Pure Storage kicked off its annual event today with new hybrid cloud capabilities and an expanded all-flash storage product line.

The vendor updated its Cloud Data Services portfolio with the availability of Cloud Block Store for AWS. This service, first announced last November, takes Pure’s on-premises storage software and deploys it on Amazon Web Services. It also enables workload mobility between on-premises and AWS cloud storage.

Pure Storage also also added Microsoft Azure to CloudSnap. This service, which migrates workloads to run natively in the cloud, already supported Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It now includes portable FlashArray snapshots for Microsoft Azure. This provides multi-cloud flexibility to enable data protection, disaster recovery, and development use cases.

According to Pure Storage’s VP of Product Solutions Chad Kenny, the new hybrid capabilities mean enterprises can send data to the public cloud as a very inexpensive storage solution, restore that data either into the public cloud directly or back on-premises in a metadata, optimized way to have backups for specific volumes in multiple clouds.

“The key differentiators is most solutions that do this, and there's a couple that are out there, just virtualize their array and throw it up into all the clouds and say, ‘it's time to deploy',” Kenny said.

Pure Storage aims to remove what Kenny calls “the barrier to the public cloud” with its Purity operating system — which traditionally runs on arrays — porting it and optimizing it for Amazon infrastructure.

The updates seek to fulfill the mission in two platforms: Cloud Block Store for AWS and CloudSnap.

Cloud Block Store for AWS was engineered as an industrial-grade block storage delivered natively in the public cloud. It also employs Pure’s Evergreen Storage Service (ES2), a pay-as-you-go cloud storage service. 

In addition to its hybrid cloud expansion, Pure Storage also broadened the reach of its all-flash arrays to tier-two applications. The vendor says this provides more consistent performance and predictable latency.

Another flash upgrade includes DirectMemory storage class memory (SCM) cards with dual-ported Intel Optane solid state drives that feature 3D XPoint nonvolatile memory (NVMe) technology. This is compatible with Pure FlashArray//X70 and FlashArray//X90 arrays.

The company claims the new features boost performance of critical applications by 200% and cut latency by as much as 50% by installing a couple of drives on an existing system. 

 “At the end of the day, we believe there's no such thing as cold data anymore. Everyone should get the advantages of being able to analyze all of their data versus just having one hot tier and then everything else being relegated out to disk,” Kenny said.

“We believe — and so do almost all enterprises — that a hybrid cloud world is what everyone is going towards, meaning they want to use some solutions in their own data center and some solutions in the public cloud,” Kenny explained. “But there's a barrier that stopping people from doing that, and we believe Cloud Block Store breaks down that barrier and allows people to leverage public cloud innovations.”

Pure Storage, along with its competitors, aims to bridge the gap between public and private cloud storage with its hybrid cloud capabilities. It’s what NetApp has been pitching for a couple years now as it works to transition from a traditional storage vendor to a cloud data services company.

And just last week, Dell EMC rolled out updates to its PowerMax storage platform that also features SCM and dual port Intel Optane drives in support of non-volatile memory express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).

“If you were to buy a PowerMax on-prem, and you decided to deploy some cloud-based solutions, most of their solutions are cloud adjacent solutions meaning that they're deployed in a data center and direct connect to Amazon cloud or Azure; you would effectively have to buy new licensing for that additional capacity,” Kenny said. “And our solution, you could leverage the same subscription that you bought on prem.” 

Pure Storage also extended its partnership with Nvidia to make it easier for enterprise customers to design and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. The new AI Data Hub is built on Pure Storage's file and object storage system and uses Nvidida's AI-ready infrastructure.