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Articles by Brian Ferrar
What Is Backup Storage?
This guide explains how enterprise backup storage supports data protection, retention, ransomware resilience, and recovery testing. Backup storage is the infrastructure used to protect and retain copies of data so organizations can recover quickly from system failures, corruption, ransomware attacks, and other disruptions. Effective backup storage does more than preserve data.
AI Models Get the Glory. Your Data Decides the Outcome
As AI moves from pilot to production, enterprises need trusted, reusable data context and clear governance to help manage compute costs and support reliable AI at scale. A while back, I argued that most enterprises don’t have a compute problem; they have a context topology problem. I still think that’s right. What I’ve changed my mind about is when it matters. I used to treat it as an architecture question: important, but something you could work on in parallel with everything else.
Everpure Intelligent Control Plane: Connecting Storage Intelligence to Cyber Resilience
Veeam, Rubrik, and Commvault have each integrated with the Everpure Intelligent Control Plane to connect storage intelligence with cyber resilience workflows, helping customers detect anomalies, gain fleet-wide context, and accelerate recovery with the data protection tools they already use. Vendors don’t integrate with someone else’s platform out of the goodness of their hearts.
From Anomaly to Action: Connecting Storage Intelligence to Cyber Recovery
Everpure and Commvault connect storage intelligence with workload-aware threat detection and cyber recovery workflows, helping organizations investigate anomalies faster, prioritize risk, and recover with greater confidence. Cyber resilience depends on speed, confidence, and context.
Why Your Data Architecture Is Your Best Security Strategy
The Enterprise Data Cloud transforms fragmented infrastructure into a unified, intelligent, and highly recoverable data platform that strengthens cyber resilience across an organization’s entire data estate. The definition of a “secure environment” has fundamentally changed. Cyber resilience is no longer an isolated security project; it’s intrinsically tied to how you architect your data infrastructure.
Why Infrastructure Complexity Is Becoming a Governance Risk in the AI Era
As data spreads across on-prem, cloud, SaaS, and edge environments, governance gets harder, risk gets harder to see, and resilience gets harder to trust. The organizations making progress are the ones treating security and governance as architectural disciplines rooted in the data layer itself. Simpler ops. Guaranteed delivery. Cost predictability. Delivered as a service. Enterprise infrastructure leaders are confronting a level of operational complexity that barely existed a few quarters ago.
Introducing the Everpure Pure1 + Veeam Anomaly Awareness Workflow
Now GA, the Pure1 + Veeam Anomaly Awareness Workflow is a new integration that unifies Everpure Pure1 and Veeam Backup & Replication. The solution enables backup and security teams to quickly identify clean restore points and fold Pure1‑driven alerts into existing incident-response flows, accelerating recovery after cyber events.
Evergreen Archives
The Evergreen® portfolio from Pure Storage redefines storage ownership with flexible, subscription-based services that eliminate traditional upgrade cycles and reduce IT complexity. With solutions like Evergreen//Forever™ for non-disruptive upgrades, Evergreen//Flex™ for modular, scale-out storage, and Evergreen//One™ for Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS), organizations can scale seamlessly while optimizing costs.
Why ‘Never Mix Production and Backup’ Is an Outdated Rule (and What Replaces It)
Modern enterprises can no longer rely on the old “never mix production and backup” rule. Instead, they need intelligent recovery tiering that combines fast local recovery with independent backup and off-site tiers. For decades, enterprise infrastructure teams followed a near-sacred rule: Never mix production and backup data. Production workloads lived on high-performance primary storage. Backups lived somewhere else—often on separate hardware, separate networks, sometimes even separate buildings.
Operational Resilience: Lessons from the CME Outage
The recent CME outage shows financial institutions must build layered operational resilience with active-active failover, near‑zero RPO/RTO, immutable snapshots, and secure isolated recovery environments to reduce blast radius and keep markets running. When it comes to cyber event postmortems, the most important thing is taking what we can learn from them so that they become opportunities to improve resilience.
Guide to Preparing for the EU Cyber Resilience Act
The EU Cyber Resilience Act entered into force in 2024 and mandates stringent cybersecurity standards for all “products with digital elements” across their lifecycle. In an era of escalating cyber threats, business continuity now depends as much on resilience as on protection. The European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)—which entered into force in late 2024—marks one of the most significant steps yet toward enforcing that mindset.
FlashStack for AI Turns Data into Competitive Advantage
FlashStack for AI from Pure Storage, Cisco, and NVIDIA provides a scalable, risk-free foundation that delivers the performance, efficiency, and resiliency enterprises need for AI success. AI has become a competitive imperative. Organizations across industries are embedding AI into their core business operations—from copilots that accelerate decision-making to retrieval-augmented assistants that transform customer engagement.
Modern Recovery at Scale: The Power of Commvault HyperScale Flex and Pure Storage
Commvault HyperScale Flex with Pure Storage FlashBlade delivers a proven, enterprise-ready platform for cyber resilience. Enterprise IT is facing a new kind of pressure. Data volumes are exploding. Cyberattacks are growing more advanced. Recovery windows are shrinking. Legacy backup appliances weren’t designed for this world. That’s why Commvault and Pure Storage have teamed up to deliver a next-generation solution: Commvault HyperScale Flex with Pure Storage® FlashBlade®.
5 Ways Enterprise Data Cloud Improves Cyber Resilience
The Enterprise Data Cloud architecture from Pure Storage embeds cyber resilience into the foundation of data management, delivering automated protection, indelible snapshots, and cleanroom recovery across hybrid environments. As cyber incidents and disruptions rise in frequency and impact, forward-looking organizations are reevaluating how they safeguard critical data. Traditional defenses are no longer sufficient on their own – modern workloads require future proof solutions.
Your Cyber Resilience Wish List for 2025-and How to Achieve It
Mounting cybersecurity threats are putting IT teams under increased pressure. Taking a holistic approach to cyber resilience can help your organization be ready and keep running smoothly in the event of an attack. Cybersecurity challenges are bigger than ever, and IT professionals are under pressure to ensure their organizations can handle and recover from an increasing number of threats.
6 Customer-proven Best Practices for Cyber-resilient Backup and Recovery
From the 3-2-1-1-0 framework to indelible data to faster threat detection, cyber resilience best practices can help organizations safeguard their operations and recover quickly and confidently when the worst happens. Cyber threats have evolved. What started as opportunistic ransomware has escalated into destructive wiperware and nation-state attacks. Traditional backup strategies—periodic snapshots, offsite tapes, or manual workflows—no longer offer sufficient protection.
Turning Setbacks into Strengths: How Spring Branch ISD Built Resilience with Pure Storage and Veeam
Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston experienced an unplanned outage. Preparation and planning were key to their recovery, as well as the integrated Pure Storage and Veeam solutions, which enabled them to restore large amounts of data quickly and efficiently. There’s nothing fun about dealing with an unplanned outage. But if you’re looking for a silver lining and you happen to be an independent school district, then a Friday during the summer break is the best-case scenario.
Cisco Live
The new release of Cisco UCS X-Series, managed with Cisco Intersight, provides tighter integration between Pure and Cisco technologies. And that makes FlashStack even more powerful.
How to Think Like a Service Provider and the Rule of 30-30-30
Service providers, specialized cloud service providers, and managed service providers have to operate efficiently if they want to stay in business. The Rule of 30-30-30 helps them maximize efficiency and profitability. “Everybody talks about a hyperefficient data center, but nobody does anything about it.” While this quote is a revised version of one that is often incorrectly credited to Mark Twain, there is truth at its core.
5 Steps to Reduce Your Data Storage Headaches
Organizations face significant challenges when it comes to managing their IT environments, particularly in this age of AI. With the right strategies and solutions in place, they can tackle these issues and drive innovation and success. In today’s data-centric business landscape, leveraging analytics and insights is crucial for driving innovation and making informed decisions.
What You Missed on Digital Bytes
Digital Bytes is where we round up a treasure trove of tips and tricks, best practices, and shortcuts to getting more out of your storage infrastructure. Join Matt Bradford, Director of Technical Marketing at Pure Storage, to stay in the know and ahead of the curve.
Why Should Executives Care about Data Storage?
What keeps executive leaders up at night—or gets them up and at their desks in the early morning? How, where, and why to adopt AI is likely top of mind. They can’t afford not to care about artificial intelligence. In our new “The Innovation Race” survey, 80% of CIOs and other IT leaders said they’re worried that their business will be left behind if their infrastructure can’t support AI fast enough. Shoring up infrastructure for AI applications is a big (and growing) concern.
Pure//Launch Blog July Edition
Summary We’ve been hard at work making enhancements to the Pure Storage platform to simplify deployments with self-service updates, enhance security and performance, improve cyber resiliency, and much more. We’ve been hard at work making enhancements to the Pure Storage platform to simplify deployments with self-service updates, enhance security and performance, improve cyber resiliency, and much more. At Pure Storage, innovation is in our DNA.
DXC Technology: Turning Ideas into Real Business Impact
Summary When this leading technology services provider needed a robust disaster recovery (DR) solution for its Managed Container Services customers, DXC Technology chose Portworx by Pure Storage. When this leading technology services provider needed a robust disaster recovery (DR) solution for its Managed Container Services platform, DXC Technology chose Portworx by Pure Storage. With IT evolving quickly, organizations need innovative solutions to ensure business continuity and data integrity.
The Cost Conundrum: How Enterprises Do More with Less on Pure Storage
Summary Data growth and costs are top data storage pain points for companies. With Pure Storage, enterprises can reduce complexity, only pay for what they need, and operate more efficiently. Data growth and costs are top data storage pain points for companies. With Pure Storage, enterprises can reduce complexity, only pay for what they need, and operate more efficiently. “Doing more with less” has been a longstanding tech mantra. Problem is, not many companies have figured out how to do this.
New Enhancements to VMware Integration for High Availability and Data Protection
Summary Two new capabilities developed in partnership with VMware provide high availability and robust data protection: XCOPY for NVMe-oF and Virtual Volumes with vSphere metro clustering. Today, we are happy to announce new capabilities in collaboration with VMware (acquired by Broadcom) that provide high availability and robust data protection—natively integrated into VMware vSphere. IT infrastructure teams need the highest levels of availability to support mission-critical workloads.
Getting Up and Running with Oracle 19c on NFSv3
Summary NFS is a widely used protocol that makes it easier for administrators to centrally manage, share, and back up data. This article shows the steps for running an Oracle 19c database on Oracle Linux 8 using NFSv3 from a FlashArray system. As a long-time supporter of running Oracle on NFS (Network File System), I’ve deployed many Oracle E-Business Suite single instance and RAC databases on NFS over the years. However, for many Oracle DBAs, NFS is still something of an unknown entity.
Tackle AI and Cyber Resiliency with Industry-first Innovations
Summary With today’s rapid pace of technological advancement, it's time to fundamentally rethink infrastructure. With advanced automation, intelligence, reliability, SLAs, and security features, the Pure Storage platform is setting new industry standards and helping organizations on their transformation journey.
Pure at Cisco Live: Meet FlashStack and IT’s Newest Superhero
As organizations work to implement complex AI projects, IT administrators are proving to be the critical path that keeps complex IT infrastructures running at maximum efficiency—without being a bottleneck, and in the face of unpredictable workloads and demands. Their value is not to be underestimated. That’s why we’re recognizing them with our own data center superhero:.
Achieving Cyber Resiliency with Pure Storage SafeMode
Summary Businesses must bolster their cyber resiliency in the face of increasing cyber threats. SafeMode offers robust protection through immutable snapshots that cannot be deleted without a multi-step verification process. These snapshots also enable organizations to quickly restore data. In today’s digital ecosystem, data isn’t just valuable: It’s the backbone of business innovation and growth. However, as the digital landscape evolves, so do the threats against this critical asset.
Why It’s More Important Now Than Ever to Rightsize Your vSphere Deployment
Summary After Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware, changes have been announced on how VMware licensing will be consumed. As a result, rightsizing vSphere deployments has become even more important. One constant that spans the entire timeline of my career has been the concept of “rightsizing” virtual machine (VM) workloads, and even deployments.
Reduce Ransomware Risk in Educational Institutions
Summary Safeguard your educational institution’s data and rebound swiftly from a ransomware attack with secure backups and a fast recovery platform. Ransomware attacks are top of mind for IT leaders at educational institutions—and for good reason. There’s been an alarming increase in ransomware attacks targeting universities, colleges, and schools.
Solutions Content | Pure Storage Blog
Solutions 6 min / Read Post Solutions 6 min / Read Post
Inside the Pure Storage-NVIDIA Collaboration: OVX Validation for AI-ready Infrastructures
Summary Pure Storage has achieved storage partner validation for NVIDIA OVX servers. The addition of OVX reference architectures to AIRI and FlashStack helps make Pure Storage the go-to provider for enterprise AI-ready infrastructure solutions. At NVIDIA GTC 2024, Pure Storage announced its close collaboration with NVIDIA to achieve storage partner validation for NVIDIA OVX servers powered by NVIDIA L40S GPUs and FlashBlade//S™.
How to Combat Ransomware: Q&A with a Healthcare CISO
A number of years ago, Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, a large, multispecialty clinic system serving the Houston area, was hit with and recovered quickly from a ransomware attack. This prompted the organization to reassess its security and resiliency strategy in collaboration with Pure Storage.
Ten Years On, Has Excitement Dimmed about the Cloud’s Transformation Power?
Summary Ten years on, unexpectedly large cloud bills and the massive looming data needs of AI-assisted applications are causing organizations to re-examine the cloud. A cloud operating model can transform IT by allowing organizations to connect to services and storage in remote data centers either managed by themselves, third parties, or a mix of both. The cloud hasn’t been bright-and-shiny new for about a decade—in fact, you might say it’s reached midlife.
Four Hot Areas for AI in Financial Services
Summary AI is making waves in almost all aspects of modern life; financial services is no exception. Learn how AI is revolutionizing customer experience and retention, credit approval, fraud detection, and more. There has been a great deal of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) for financial services recently—and for good reason. Abundant compute and storage resources, flexible development protocols and tools, and varied and abundant data promise to usher in a golden age of AI.
Pure Storage FlashBlade//S with Cohesity DataProtect: Your Secret Weapon against Ransomware
One of the most common ransomware attacks we see today is the destruction of backup data. The ability to recover quickly from this sort of destructive attack is a huge question mark for traditional backup systems or any purpose-built backup solution. Businesses cannot wait days or weeks to get their data back—they need to recover within hours from any sort of disaster to avoid incurring major downtime and the resulting loss of revenue.
FlashArray File Services Certified for SAP HANA
SAP creates and manipulates an organization’s most sensitive customer, financial, and operational data. Managing all of that data is integral to any successful SAP environment. It underpins the reliability, accuracy, and security of information, impacting everything from day-to-day operations to strategic decision-making. So it should come as no surprise that nearly a decade ago, SAP first chose to collaborate with the leader in high-performance all-flash data management, Pure Storage.
Pure Storage FlashStack for AI Checks Boxes for Rapid AI Deployment at Any Scale
By Brian Ferrar, marketing director, FlashStack and FlashStack as-a-Service, Pure Storage Pure Storage, Inc. and Cisco Systems, Inc. announced FlashStack for AI, a joint solution with Nvidia Corp. intended to simplify, automate, and scale AI infrastructure for rapid, foolproof deployment of AI solutions. FlashStack for AI is a software-defined, intelligently managed, full-stack infrastructure featuring automated real-time scalability.
How Modern Data Storage Delivers Safety with Video Surveillance
Video surveillance often plays the hero in a crime drama, serving up a crucial piece of critical evidence just in time to help law enforcement investigators and prosecutors bring bad actors to justice. However, the vital role of video surveillance in promoting public safety is far from fiction.
FlashStack Addresses 4 Critical C Suite Priorities |
Many of us will be traveling to Cisco Live in Las Vegas the first week of June, followed by Pure Storage’s own Pure//Accelerate®, also in Vegas, June 14-16. At both shows, we’ll be featuring solutions empowered by our new Cisco UCS X-Series-based FlashStack® from Pure Storage and Cisco Systems. An inherent architectural advantage of FlashStack’s software-defined, AI-based infrastructure is that users can support their entire portfolio from a single intelligent interface.
Enterprises choose Cisco HyperFlex for SAP Application Modernization (Part 2)
SAP customers have found Cisco HyperFlex responds faster to the demands of their production workloads and improves business services with agility, flexibility and simplicity. SAP data centers around the world are already using Cisco HyperFlex to modernize their infrastructure, unlocking the full potential of HCI for easier migrations, simplified management and improved performance. Most large enterprises depend on legacy ERP and SCM to run their core business operations.
Enterprises choose Cisco HyperFlex for SAP Application Modernization (Part1)
There’s a new sheriff in Tech Town: Cisco HyperFlex. IT teams across every industry and geography are transforming enterprise application deployments with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). HCI consolidates compute, networking and storage into a single system. And Cisco HyperFlex is the fastest growing example of this powerful new architecture.
Modernizing SAP Landscapes: A Complete Portfolio ensures Gain without Pain
Fall is upon us, which means once again it’s time for SAP TechEd in Las Vegas and Barcelona, twin cities which couldn’t be more similar. Legend has it that Hercules founded Barcelona when one of his ships wrecked on the site during his search for the Golden Fleece. Since then, it’s convenient location on a busy coastal route, and its ability to entertain and accommodate thousands of IT professionals has ensured its continued importance throughout the ages.
Cisco Demonstrates the Magic of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for SAP
SAP Sapphire in June in Orlando can be a magical experience…a hot, humid, magical experience. This year Cisco is showcasing a number of new SAP solutions. Our Sapphire magic starts with a big reveal: Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for SAP.
Cisco : & MapR set a Software Defined Storage World Record | 4-Traders
It sounds like a long time, but first we had to wait for a few milestones to precede us: That's some pretty impressive company. Why is this particular benchmark result so significant? Because data is the lifeblood of business. According to IDC, we've entered the Data Age: The world's data will double every two years for the next decade. How companies store, manage, access, and deliver hypercritical data will determine winners and losers.
Cisco & MapR set a Software Defined Storage World Record
It sounds like a long time, but first we had to wait for a few milestones to precede us: That’s some pretty impressive company. Why is this particular benchmark result so significant? Because data is the lifeblood of business. According to IDC, we’ve entered the Data Age: The world’s data will double every two years for the next decade. How companies store, manage, access, and deliver hypercritical data will determine winners and losers.
Cisco : Top 10 Considerations for SAP Big Data and Analytics | 4-Traders
It's that time again: SAP TechEd in Las Vegas! Local temperatures have cooled to a balmy 150 degrees outside the convention center and 10 degrees inside, reminding us that SAP Data Center refresh season is once again upon us. This year at TechEd, Cisco will focus on securing critical SAP data and systems, and leveraging HANA to improve business outcomes. One topic we'll present is Big Data and Analytics. #1.
Top 10 Considerations for SAP Big Data and Analytics
It’s that time again: SAP TechEd in Las Vegas! Local temperatures have cooled to a balmy 150 degrees outside the convention center and 10 degrees inside, reminding us that SAP Data Center refresh season is once again upon us. This year at TechEd, Cisco will focus on securing critical SAP data and systems, and leveraging HANA to improve business outcomes. One topic we’ll present is Big Data and Analytics. #1.
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