Customers leveraging Pure Storage platform for VMware migration

According to Nirav Sheth, Vice President, Worldwide Systems Engineering at Pure Storage, customers that remain with VMware are looking for options, which is where he believes Pure Storage is engaging with them to evaluate their strategy.

Pure Storage made several announcements at its Accelerate 2025 event in Singapore. This included the expansion of its Flash Array portfolio, the tech vendor is seeing a lot of excitement from customers in the financial industry.

In fact, the newest flagship of the FlashArray family, delivers more performance at DRAM class latency with 25% greater capacity, 50% decreased latency and 100% better performance increase.

With the cost of power expected to only increase due to the demand generated from AI, density and efficiency for customers become paramount. While performance is critical, the ability to dense solutions is also important.

According to Nirav Sheth, Vice President, Worldwide Systems Engineering at Pure Storage, Pure’s Flash Array family delivers up to 29 times more capacity per rack.

“With our direct flash models, we can have a 1 to 29 ratio. We have one customer that wants to work with us because they can take out 10 racks and replace them with 1 of ours. They can exponentially increase footprint with how they serve customers because milliseconds matter to them. We will also have capabilities expend to the edge so they can have ROI on these depending on the use case and workload. We can serve all customers big to large depending on what their use cases and capabilities are,” Sheth said.

VMware migration on the Intelligent Control Plane

But what’s most exciting is the new capabilities to the Enterprise Data Cloud delivered by the Pure Storage Platform. The Intelligent Control Plane (ICP), which is part of the Enterprise Data Cloud now solves data silos and fragmentation, operational complexity as well as provides alerts on threats and regulatory concerns.

According to Sheth, customers are looking to migrate workloads from VMware to KubeVirt, which is powered by the ICP. While Sheth acknowledged that Pure Storage continues to have a good partnership with VMware, customers on the other hand are evaluating alternatives due to the changes in pricing since the Broadcom acquisition.

“Customers are looking how they can take virtualized workloads and put them in containers like KubeVirt and marrying that with container-based workloads as well. An obstacle for customers when it comes to transforming VMware is the migration. How can they migrate with minimal disruption? And this is where the ICP can help customers execute the changes they want to execute and validate that these are healthy. Hence, we are announcing data intelligence which enables real time awareness of applications and workloads across the entire fleet,” explained Sheth.

Sheth also pointed out that customers that remain with VMware are looking for options. This is where he believes Pure Storage is engaging with customers to evaluate their strategy.

“We have a flexible platform that accommodates all strategies. For the most robust capabilities with VMware, we have VMware assessment capabilities that customers can use as well. For customers who want to migrate, we deliver them in a cost-effective experience. For those who want an alternative, we have deep integrations with all other providers. For example, we have our first ever partnership with Nutanix that’s enabling this. Some customers also just want all new aps to be containerized while there are customers that want to move from virtualized to containers as well,” Sheth said.

Ultimately, Sheth said that Pure Storage wants to provide customers with choice and the confidence that Pure Storage is the right platform for them.

“No matter what they chose, we give them a simple and easy experience, mostly advisory and help them figure out the right answer. A lot of time the answer is an ‘and’ and not ‘or’”, he concluded.