59:00 Webinar
Ask Us Everything about Purity Upgrades
This month we’re talking about Purity upgrades—and how to plan, prepare, and execute them with confidence. With new capabilities being announced at Pure Accelerate, it’s a great time to get current so you’re ready to take advantage of what’s next.
This webinar first aired on June 5, 2026
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Welcome, everyone, to yet another Ask Us Everything here at Everpure. we have a fantastic one for you today on a topic that I know a lot of you are interested in, how to do purity upgrades, what's in it for you, what might have changed since the last time you did one. In, in the process, obviously, our products and our, our platform is always improving, and
that's one of the great things about the Everpure platform. and now we've got self-service options. Just all sorts of great stuff that we're gonna cover here today. And the main reason is because, guess what's happening very soon? The Everpure Accelerate Conference, and that is, as you know, a time when a lot of great
new capabilities and products and different things adding to the platform start coming in. And this is a way for you to understand what the upgrade process can be like to get ready for all those changes. And just by the way, our next Ask Us Everything next month will be covering all of the things that were, announced and, enhanced and talked about at Accelerate.
So, be sure, we're gonna have the sign up, for our next session. But more importantly, let's talk about purity upgrades. Joining me today are Matthew Bednar and Greg Karl, both principal technology strategists. Is that what it is? I always wanna say spec- That is, that is
right, yeah. Principal technology strategists. You guys are on a whole other level from spec. Well- I mean, you're special, don't get me wrong, but Been told. You're, you're strategically special, so okay. Strategically special? There you go.
I like that. Put it on my business card. Good. That's right. That's going on the back, for sure. Oh, awesome. so, so, you know, w- this whole idea of, a platform that keeps improving over time. Now, most people when they think of that, they're thinking of the hardware upgrades
because, I mean, that, that's the hardest thing in storage anyway, and Everpure, you know, mastered that, a long, long time ago, and people really lean on the fact that they can have non-disruptive hardware upgrades. But bedrock to it is also non-disruptive software upgrades, and that's what we're really gonna cover in today.
So, Matt, how about we start with you? What are, what are some of your thoughts on, what's really cool about not only the purity ecosystem, but how easy it is to upgrade? Yeah, absolutely. So I think when we look at the direction that Everpure is driving its technology, we can kind of get a sense of, if we think about like
messagings like the enterprise data cloud, right? That Pure's been, or Everpure's been talking about for the last, year and a half now. You, you see this drive towards self-fulfillment, towards self-service. we've also been exceptionally busy from an engineering perspective adding feature and functions not only to the purity code base, but also to things like Pure1 and
other tool sets that go along with our, our data-centric story. So, for me, I think the most exciting thing about doing any kind of firmware or software upgrades on the arrays these days is probably self-service upgrade, right? We've moved from only offering a bespoke white glove service path, where you had to schedule it with support, you kinda had to wait till there was availability in their schedule, to
you being the master of your own destiny from a, from a firmware upgrade perspective. And true to the DNA that this company's carried since day one, it's a very easy, very automatically driven process that is fully backed by human support, right? I- it's kind of the best of both worlds. Greg, thoughts? Yeah, and, and it is definitely in the, the
core ethos of everything we do, right? We are fundamentally different from all of our competitors, because now we've changed what used to be a, "Okay, I need to upgrade once or maybe twice a year because my, my storage vendor told me to," to, "I now have this optionality of different capabilities that I can deliver back to the business." Right.
Maybe it's something, is an acceptable risk. Maybe I do wanna do a sort of a bleeding edge code or maybe I wanna have a paralyzed release cycle. And this is what we're finding customers that can iterate a lot faster, can now have the option to speed up their capabilities based upon they require, because of our release
cycles, because of our paralyzed, you know, development paths. we are actually delivering whole audits. Heck, our, we released object on flash arrays, a software upgrade. Right? That would've been a whole different- Right product release with a new thing you have to buy, with the whiz bang, with somebody on
stage saying, "This is the greatest thing to ever hap-" It was a software upgrade. Oh, oh, and it doesn't work with the storage media you have now. Exactly. Or some, some little wrinkle like that, right, yeah. Exactly. So th- this is, this is a core differentiation. All of our newer customers, they're still having this shock of, "No way it works that
way," right? It's one of my favorite things to do, is, "There's no way it works that way." I'm like, "Okay, all right. I guess you're gonna force my hand here, but this is really how it works, man." And, and kind of iterate through multiple cold life cycles. So but also be understanding from a business perspective, we have understanding of an
acceptable risk model, right? So we don't say you have to go down the path of the latest every single month, but we give you optionality, "Hey, this is something I'm gonna get on the truck for." Maybe it's object on FA, maybe it's our future releases from, you know, having encryption in flight on flash array.
Like, again, software upgrades. Right. Yeah, and, and, you know, I love how you compared and contrast with the legacy model that, ugh-Just about all, you know, folks in IT are so used to where it's like, oh, no, no, no, these- th- here, here's the latest and greatest thing, and then you gotta read so far down into the release notes to figure out what
else you've gotta change in your stack to actually make that work, versus the EverPure way of doing it, which has always been, how can we make it as simple as possible? How can we have it, create the least amount of havoc within our user base, and especially within their own environments, so that people can actually take advantage? I love how you mentioned it being iterative, because that And a, and a lot of our Pure
user- EverPure users and Purity folks, do come to lean on that and actually follow, you know, the feature releases, commonly called dot releases. Mm-hmm. you know, and, and when they see something that they need, just pull it in. And then I know we have a lot of other users who are, maybe a little more
conservative-minded, whether it's through their own internal policy or just their own bias, and they want things that have been tr- you know, tried and tested, and I know we'll be able to get into, you know, our, our different approaches. We, we cover you both ways. we have those, those bedrock things that we call long life releases, and then we have our
feature releases as well. So however you want to do it is your choice, just the same way with the ease of the, the upgrade itself, and then the fact that it's not g- you don't have to take the system offline. the prerequisites are generally we've figured that out for you, as opposed to- Mm-hmm "Hey,
here's a patch. Let us know if there's a problem." Right. I've been used to that at a l- a few other organizations, so, um- Yeah, but definitely not the way we've ever done things, though. Like, even when it was just white glove service, right? There was never a point in time where we were like, "Here, best of luck." It's always been a
guided process. We've just, found great success in the ability to scale and give customers more options around when and how their fleets get upgraded, through the self-service, right? But it's the One of the coolest things, I think, about the self-service upgrades is that y- your case structure gets automatically built for you through Pure1.
So when you go through the process of prepping these arrays for upgrade, and we can actually take a look at some of, how that works in a little bit. But when you go through the process of prepping these things for self-service upgrade, all the health checks are handled for you, all the Purity code recommendation is done for you, and in Pure1 now you can actually set your customer personality type.
Do I want to see nothing but the long life release schedule? Do I want to see what's happening in the standard life releases, where we're iterating new features? Almost three every 30 days, by the way, right now. So think about that for a second. Three new primary features in Purity every 30 days.
That's nutty, right? So, being able to either stay up to date with those SRs, continue a path down LLR, the, the personality in Pure1 that you set for your arrays will determine what upgrades they see, and you'll only be notified when it's an upgrade that meets your business requirements. And that's, I think, really cool.
Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, and I And the integration with Pure1 I think is, really important too, where, yeah, not only is it self-service, but you can really get an idea of what, is going to be available and if it's applicable to your environment, if you can actually make some use of it. Absolutely.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Greg, what do you think are, some of the great capabilities that might have, bubbled up over the last year or 18 months? I'm- obviously, I'm sure the folks in our audience are all over the map in terms of where they are and when they've most recently upgraded, but let's just kind of paint an overall picture of, you know, let's, let's,
for a, a straw man, customer who might not have upgraded their Purity in the last 18 months, what are they missing out on right now? Oh, my goodness. So Matt'll, Matt'll laugh at this. We have one of our leaders of our product management organization has a slide that he shows, "Hey, in the last year, here's all the features that we've delivered," and he hits
animate, and it literally fills up with over 150 features on one slide. It's like, oh, my God, so much eight-point font. Um- Like one of those Word bubble charts? Yes. Ex- exactly. It's just It's overwhelming, but it's like, oh yeah, yeah, we did do that. Oh yeah, we do do that.
In some cases, you know, maybe it wasn't important to my customers at the time, but hey- Right for someone else, that was critical to them, right? So, but just going through the past, heck, just the past few months, NFS over TLS capabilities, being able to support, fiber channel in-flight, fiber channel encryption in-flight, object on FlashArray, self-service capability expansions, being able to tune
ciphers from a TLS perspective on FlashBlade, realms expansion, fusion expansions- Right preset expansions. Again, these are these are all just every single month, we just keep on coming with this stuff. expansion on f- FA file, w- meaning, upping our managed directory limits.
Yeah. Like, all these things just over the past three and, three and a half, four months. Let's not forget file and object auditing. Like, that's huge. Right? See? See previous eight-point font 150 things.
Right? Right? These are huge, huge capabilities, and you know, we're And this is how we're gonna roll out additional things, auditing starting there. rolling into, hey, when we started talking about, um-No antivirus capabilities. It's gonna be a software upgrade, right? Yeah.
Something we've been talking about for a long time. So this is not where we have to, you know, talk about, hey, wait till the next platform. People move to the next platform when they need to move to the plex pl- next platform. Features should not be held behind a platform capability unless it's a specific hardware thing, which what we have found, and I've kind of learned this here, again, I'm coming from
the old software-defined HCI world, is customers don't really need hardware capabilities. They need a function that requires back to the business that something can be delivered and something simple, right? It And that was the whole appeal of software-defined in the first place.
So, oh, easy life cycle, and, and it can just scale up and out forever. Well, yeah, it can scale up and out forever. How long do your self-service upgrades take? do you have a calendar or do you have a watch, right? 'Cause now we're talking days and weeks in some cases for true large scale
software-defined, where we're talking about 90 minutes in some cases for self-service upgrades where customers are doing it themselves. That's just a game changer, especially in large enterprise. But even in small, medium business, or it doesn't matter what vertical you're in, and what your business is about, like, that's risk mitigated, that's time back, and most
importantly, it gives you a way to on-ramp, on-ramp, based upon, hey, maybe something's coming out next month. We have some cool stuff being announced at Accelerate. How can I take advantage of that? That's why you're here, right? How you can go through the upgrade process. If it is that valuable to you, if it's something that is business
critical, software upgrade. Hey, and Carl Or, sorry, Greg. I knew that was gonna happen at some point 'cause your name is Greg. Everybody gets one, Mr. Rickson. I know. I know. It happens.
Well, hey- I got two first names. I've been blessed with two first names. Well, I, I was gonna say because actually I have lived with that my whole life. Everyone calls me Rick. Because the only memorable syllable apparently in my entire name is Rick. Okay, so Greg, we do have a question on that exact topic.
Where can our users find this summary of new features? Do we, do we have a cheat sheet somewhere or...? So with every major release, there's release notes published out there. You can get the abridged version, kind of the bullets. Yeah. But you can also get the everything that is out there.
It's all available out on our support portal, and that's every time a new software release is out. So, what I've had some customers do is they actually get the full list of reports of everything that's out there and they're feeding it into LLMs and saying, "Hey, is this applicable to my environment?" Right. "Is this something I need to, you know, take advantage of today?" So, and thank you, Mr.
Bednar, throwing that out there on the support portal, support.purestorage.com. so it, it, it's very open. We're, we're There's no, you know, things we're holding back on. We're very, very transparent in, what we're doing, everything we're patching and fixing all the way throughout the software life cycle.
Yeah, and the question was from Kenny, and he followed up with, "Is there a blog?" And, you read my mind, Kenny, because I think the, the detailed version and the stuff that you're really gonna wanna go through is exactly what, Greg was just talking about. the support docs. But we do also encapsulate it for you, in our,
innovations page on the web. Mm-hmm. And we'll make sure to get that link out, as part of the follow-up for- Mm-hmm or, or I'll, I'll make sure it gets into chat at some point. There is basically a running blog, or a short- series of blog. That way you've got the TLDR for, you know, the, the high level view of everything that's
been added to Purity, but also, as we've mentioned, all the tools that are, that are included- Mm-hmm whether it's Pure1 or what have you, and, th- that innovation is, as we said, happens so quickly. Yeah, you, you, you really do need a cheat sheet for, uh- Yeah for how that all works. Yeah, for sure. And, and, and another w- resource is great,
it's really growing exponentially since the relaunch, is our, our Pure Community site. you'll find some great additions out there as well, and I'm, I'm gonna get some nasty grams. I didn't even talk about Dee Produce, Mr. Bednar. we just had a multi-part blog series, which will make me think about it- Right on Dee Produce and the impact going forward, especially in the current supply chain crisis
we're in. Hey, now I can get some storage back or get greater efficiencies when maybe supply is higher, cost is exponentially higher. Mm-hmm. Now the value of the software capability. So just with a software upgrade, customers are getting more usable capacity on their systems. Not a great business model, right?
But if you have the storage business. But ultimately what that is saying, that we care about their customers, we're releasing these features out there, not just from a parity perspective, but also saying, "Hey, in these times we are now gonna release a feature that's gonna give you more usable capacity depending on your workload," and it's 'cause something's gonna get better over time.
So we might say, "Hey, you're getting two-to-one data reduction today. Introduce Dee Produce, some cases I might be going to five-to-one. And guess what? A month from now you might go to 10-to-one once the whole process is done." That's like a 5X increase on overall usable capacity. That's huge, especially as budgets are tightening this year.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, who- Mm-hmm who hasn't, faced sticker shock at, what expansion looks like these days? So- Yeah if we can take down the amount of k- data that, we can use in the effective capacity we have now, that's definitely a win. Hey, I did wanna make one other shout-out too, and it was, it was mentioned
in the, in the chat. the EverPure Community, if you have not checked that out yet, that is actually where a lot of this information is. I wanted to call out the, the main website, you know, pages that we have and, and those blogs, but the EverPure Community is your should be one of your first resources to go to
to make sure that you can, get this all, y- you know, get not only from the P- EverPure experts, but with your peers. And that is a, a, a, a really cool thing to have.Um, okay, I wanna, grab some- So one more, one more thought around- Yeah, please finding information, too, around these upgrades and the feature sets as well.
We actually list the upgrade notes with the version of Purity in Pure1 Now. So if you're going through the process of selecting your upgrade from a self-service upgrade perspective, it's literally going to have the notes link right there next to that version of Purity that you're about to move to. So you can read through, you can get all the caveats, you can get all the, uh- Mm-hmm
things to consider. You'll also see a list of all the new features if it's an SR release. Something to keep in mind, a- and maybe something that we'll transition to in a minute, so I don't wanna go too deep here, but when we talk about upgrades, there is two paths here. There is the standard life release with all the features.
There is the long life release, which is good for three years, right? And in those long life releases, when you look at the notes, you're gonna see things like zero-day patching. You're gonna see, like, things like, firmware hardening. You're gonna see all that kind of thing, but you're not gonna see a whole
bunch of features, right? Those long life releases take the standard life release features of its predecessor, and those are the features for that LLR, so, or for that long life release. So you really get this tried, true, stable path if we're talking about business critical architecture, right?
If we're talking about things that maybe aren't so critical, maybe it's a test dev environment, maybe you're running multiple arrays so you can do QA on your production set, you can run the SR line and test out the latest and greatest that engineering is delivering, and really get a sense for what's gonna be hitting that next LLR. Mm-hmm. And bouncing between those two is seamless as
well, right? We do this by release date. So you can move from an SR into an LLR. You can move from an LR to a more recent SR. it's based on release date, so- Mm-hmm really cool and so much flexibility now around those kind of things. Yeah, I lo- I love you helping to disambiguate
that, and I know, I think you've got a graphic that helps kinda show, especially because of the naming. We, we've changed the n- the taxonomy on this, s- for some of our longer term users. So if you wanna go ahead and we can cover this off, see if there's any other questions on it, and then it Almost all of our other questions are about the efficacy of self-service.
so I think we're probably gonna spend the rest of our time on that. We can always call back to this if we need to. Yeah. See if we can get that slide up. Oh, and yeah, there you go. There we go. Perfect. Can you guys see my screen now?
Looks good. Looks like the webinar's got it. Awesome. Excellent. Yeah. so this is basically a layout of what the Purity code looks like now, right? if you notice, FR stands for feature release or standard release, and then LLR is our long life release.
And it is essentially the exact same code. So that code set starts life at, just a reference here right at the top, 6.12, right? Which is gonna be, our current, feature release. And then it will turn into 6.13.13 when it hits an LLR stride. So it is the same exact code set.
We are stabilizing it into LLR, and then we're supporting that code set for three years, and that's awesome, right? You, you literally get the best of both worlds. I can rapidly iterate my code to get new features, or I can stay on the same base code for three years and just upgrade at w- yearly or twice yearly cadences to make
sure that I'm got the latest hotfixes, to make sure that I have the latest security patching architecture. So we're really allowing you to pick your journey, your story through the Pure code structure. Carl, any thought? Or Greg?
That was my one. E- Ed, too, but I- I, I jinxed you, man oh, you totally jinxed me, dude. Ed, too, but- You ruined me. I've never done that to Greg, by the way. Greg- Yeah, this is- over to you this is hilarious. Thoughts? So a- and, and then another thing that comes
to mind, so I, I used to cover the federal space. Still, still doing it part-time, it's a good hobby. but also in the- Yeah in the financial sector, some very risk-averse customers, right? They're not going to the latest release, but they, they want And it's sort of a, a catch-22. They want the latest capabilities, but it's on kind of a newer release, and one of the things
also changing with our featured long life release is there was some confusion. so when, for instance, 6.10 is gonna go to 6.11, it would be 6.11.0. Like, well, nobody's gonna install a .0 release. It's been only hardwired in some of our DNA. So we've actually taken the option out and saying, "Whatever the last iteration was for
6.10," let's say it was 9, right? I'll just use an arbitrary number. Not gonna be 9. but whatever rolls to 6.11 is gonna be 6.11.10. Just to kinda reiterate what Matt was talking about, where it's not a .0 release, right? But from this point forward, it is now gonna be managed, maintained.
Anything from a CV-related thing, bug fixes, anything else, this is gonna cover everything in our future releases and then all the way through that three-year span, 36 month, of that long life release as well, which is where we find a lot of our large enterprise customers laying this out. But they also have feature releases maybe in a lab or in a test dev box, 'cause they, "Hey, I
would really do wanna roll this out." So when that, you know, the day one release of the long life release is ready, boom, they know they can adopt it immediately. They've already done their own internal testing, and they can roll out these features a lot faster. Again, it's all about what level of acceptable risk the bus- the business- Right a business wants to have.
Yep, absolutely. Yeah. And the thing that I think is awesome is the way that these long life releases overlap, right?So if you think about the upgrade process for most, customers, especially if we're talking like enterprise globals, right? They're going to play the LLR game, so they're gonna continue to bounce up through LLRs.
So at any point in time, if I need features that were in 6.8- Right let's just say, and I'm running 6.7, which is my current LLR, I can jump up the stack, and I can do the exact same thing into 6.11 whenever I'm comfortable jumping in, right? So this allows basically long life release transitions indefinitely over- Right a
three-year timeframe moving forward. You read my mind, Matt, because, y- I mean, we support the LLRs for three years, but that doesn't mean you need to stay on it for three years. Right. Obviously, that's your choice if you want to, but you can still move to yet another tried and true, as bulletproof as we can possibly make it release that is now going to have all
of the features that have been added in the meantime, it purely by staying in the LLR track and just moving up, as you said. And, and, and- Absolutely I, I think I can even see you added some arrows in the blocks. I did. I added, I da- I added They're small arrows, and I apologize for that. I'll change the size of them- the next time I
start drawing on the screen. But the, the idea behind this is, is pretty awesome from the standpoint of there's so much good in 6.10, right? I, I can't encourage the existing Pure customers that might be listening enough. Like, take a look at the 6.11 line. If you're running 6.9, if you're running 6.7, w- it, like, let's go, right?
6.11 is where you want to be for your business. You're gonna get the best features, you're gonna get the best zero day fixes. You're gonna have the ability to run closer to the edge without being anywhere near the edge. The adoption that we're seeing in 6.11 is fantastic, and it's only gonna continue momentum as we move forward with SSU.
The other thing that I think that's worth mentioning, w- again, part of that feature structure that we keep on rolling forward as we increase Purity versions, you also get the ability to do single line security patching in the latest versions- Mm-hmm of Purity as well, right? So I can literally go to my command line, can log in as my array admin, and I can execute
one command to check against the mothership and see if there's any security patching for my version of Purity. It's not a controller restart. It's not a, "I have to apply new code to my controller's process." It is a hot patch that can be applied. For customers who have a security focus, which
I think is literally everyone in this day and age- Mm-hmm having access to single command structures that allow you to be in the most secure spot possible without having to do any reboots, without having to schedule a possible interruption window or anything like that, that is gold, right? And something that I haven't heard a lot about in the market.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the key thing, Well, not the key. There's a lot of key things that are in 6.11. Yeah, right. Yeah. But one of the ones that, we even got a question on was Fusion.
and so that's a big driving factor. And the question, I believe it was from, Was it Dave or, Tim? Tim was asking, about Fusion and what the advantages are for, enterprises that have large, large fleets. I'll, I'll just take that one real quick, 'cause this isn't a Fusion-centric one, but if
this is one of the, compelling reasons to keep upgrading your Purity, then we should at least give you an idea. So what it, what it does is basically provide the bedrock of the intelligent control plane that is essential to, the enterprise data cloud that, Matt and Greg have been talking about, where you now have the ability not only to affect and manage, multiple arrays at
once, you can standardize them and you can automate them at the same time. So now policies can be automatically enforced. They can auto- be automatically, changed if needed. users can be added. There, you know, it This whole self-service idea that we've been talking about around
Purity upgrades for you, you can wind up creating a lot more self-service in your data stack for users so that they can, with the right permissions, gain access to the data that they need to. So now your job becomes much more strategic and l- much less about, "What's my SLA on getting new users approved?" Right.
And, you know, "How many people do I need to staff that with?" And, and that kind of stuff. Those are just a couple of quick examples. But, F- Fusion, it really is a game changer, and that is why you've been hearing about it so much as, EverPure, customers. Any- anything you guys wanna add on that?
Yeah. So I'll C- couple of points, right? So especially in large enterprise Actually, let me This can be up on the large enterprise. So I'm, I've, I'm, I'm very grateful to work with some of the largest environments on the planet. Automation is king, right?
If you can give me a simpler API endpoint that I can interact with 100 arrays at once versus one, that's great. so it matters from an SRE perspective. It matters from a DevOps perspective. It matters to massive scale capabilities.
So I have an concept of data governance as well, which is very, very prevalent right now, especially as I move into the, you know, wave two of the AI era. understanding what your data is, who's accessing it, is it deployed the right way? Does it have the same form factor all the way throughout? So p- policy-driven capabilities, automation capabilities from a single endpoint
perspective, but also creating constructs that align back to corporate policy. So if we're talking about multi-tenant environments, as an administrator, I'm no longer just-A-a-adhering to task anymore or getting ticket requests, either by email, ServiceNow, whatever, I can now automate automatically, automagically, right? Have those presets available and provision workloads across that.
And oh, by the way, now they can do chargeback and showback as well with our workload tagging. These are all features that, as we talked about automating large autonomous storage environments for years, chargeback, showback was always a pain. It's one of the things- Yeah VMware did pretty good, right? You can track your tag, track, you know, show the receipts if you will, right?
But now we can do it autonomously for any type of environment. So now we can attach da- we can attach ourselves to data at a global scale, and I'll stop there because I can, you know, me- I think me and Bednar could take off the rest of this if we go into one touch and how all of that adds up to a much larger story. Right. But just from that lens in large enterprise, the value is exponential.
Add The deeper you get into it, and the fact that we're sort of paralyzing the splice capabilities and iterating these features so quickly, it's getting very mature very quick. Right. Yeah. Well, so we've covered really well, I think, a lot of the, the why, I guess, of- staying on Purity and some of the basics of the, of the how, at least, like how to
decipher, which path you wanna take. We have a lot of questions around the nitty-gritties of the how, and one of them is around rollbacks. so if you are, on the self-service upgrade- Yeah are there paths for rolling back to a previous version if you run into something?
Or I think there was a, a good wrinkle on this in another question, which was, the pre-checks that you talked about and the health checks, can you make sure that you won't have to do rollback because you know the gotchas beforehand? That's what we want. Yeah, that's No, I'm just kidding. So, two, two things, that I think I can kick off around that real quick.
also really appreciate the questions in the chat. So let's see if we can address, Phil's question. I think it was Phil. Nope, I'm sorry. Not Yeah, Peter. Peter's question around suggestions for management to feel more comfortable utilizing the self-service upgrades, and we're also
gonna address David Sharp's question around, self-service upgrades availability on FlashBlade. so let's start, with Peter's, 'cause I think that, that feeds into this kind of like what happens, how do I roll back, how does this all work? There's multiple different ways to schedule the self-service upgrade.
You can schedule them in bulk. You can schedule them individually per array. You can also schedule them based on fleets or multiple within a single location, again, part of that bulk feature for the upgrade. And then you can pick your upgrade path.
So you can say full automation, right? Take me through the entire Purity upgrade, start to finish, let me know when you're done. Or you can say, "I wanna do this in stages, so I want you to upgrade the passive controller. I want you to fail over to that passive controller, and then I want you to wait. I'm going to make sure that everything's good in my environment, and then I'm gonna tell you
when it's time to do the second controller." Up until the time that the upgrade completes on the second controller, you can actually roll back this process. If anything goes wrong in this process, whether it's full automated start to finish or you ask for the pause in between, we're gonna automatically, proactively open a SEV 1 case with support. You will be engaged with a real person in
order to address whatever happened to the automated upgrade process, and that shouldn't scare anyone, right? we have basically a 95-plus percent success upgrade around SSUs. That's remarkable. Believe it or not, and this is not me bagging on, on Everpure's white glove services at all,
but it is even more successful, so that 95%, that's a higher success rating than our ri- than our white glove service. So that's nutty. Like, that literally should give you the confidence that SSU is fully fleshed out. Also, to answer that question around, FlashBlade, SSU for FlashBlade
is coming. In the latest versions of FlashBlade, you can actually drive self-service upgrades through the command line. In future releases of Purity for FlashBlade this year, you're going to see it come into the GUI and into Pure1 just like FlashArray, and that's super exciting when we talk about the idea of fleets within Fusion.
When we talk about managing your data estate, that's the kind of tooling that we need, right? Yeah. So the answer to that is yes and coming. Greg, thoughts? No, I mean, I think you, you put a bow on it right there, man. the fact that it's coming i- is showing we're having that increased autonomy across all the platforms, right?
That's, that's the huge, huge capability of similarity. You can't operate like an enterprise data collab, you don't have commonality of capabilities. Again, hence the intelligent control plane, hence the similar capabilities across platforms.
there was one other question I think we kind of breezed over a little bit. We talked about you can go to the support portal where we could look for releases and when the new release is available. So there's no way to do it from Pure1 today. From an email perspective, you can look at the proactive planner.
But if you go on support portal, you go to our FA release or FB release page, if you hit watch or watchlist, you can get an email notification when that page is updated. So like Matt talked about, if I If there is a new release that comes out, it might be pertinent for my environment. Hey, I can read the notes there, I can put it into LLM, do whatever you want, right?
so there's multiple ways to get the information. If you want the latest and greatest, like when it drops at midnight, cool. You wanna be there at, you know, Black Friday, you wanna be there at midnight at Walmart banging on the door, you can do that too. but to have that notification, you can go to the support portal for that specific release
you want or the overall release life cycle. You know, I think it's the FA release-So look at my, tab 'cause I have it bookmarked myself. yeah, at the FA release end of life schedule, watch that page, you can get automated updates sent to you. Awesome. Fantastic. Well, thanks for, covering We, we just knocked
out about four or five of the questions. 'cause everyone's concerned about the same thing. It's like I get it. h- here's a good one that I think, you guys can probably answer pretty quickly, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Joseph has, "Are all features included in main licenses, or are there features that are licensed separately?" In other words, are we trying to nickel and dime our customers here at EverPure? No, we absolutely try and get every single penny we can out of you, so you're gonna get a- You're gonna get a bill for this webinar. No.
Everything is all-inclusive. It's, it's been that way since inception, it will always be that way. It's part of our core belief in the evergreen platform cycle. Well, let's be very clear. In which part are you saying we've always been?
W- we've, well, we've always been on the evergreen mentality of everything is inclusive. We're not That is not- Right in our ethos at all. Now, if I get a Venmo 'cause you enjoyed the webinar, I'm not gonna say no, but I'm just saying- Yeah as a customer, we believe your investment with us should include all of our future capabilities. It is an investment in us. Yeah.
It's not a purchase. An investment includes a continual return to you as a loyal customer. So as Fusion rolled out, there was not a, "Oh, you gotta buy the Fusion Suite. Oh, oh, oh, you're, you're gonna do, Oh, you want a new security upgrade? Oh, well, you have to get the security suite obviously." I, I think there was, like, five
minutes when we thought about it, and it was the quickest retraction ever because- Yeah right. I mean, how can you build an enterprise data cloud if you're saying, "Yeah, well, this stuff is good, but what you really have to buy is that for this vision that we're paint- Right. That's, that's how the legacy vendors do it.
That's, yeah. Absolutely. Totally fair. Been on both sides of the aisle there. It's not, it's not a good feeling. It's not a good feeling either way. Yeah. So- Don't ask me about Time Finder licenses.
Maybe a, another quick thought on that, and just to, to, to maybe finalize this with a bit of clarity. If this is a Purity feature that we're talking about, meaning it's built into the Purity code structure, it's always going to be inclusive, right? Yeah. It is part of your support contract.
There is no additional licensing costs around any of the Purity feature base. But one of the things that's awesome about EverPure is we've expanded our portfolio beyond just storage. All right? Right. So when you think about new acquisitions like One Touch, when you talk about, like, Portworx Enterprise, those are
gonna be continued to be optional SKUs that customers can add on to existing structure, that they can use independent of the storage layer, right? so there's a lot more to our portfolio today. If you haven't taken a look at EverPure recently, would encourage you to do so. the scope that we meet inside of a data center now or inside of a public and private cloud
architecture is astounding. so food for thought there. there was another question that I was hoping that we could answer real quick. Are you cool with that, Kevin? Did we tie off on the last one?
Yeah, I think so. Okay. So I really like David's question, and that is, "We're in the process of adding file and objects to our Pure portfolio. I assume release updates are the same as it is for our block storage on Pure." Greg, you wanna take that one? Yeah.
So if it's on FlashArray, right? 100%, right? If you're doing block volume object on FlashArray, with FlashBlade, similar release cadence. We've actually just adopted the same feature release, long life release methodology- Yeah and the code iteration is, is sort of parallelized, right?
So, nothing's gonna really gonna change there. You're still gonna have the capability to see what's coming, if you need it, if it's pertinent to you. the security capabilities Matt talked about earlier, yes, it's also there as well for file and object. So again, the commonality in the ecosystem i- is, is kind of the big value add, right?
We, we say we are, you know, one software, one software platform, two hardware platforms, right? We really are merging that together for the experience, right? There are fundamental differences from a scale-up versus scale-out. We get that. We You can't They can't be identical.
They shouldn't be identical. but what we do wanna have is the- make sure the experience is the same. That's where Fusion comes into play, to make sure the experience is the same, so that as I'm, you know, looking at the pros and cons of going, doing upgrade path, I understand, okay, I can adopt object on FlashArray, but what am I getting and what do I need?
Or maybe it's something I need to do on FlashBlade. Oh, wait a minute, I already had that available on FlashBlade, right? So it gives you the balance of my purpose and workload of what I wanna use these different platforms for, as opposed to, okay, well, if it has to be object, it has to be here, but I have to wait till next month. That's not the way we operate, right?
We're very clear and transparent on, hey, we You should use this for this purpose. And, you know, talk to your partners, talk to your SEs, talk to your account teams. That's what we're here for. does it make sense to try this out? You know my environment very well. Everyone's almost a trusted advisor.
You should be, and if they're not, you know, you haven't met with your SE recently, right? They are your trusted advisor into your account. does this make sense for us to do right now? You know our risk mitigation policy. We're not bleeding edge.
What are your thoughts? And that's the cool thing about this. Pure1 can give you insights, but sometimes there's, there's a human aspect of, yeah, just 'cause you can doesn't mean you should. And that's the great thing about our parallel release lines. It gives customers that optionality.
Absolutely. Yeah. And I, and I love how you touched on, you know, there's We have different tools for different jobs, you know? Yeah. We're, we're trying to get as much unified storage as possible into the FlashArray platform because that is, you know, so pervasive, and so much of our user
base already has it. But there is a reason that we also offer FlashBlade, because it is a fundamentally different architecture in terms of-How it handles data, especially large volumes or high throughput or, you know, things along those lines. so right, it's what is the right tool for the job, and that's where speaking with your
EverPure, you know, sales team and even more importantly with your partners, you know, that you're relying on for, for guidance and, and all that, they're all experts on the EverPure platform, how that road toward a, enterprise data cloud looks, and which tool to use when. And then, you know, as Greg was just saying, the whole point is that it all feels the same
from a user, y- you know, not just the interface perspective, but just how it all works and how it can tie into all these other new things that we have, like Port Works, like One Touch. Soon to be renamed, I hear. So again, since this is the pre-Accelerate, Ask Us Everything, on the next one I'm sure we'll have even more details about how this is all gonna work.
But, uh- Absolutely yeah. Any, any other thoughts, guys, on that? Yeah, I mean, there's the old adage I've used for a long time, right? Is you, you can, you can take a hammer and, and hit a Phillips-head screwdriver if you want to. It'll go in the wall. Or you can just go get a freaking screwdriver, right?
That's, that's, that's our job here, is making sure you got the right tools in your belt, and knowing you have 'em in your belt. That's what we found in a lot of customers. And one thing I'll throw out there, too, is if customers are the ones saying, "Hey, I would like to try out this specific thing"- Mm-hmm if you don't have access to Test Drive, reach
out to your SE and account team. The latest versions are out there available on Test Drive. Hey, I want to see what this actually looks like. Me, I'm a kinesthetic learner. I'm a doer. That's how I learn.
I can't just look at release notes. I gotta get in there and, and, and break stuff, right? That's, that's my methodology, so I like that aspect. Do that. You want to see what it's like, how it's different, will it Is it better?
Is it worse? Do I want to try my script against it, in some cases- Right for my environment? Try it out in Test Drive. Yeah. Amen to that. I love that. Also- What, what No, go ahead, Matt oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Kevin. No, no, no.
You go first. Oh, my turn? All right, cool. Abs- I was just gonna add on to that, that this is not somehow limited to only Pure Storage customer, or sorry, EverPure customers either. Been with this company for seven years. Yeah.
My apologies. It ta- it takes a minute. It takes a while. So, from an, from an EverPure perspective, this isn't customer only, right? Test Drive is accessible to anyone. Yeah. It is a guided or it is just kind of like your
own private laboratory, where you can play around with Pure features and functionality. you can play around with replication. There is so much good that you can get out of Test Drive. When I was a customer, to Greg's point, I actually used to request Test Drive, vouchers so that I could test automation code in a, in an isolated environment that I couldn't
destroy, right? that's huge, so go nuts, man. Reach out to your local teams. Make sure you get some Test Drive vouchers. Yeah. Absolutely.
So yeah, what I was gonna say, and you just touched on it again, is this whole idea of, that, Greg was talking about with how you learn and everything. and I gotta break stuff. I, my fav- one of my favorite bosses in my entire career, that was his mantra. He'd come into a meeting and say, "Okay, what stuff are we gonna break today?" He might not
have used the word stuff, but- because, you know, and that's one of the great things. It ties back to the LLR versus FR and all this stuff. I mean, we make it almost bulletproof, not just within the Test Drive, environment, but, I hope most EverPure customers feel this enveloping safety net. We really You know, whether it's our actual,
you know, a support organization or everything that we've engineered into the product from day one, all of the testing that we do, you know, all of your knowledge resources. I mean, you know, there's an entire ecosystem that's basically there to support you and make sure that you're a success, and these guys are a big part of that, Matt and Greg. Yeah. There are m- Yeah there are many of us.
We are an international team that are here to help you out. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and we also have an entire squad of FSAs globally as well, field solution architects. So if you have- Yeah situations or if you have projects within your business and you're like, "Man, I don't know which way to go.
This, this is gonna go really nitty-gritty, and I need somebody with a lot of technical expertise to help me show how I can marry all these technologies together," man, they are awesome at that. So don't hesitate to reach out. we have another question. Do we wanna tackle the Pure Fusion question that we got real quick, or are we running out
of time? I, well, if you guys have any other thoughts on it, I gave the, like- Sure you know, 10,000-foot view, if you want to start- Absolutely going down maybe more to 5,000 feet, we definitely have time. All right, cool. I want to unpack this a little bit. Yeah. So the question's from Tim Page, and it's, "What is Pure Fusion, and what are the
benefits of a company with multiple EverPure storage devices and use and/or implement that feature?" So first off, if you have one Pure Storage array, if you have 150 Pure Storage arrays, you really want to adopt Fleets. You really want to adopt Fusion. There is absolutely no reason not to.
We support integration with AD or LDAP. That is literally the biggest thing that you need to be able to leverage Fusion effectively, and it is three-step process. It is very simple. Integrate with AD, log into the array, create a fleet, start joining members to the fleet.
Could not be easier. It is 100% GUI-driven, and the benefits are astronomical. Now, all of a sudden, I can log into a single endpoint, whether it be manually-Or via automation. And rather than having to track an entire, in the case of 150 arrays, 150 API
tokens, now I need two, right? I need two endpoints that I can talk to, a primary and a backup. And I can run automation, I can run manual changes against my fleet. I can deploy block, I can deploy file. I can get recommendations for which array within a specific geographic region or which
area is going to be the best suited for the workload that I'm deploying. The This is everything that I would have wanted out of a global control plane for Purity, right? And we're m- dedicating tons of engineering time and effort to this, and we're expanding its use cases all the time.
I know I waxed a little poetic there. Sorry. Greg, thoughts? No. What do you think? This is, this is great, man. And this is I'll, I'll take it one higher for the propeller heads where my nerds at, right? Yeah. So if you're dabbling with MCP and MCP server, right?
You know you can do it w- within Pure1, but, what if we could do it with my FlashArray? What if I had a single API endpoint? If you're going to accelerate, I would go check out Mr. Anthony Nosentino's session on it. It's an awesome session of how you can actually not just pull data about your fleet,
but also orchestrate a lot of capabilities all using natural language. It's really freaking cool. And if you wanna know where he is, say databases three times, Anthony Nosentino magically appears- Yeah like Beetlejuice. Yeah. So he just appears.
So if you ever wanna know, he's, he's the guy. But anyways, that, that leans into more of our larger AI strategy, that Fusion's part of it, right? Simplifying large scale environments where a lot of different data types are there. Where we wanna have natural language integration, you have to aggregate this, the
simplicity, right? We do that with Fusion. Yeah. And I think actually the fastest way to get Anthony, t- i- within your personal space is to just shout out, "Databases are dead. It's all about unstructured." And- Oh my goodness he will magically appear with the
exact- I'm just waiting for Anthony to tackle Kevin across this table I just Yeah, I just I did. Ah. Yeah, just I almost had to make a legal disclaimer there. Oh my goodness. All right. Well, I think we have covered just about all the questions that have come in.
So, if you guys have any final thoughts, I think, now's the time. Why W- Give me, give me at least the 30-second pitch of why folks should make sure that they stay on a recent version of a Purity, and then, two, any other final thoughts you have. Yeah. Start with Matt.
All right. I'll, I'll kick this off. So honestly, the thing that I think about most when I talk about, like, staying closer to the latest from, at least at, at bare minimum an LLR perspective, is the stability that that's going to give your organization, right? It used to be the, the model around this was if it's working, don't touch it, right? Right.
That is, that is not the model that Pure has ever had, and the closer you are to the latest dot release within the latest LLR, that is literally the most stable the code gets from a Pure Storage perspective, right? There's no zero days that are going to be discovered that aren't going to apply. There is all of the latest hardening, all of the latest security integration,
and honestly, the latest feature set, right? We talked about how 6.10 for FlashArray and even 6.6 for FlashBlade, those are fantastic feature releases for those platforms. You want those features for your business. Do yourself a favor and stay within the latest LLR.
Like, it's just the sweet spot, I think is how I would put it. Greg, thoughts? 100%. and then I don't wanna go full tinfoil hat man here, right? But, something I talk about a lot with my customers is things like post-quantum cryptography or things that are kinda, you know, boogeymen that are out there that are
gonna be very real very soon, right? How are we gonna implement it? Well, we're actually gonna do it non-destructively. You don't have to go buy new DFMs. You don't have to go We're actually able to do it non-destructively. But guess what you have to do to get post-quantum ciphers?
You have to stay current on your upgrades, right? And that entire security space for data especially is changing, right? If you look at the major announcements with Project Glasswing and Anthropic, and, and Mythos of how that's changing. How quickly do you think you're gonna have to patch in a world where I can now scan every
single aspect of binaries instantly and across everything inside the infrastructure stack? Upgrades are gonna become very, very, very important, so always stay on an LLR. I'm a N minus one, N minus two I can get behind, right? But think about how we iterated each one of these things, right? I have a feature release, I have my long life release, and it's not a
dot zero anymore, right? It's dot 10, it's dot 11, it's dot 12, out through the whole 36 month of that process. So the need to iterate quickly and respond to change is going to change exponentially over the next 18 months. It already has over the last 12.
The larger the enterprise, the more the risk. Stay current. Understand the risk factors of not being current, which is the exact opposite of how we used to approach this. I don't wanna be on dot zero, dot one. What are the implications now of not being on dot one?
Or, or not being on N minus one? It could be massive, right? So while we always wanna make sure we're ac- being good stewards of data, we're also saying, "Look, man, I'm not telling you to download the latest," right? I always get the Apple updates of, "Hey, you wanna download this thing?" It's like, oh no,
I need to read all these notes before I install anything with Apple Intelligence, et cetera, right? That's just my personal policy. But I also know that I have to maintain the current, not because I want the latest things, 'cause I care about the security patches. And when it comes to data, if you don't have security, what the heck are you doing?
That's what we're all about, data.Yeah, and I love that you use that as the, I don't know, maybe killer app metaphor. There's a lot of lenses that we've been trying to help people look through this, decision tree with, you know, the benefits of fusion, all this. But when it comes right down to it, look, data is the lifeblood of any organization.
Y'all are in charge of that, and if you don't have the security that you need, and with the advancing threats as quickly as they're happening, and the multiphasic that you need, you know, it- you're running at a disadvantage and incurring more risk if you're not on the latest, most secure version, of our software. And that's always gonna be an overtime thing, you know?
Because, if you've got yesterday's release, then you're fighting yesterday's battle, you know, or today's battles with yesterday's tools. So, love that. Fantastic. All right, well, I think that is a wrap. I again want to, make sure folks stick around all the way for the end, even though I said
wrap, for our raffle. So three lucky, attendees will, get oh, and just like that, Lauren has, magically made the three names appear. So our raffle winners today are Kenny L., Tim P., and David S. Our team will be following up with you for your, pr- info about claiming your prize.
and Tim is already celebrating in chat. Love to see it. Love to see it. and by the way, I did, also wanna make a, a quick shout-out. David, was, mentioning that, you know, that whole mentality that we were talking about around if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Mm-hmm.
he was basically saying that Everpure is helping change that mentality in his organization because of everything that we've talked about today, you know, that we, we try to make things so bulletproof, and then also stand behind you. So, any other final words you guys wanna, wanna say before we sign off? No. Thank you for having us on.
I think we've hit on the points that are important. That's it, man. It's going to break is the new mentality. There we go. It's going to break, but can we withstand it? Right. That's it. There you go. Let's break stuff. I love it. Let's go break things.
Probably not gonna be our top line, you know, tagline at Everpure, but, uh- Probably not it could be ours. You might not see that on a T-shirt, but I'm just saying, man. Look, let's Stuff's gonna break. Oh, T-shirts never hurt anyone. Yeah, secur- security is a thing for a reason. It's getting scary out there, guys. Let us break it so it doesn't break you, I
think would be a better tagline. There you go. Don't go full Ivan Drago. There you go. There you go. That's it. I got that reference. There we go. All right, this was awesome.
Matt, Greg- Make sure you guys attend the next one, too or Carl, whatever you go by. Yeah. I'm sorry, what was that, Matt? I was just saying, make sure you attend the next one, too. There's so much awesome coming out of Accelerate. Yes. You really don't wanna miss that. Yes.
See, Matt, it, keeps auditioning for my job. So, um- it's great because I get to be lazy, and then he can do the promo, so We're having way too much fun here. All right, Matt, Greg, thank you so much. Really appreciate the time. Everyone who was here today, thank you so much
for the lively interaction. This is what Ask Us Everything's are supposed to be about. This isn't just like, "Hey, here's 27 slides and a couple of experts." It's all about what are the issues that you all need. And as Matt just said, our next one I'm sure is gonna be incredibly lively, dissecting what,
was announced and, and some of the key learnings from Accelerate. So, look forward to seeing you all then. Matt and Greg, thank you so much, and thanks to everyone in the audience. Have a great day. Thanks, everybody.
Greg Carl
Principal Technologist, Everpure
Matthew Bednar
Sr. Technical Evangelist, Everpure
Kevin Rickson
Product Marketing Director, Everpure
Got questions about Purity upgrades? Get answers.
This month we’re talking about Purity upgrades—and how to plan, prepare, and execute them with confidence. With new capabilities being announced at Pure Accelerate, it’s a great time to get current so you’re ready to take advantage of what’s next.
You’ll get an overview of how to:
- Plan and execute upgrades with minimal effort and no disruption.
- Choose between self-service and support-assisted upgrade paths.
- Understand what to expect before, during, and after an upgrade.
- Unlock new capabilities like Pure Fusion™ and Enterprise File with the latest version.
Upgrades are fast, non-disruptive, and designed to fit seamlessly into your workflow.
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