Pure Storage announced a self-service, storage-as-code platform this week that it claims extends the agility and scalability of the cloud to enterprise storage. It launches alongside a database-as-a-service platform for Kubernetes.

This is a “significant progression in the vision of the company,” Pure Storage Chief Product Officer Ajay Singh said. “Data storage and management ultimately should be just services, delivered as code, self-managed, using AI.”

The new platform transforms Pure Storage into a “modern storage and data services” company, he said, adding the updates come just as customers modernize their infrastructure and operations for multi-cloud architectures.

The platform, dubbed Pure Fusion, provides a software-as-a-service management plane that pools storage arrays and clusters into availability zones. Additionally, the service automates tasks like workload placement and mobility and fleet rebalancing management.

“Pure Fusion brings together everything that Pure [Storage] has already done to simplify the storage administrator’s job into one place,” Steve McDowell, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SDxCentral. “It truly does deliver a cloud-like, push-button management experience across an enterprise’s fleet of Pure Storage offerings, even extending into Pure [Storage's] cloud offerings.”

The platform includes “a healthy dose of infrastructure-as-code, where an IT administrator can begin to integrate storage provisioning and management into the programmable operations tools that have become the backbone of enterprise IT administration,” he added.

Pure Fusion also integrates with the vendor's newly announced Kubernetes-focused software-defined storage layer, which it calls Portworx Data Services.

“Portworx Data Services is a database-as-a-service platform for SQL, NoSQL, streaming services, and a broad range of data services,” Singh said. “What's unique is it can run on any infrastructure.”

Pure Storage acquired the cloud-native storage provider last year, integrating Portworx's container and microservice storage platform into its broader portfolio.

“Much like Fusion does with Pure [Storage], the new Portworx Data Services evolves Portworx’s existing push towards simple-to-deploy and simple-to-manage cloud-native offerings,” McDowell said.

Pure Storage also introduced enhanced automation tools to its Pure1 unified management portal. Customers can now get real-time service level agreements across their storage cloud, monitor applications protected by SafeMode snapshots against ransomware attacks, and visualize their Portworx container infrastructure.

Moving forward, the vendor plans to incorporate both Fusion and Portworx Data Services into the portal to extend additional artificial intelligence functionality into its data storage and management platform, Singh said.

Pure Storage will preview Fusion later this year, with an official launch slated for the first half of 2022.