The Intelligent Control Plane Evolves: Unlocking the Power of AI-driven Infrastructure

AI isn’t just speeding things up. It’s exposing what traditional infrastructure can’t do. Storage built for stand-alone systems—each managed individually—now has to support global, always-on operations at massive scale. And it’s coming apart at the seams.

This isn’t a storage problem. It’s a management problem. Thousands of business-critical applications are still tied to dedicated stacks of storage: disconnected, rigid, and multiplying fast. The result? Hundreds of silos stretched across on-prem, hybrid, and public clouds. IT slows down, compliance risks pile up, and teams waste weeks on manual, error-prone work just to keep things running.

Here’s the good news: The days managing storage boxes, systems, and endless tickets are over. It’s time to manage data with simplicity as the guiding principle.

Building on what we introduced this past June in Las Vegas, we’re enhancing the industry’s first intelligent control plane—powered by Pure Fusion™—to deliver even more value for your Enterprise Data Cloud:

  • Actionable insights across your fleet that drive autonomous outcomes
  • Broader interoperability to enable true end-to-end workflows
  • Seamless fleet-wide data management that simplifies operations

AI Expanded across the Ecosystem: The Next Leap

At Pure//Accelerate® in June, we also announced the general availability of Pure1® AI Copilot, a powerful way to get more done with less effort and deeper insight. Now we’re taking it further with integration to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, the systems already running your business. This expands AI Copilot’s reach across your ecosystem, turning scattered infrastructure into connected intelligence.

Where once systems operated in silos with fragmented data and limited visibility—requiring endless meetings and manual planning—AI Copilot with MCP brings a unified view that can see, understand, and act across your entire ecosystem.

But AI is only as powerful as the data behind it. Without clear visibility into your environment, its potential stays locked away. 

Data intelligence is a new capability that inspects workloads by application and deployment type, classifies them into actionable tiers, and enables your system to act across the fleet with precision—no manual tagging, no guesswork, and all at scale. Even routine tasks like enforcing naming conventions become effortless. What was once a black box of capacity becomes a data-rich engine for AI policy-driven enforcement.

This isn’t AI tacked on at the edges; it’s wired into the intelligent control plane. AI Copilot, together with MCP server integration, connects your environment with our context-aware data intelligence, letting you trigger workflows in natural language. Migrate VMs to OpenShift or rebalance workloads with a single command. AI Copilot will orchestrate the process end to end—safely and securely—guiding you step by step.

Redefining Enterprise Fleet Data Management 

Essential to realizing the Enterprise Data Cloud architecture, Pure Fusion brings all of your storage into a distributed, virtualized mesh of storage systems that work as one interconnected fleet. Provisioning shifts from individual tickets to fleet-wide policies, ensuring consistency and compliance by design. Pure Fusion delivers performance, workload balancing, and optimization—all handled centrally, across your entire estate. 

To make this real, we introduced workflow orchestration earlier this year, along with the enhancements to Pure Fusion. And now, we’re adding some exciting new features to help you automate, manage, and scale your Enterprise Data Cloud.

Why waste days on manual, repetitive tasks when AI can follow the policies you set? With workflow automation templates and recipes, coupled with AI Copilot, you use pre-created configurations to simplify and accelerate end-to-end orchestrations. Templated recipes for database provisioning or VM migrations (for example, moving from VMware to OpenShift with Portworx®) can cut migration times from days to minutes.

As AI workloads move to containers, we’ve also integrated Portworx with Pure Fusion. Instead of wrangling clusters and manually tuning storage, this integration makes your entire container environment self-optimizing—freeing developers to focus on building, not just managing. Connect your Kubernetes clusters to Pure Fusion to automatically discover and sync your entire fleet—then use the Pure Fusion placement engine to optimally deploy container volumes. By extending Pure Fusion to Portworx, we’re simplifying deployments at scale to accelerate developer productivity.

Last but definitely not least, Pure1 AI Copilot now integrates with Portworx, enabling developers and engineers to use natural language prompts to get cluster-aware insights. The old way meant digging through dashboards, parsing logs, and scripting—all to find basic answers. Not anymore. Ask AI Copilot about metadata, capacity, or documentation, and it returns instant, clear insights. No hunting, no hassle.

Pure Fusion isn’t just some ordinary management layer. It unleashes the power of automation to effortlessly manage your global fleet. Every array, every service, every protocol, managed and automated as one. Control any system from a single UI. Automate provisioning and workloads to improve data protection, keep QoS consistent, and cut human error.

And unlike legacy solutions that bolt on post-deployment, Pure Fusion is built directly into our common operating environment, Purity. 

And here’s the best part: Pure Fusion is included in the 6.8.1 release of Purity for FlashArray™ and the 4.5.6 release of Purity for FlashBlade®. No extra licenses. No hidden tiers. Pure Fusion supports your entire Pure Storage data plane—FlashArray, FlashBlade, and Pure Storage Cloud. And you can get started in minutes.

The Bottom Line: It’s about the Data

The intelligent control plane isn’t a vision for tomorrow—it’s here today. It shifts the focus from managing storage to managing data. And with these announcements, deploying an Enterprise Data Cloud is now faster, easier, and immediately impactful. While others continue to rely on legacy vendors, stitching together fragmented systems, you can leap straight into a unified, intelligent model built for rapid innovation. 

That’s why the future of enterprise storage belongs to the Enterprise Data Cloud. Why not get started today?