Pure Storage today added a raft of platforms and services to its portfolio, including an ability to now manage fleets of storage clusters across a distributed computing environment rather than just enabling IT teams to manage a single array.

Announced at the Pure//Accelerate conference, the Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) is based on Pure Fusion with Automation, an update to a framework for unifying the management of file, block and object storage systems in a way that makes it possible to remotely configure them.

Additionally, storage administrators are provided with an ability to programmatically apply compliance polices and update storage systems after they are deployed, thereby eliminating the need to pre-plan and tune deployments. Pure Storage is also providing thousands of connectors to third-party applications that can be used to create playbooks for deploying and updating systems, including now integrations with Rubrik to thwart ransomware attacks by streamlining data recovery using immutable snapshots.

At the same time, Pure Storage is now providing support for VMware Recovery software and has partnered with CrowdStrike to provide an on-premises platform optimized for log analytics to streamline cybersecurity investigations.

Pure Storage has also added additional storage arrays, including a FlashArray//XLTM R5 that increases capacity by 50% over previous offerings while doubling the amount of IOPS per rack unit. A FlashArray//ST array provides more than 10 million IOPS per five rack units through an optimized IO path and now all FlashArrays also support object storage software. A FlashBlade//STM R2 controller has also been added to improve the performance of a scale-out platform for unifying file and object storage by as much as 30%

Finally, an AI Copilot for storage administrators that was introduced earlier this year is now generally available.

Patrick Smith, field CTO for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said that while these types of AI tools will make storage administrators more efficient it’s not likely they will replace the need for them any time soon, especially as the volume of various types of data that needs to be stored and managed using file, block and object systems continues to only exponentially increase.

In fact, the need to independently scale storage and compute is only going to become more pronounced in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), he added.

Ultimately, Pure Storage is working toward making it possible to manage storage as a true service as part of a larger effort to make it feasible to manage massive volumes of data at much higher levels of scale, noted Smith.

It’s not clear to what degree the rise of AI and other data-intensive workloads might one day soon require organizations to invest in IT infrastructure platforms designed specifically for those classes of workload, but the cost of making that transition is likely to be substantial. In the meantime, however, the need to manage that data at scale will require higher levels of automation to enable IT teams to manage what will soon become multiple petabytes of data strewn across the enterprise.