What Is an Intelligent Control Plane? How Pure1 and Everpure Fusion Work Together

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Everpure Fusion™: sharing demos, hosting workshops, and beta testing some really exciting new features. But Everpure Fusion is only one half of the intelligent control plane at the heart of the story. Pure1® is the other half—except they aren’t really separate stories. 

Once you understand how they fit together, a lot of things about how modern enterprise storage should work start to click.

The problem with ‘smart’ storage that can’t act

Most storage platforms today can observe. They’ll show you dashboards, throw off telemetry, maybe even surface a recommendation when you log in on a Tuesday morning. That’s useful. But observation without action is just a very expensive weather app. It tells you it’s going to rain. It doesn’t hand you an umbrella.

What’s been missing—for a long time—is the closed loop: a system that sees what’s happening, figures out the right response, and then does something about it without requiring a human to translate insight into a ticket, a ticket into a change window, and a change window into three teams coordinating on a call.

That closed loop is what Pure1 and Everpure Fusion deliver together. And together, they’re what we call the intelligent control plane.

Two halves of one system

Here’s one way to frame it:

Everpure Fusion is the hands. It’s the automation engine, embedded directly into Purity (no separate control plane to stand up, no new infrastructure to manage). Everpure Fusion federates your arrays—FlashArray™, FlashBlade®, Everpure Cloud, Evergreen//One™—into a single programmable fleet. It’s what lets you provision and configure resources across multiple arrays at once, enforce policies at scale, place workloads intelligently, and run remote operations without logging into individual arrays. Everpure Fusion doesn’t just see your fleet—it acts on it.

Pure1 is the brain. It’s the cloud-delivered AIOps and resource planning layer that aggregates telemetry across your entire environment performance, capacity, risk, health—and then does something sophisticated with it. Pure1 Meta, the Workload Planner, and AI Copilot: these aren’t just monitoring tools. They’re a reasoning layer that can evaluate your entire storage environment, model what’s coming, and recommend—or in some cases, directly trigger—the right actions with workflows.

The connection between these two control planes is deliberate and secure. Every Everpure Fusion-enabled array maintains an encrypted, outbound-only mTLS connection to Pure1. What flows across that connection is operational metadata inventory, configuration, health signals, performance and capacity telemetry, policy state—not customer data. Pure1 uses that telemetry to run its analytics and returns workload placement guidance and orchestration recommendations that Everpure Fusion can act on across the fleet.

That’s the loop. Intelligence flows in one direction; execution flows in the other. Neither one is complete without the other.

Why ‘better together’ isn’t just a buzzword

I know “better together” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot. Let me be specific about why it’s actually true here.

Without Pure1, Everpure Fusion is powerful but flying a bit blind at the holistic fleet level. You can provision and enforce policy across arrays, but you’re working from what you know, not from a continuously updated, AI-assisted view of where your workloads should actually land. You’re still making judgment calls that a machine should be making.

Without Everpure Fusion, Pure1 is a brilliant analyst who can’t touch the keyboard. It can tell you exactly which array has headroom, exactly which workloads are at risk, exactly where a protection policy should be applied—but none of that becomes action until a human translates it. That translation is where latency, errors, and inconsistency creep in.

Together, they eliminate the gap between knowing and doing. That’s the intelligent control plane. And it’s the operating model underneath what we call the Enterprise Data Cloud.

What this looks like in practice

Let me walk through a few real use cases and outcomes, because the abstraction only gets you so far.

Use case: AI workloads: Describe what you need, not where it lives

When a data science team needs a new AI training workspace—say, 20TB, gold protection, high throughput—they shouldn’t have to know which array has headroom or how to configure replication. With Everpure Fusion, you expose a preset for that service class. Pure1 tells Everpure Fusion where capacity and performance headroom actually exist across the fleet. Everpure Fusion recommends and places the workload there—at your discretion. As training runs grow and inference workloads scale, Everpure Fusion handles non-disruptive growth without anyone filing a ticket.

The outcome: Your storage becomes the AI activation layer—something teams request by intent, not by micromanaging infrastructure.

Use case: Cyber resilience: From reaction to orchestrated recovery

When a threat hits, the question isn’t just “where are our backups?” It’s “which recovery points are clean, and can we recover fast?” Everpure Fusion presets and workloads bake SafeMode™ snapshot policies and replication into every protected workload from day one—not as an afterthought. Pure1 provides real-time anomaly visibility and risk dashboards. In integrations like our Rubrik workflow, Pure1 queries Rubrik Security Cloud for threat signals and uses Everpure Fusion to automatically tag affected volumes and surface clean recovery points—without waiting for a human to connect the dots.

The outcome: Resilience becomes built in, not bolted on—and recovery happens at fleet scale, not array by array.

Use case: Virtualization: Policy-driven instead of ticket-driven

VMware and Kubernetes teams spend an uncomfortable amount of time filing storage tickets—datastore sizing, rebalancing, provisioning new PVCs. Everpure Fusion treats all virtualization storage as part of a unified fleet with policies tuned for VCF, vSphere, and Portworx®-backed Kubernetes. Pure1 adds end-to-end VM-to-array visibility and tells you where to place high-I/O virtual workloads before they saturate the wrong array.

The outcome: Storage for virtualization stops being a bottleneck and becomes a fabric—one that enforces SLOs automatically and rebalances without disrupting the VM.

Enterprise Data Cloud: One operating model for everything

This is the one I get most excited about, because it’s where all the individual use cases converge. The Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) isn’t a product. It’s an outcome—a virtualized cloud of data governed by an intelligent control plane, delivered as a service, with cyber resilience built in by design. Everpure Fusion provides the execution layer: fleets, zones, presets, workloads, and the ability to manage service classes instead of individual arrays. Pure1 provides the intelligence layer: AI-driven analytics, closed-loop automation, fleet-wide planning across edge, core, and cloud.

The outcome: Your infrastructure team stops being a caretaker—and starts being the team that built the platform everything else runs on.

Watch our video series and learn more about the Everpure platform.

The shift I keep coming back to

The intelligent control plane isn’t a feature you check off; it’s a different operating model. For many who have been in infrastructure for some time, it’s also a different way of thinking and planning. It’s the difference between infrastructure that requires human orchestration at every step and infrastructure that knows what it should do and does it.

Pure1 gives you the insight. Everpure Fusion gives you the action. 

Together, they give you a storage environment that’s always learning, always current, and always working on your behalf—whether you’re running AI pipelines, defending against ransomware, scaling VMs, or trying to build something that looks a little more like a cloud and a lot less like a room full of appliances you’re managing by hand.

That’s the intelligent control plane. That’s what EDC runs on. And that’s why I won’t stop talking about it.

Dig deeper into Everpure Fusion and the intelligent control plane

• File presents with Ever-pure Fusion
• Intelligent control plane automation: Control and compliance (Everpure Fusion, workload orchestration, and compliance)
• Pure Fusion MCP Server sneak peek

Manage your data, not your storage.

Discover the EDC