload. That got people started.” But what Everpure is doing is different.

“We're taking our solutions and making them an integrated part of the AI pipeline. Not just exposing storage to AI but building hardware and software that's native to it. FlashBlade//EXA™ (Everpure's purpose-built platform for AI-scale and neocloud workloads) going into neoclouds, FlashBlade connecting directly to GPU and key-value cache performance. Everpure didn't just say we support AI. They asked, ‘How do we enable it?’” And on focus: “Are we only focused on AI? No. We're focused on the entire data estate and AI is a key part of it.”

When product managers (PMs) worry that automation means fewer jobs, Jon pushes back without hesitation. He references NVIDIA President and CEO Jensen Huang's framing: AI shouldn't cause layoffs, it should increase output capacity. “We're all resource-constrained. What you're trying to do is increase the capacity of the team you have. As a PM, my job is never done. All AI does is let me do the next few things even quicker.”

The analogy he likes best is a theme park queue. “AI isn't getting rid of the cars. It's not getting rid of the ride. It's just making it handle more people. That's all we're doing.”

The importance of innovation through collaboration

Jon's leadership philosophy is rooted in one belief: you don't win at Everpure by being a superhero. “Every PM I've ever worked with, the ones who consistently win are the ones who are always talking to everyone, looking for input and improving their output.”

When a new PM joins his team and says they're ready to dive in, Jon's response is consistent: hold on. “I tell them first, ‘I just want you to meet people. Get to know them. Build the relationships. Because you're not going to be able to do anything on those projects until you know who you're talking to and feel comfortable talking to them.’”

He describes the PM role as keeping the engine running. “You already have a train that's going. That's your business. It's not stopping. Engineers feed the fire with new products. PMs make sure everyone's talking to each other: Engineering, Marketing, Sales, the whole thing. If you're not talking to everybody, you better start.”

That openness extends to how ideas flow at Everpure. In many organizations, ideas fight their way through layers. At Everpure, that dynamic is different. “Here, the hierarchy is flat. I recently had an idea and asked if I could run it past Prakash Darji, Vice President and General Manager of the Digital Experience Business Unit. He said yes immediately. He made time for me.”

For Jon, “all I've ever wanted to do is build things that matter, come up with new ideas and create change.”