Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025: Key Announcements

Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025 is in full swing in Las Vegas. The now traditional yearly event is an opportunity for the company to air its major announcements, accomplishments, and give hints on their roadmap.

Overall Messaging

Pure Storage focused its messaging around the burden of legacy storage as a roadblock to implement a clear data strategy, and the need to build an Enterprise Data Cloud to resolve this problem.

According to Pure, organizations that want to execute on this vision should embark in a journey that begins with storage infrastructure transformation, continues with workload transformation, and ends with business outcome transformation. Each step of the journey improves operational agility and allows organizations to utilize technology more efficiently.

Enablers for Pure Storage Enterprise Data Cloud vision at Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025
Figure 1 – Enablers for Pure Storage Enterprise Data Cloud vision – Source: Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025

Pure Storage intends to help customers achieve its vision by delivering fleet management capabilities, providing full workload spectrum support (from a storage standpoint i.e., looking at capacity, scalability, performance, and cost), and finally by offering data copy management through policy-based governance.

A key tenet of the vision in this area is the orchestration of Pure Storage platform through Pure Fusion. The company proposes FlashBlade as the core data center technology, providing large scale multi-site, multi-tenant capabilities across file and object, although no mention of block workloads is made (not supported by FlashBlade). Perhaps Pure Storage assumes that in this Edge-to-Core vision, organizations do not need to run block workloads in core data centers.

At the edge, Pure sees FlashArray as a Unified Edge solution, now offering block, file, and object within a single platform, backed by a native S3 implementation, and the ability to replicate to core on the roadmap. It sees opportunities for edge consolidation of remote workloads for ROBO sites and smaller environments.

The company also mentions cloud interoperability as a future goal, a welcome note since this area has not been a particular focus area so far.

Hardware Announcements

Full workload spectrum is an area where Pure had been improving its capabilities in 2024, and kept delivering further in 2025 as well.

A summary of Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025 Hardware Announcements
Figure 2 – A summary of //Accelerate 2025 Hardware Announcements – Source: Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025

300 TB DFMs

Storage density is now doubling thanks to 300 TB DirectFlash Modules (DFM), compared to 150 TB models showcased last year, while maintaining power consumption unchanged. It can be expected that these QLC 3D NAND 300 TB modules, focused on high capacity workloads, will be generally available towards the end of 2025 and will allow non-disruptive upgrades.

FlashArray//XL

The FlashArray//XL is receiving an Evergreen evolution with its R5 controller release, still based on Intel CPUs. //XL systems see their capacity and density increase (up to 1.9 PB raw / 7.4 PB effective), leading to improvements across the board from a performance density, space efficiency, and power efficiency.

Improvements Over Previous Generation XL:

  • 70% performance increase for //XL170
  • 30% performance increase for //XL130
  • 2x more transactions-per-minute (TPM)
  • 23% more query throughput TPM for OLAP
  • 67% higher performance for EPIC environments

FlashArray//ST

The FlashArray//ST is a newcomer that focuses on ultra-high performance and consistent ultra low latency, with a focus on in-memory databases, achieving > 10M IOPS per system when using 4 KB blocks.

The FlashArray//ST bezel was showcased at Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025
Figure 3 – The FlashArray//ST bezel – Source: Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025

It is build on //XL hardware and Purity OS, but is entirely designed for performance, with a data path optimized for performance and the removal of any latency-inducing features such as compression, deduplication, etc. It however supports snapshots & replication for data protection, and writable clones for copy-data management.

FlashBlade//S R2

Two new FlashBlade systems are announced: the //S200 R2 (high performance, high bandwidth), and the //S500 R2, with superlative statements: highest performance, highest bandwidth, and metadata performance.

Those systems support up to 16x 400 GbE network uplinks for multi-chassis networking. Furthermore, they implement a modular disaggregated architecture to independently scale capacity and performance in multi-chassis deployments, with up to 50% higher performance, and the ability to use up to 300 TB per blade (compared to 150 TB / blade on //S100 series).

Those improvements are clearly directed at bleeding edge workloads such as AI and HPC. Pure claims performance of those new systems is not only better than previous generation, but is also 20-25% above its competitors for RAG, training & inference, and simulation workloads.

Software Announcements

In this Enterprise Data Cloud vision, the company sees the Intelligent Control Plane as the key enabler to proper storage utilization through policy-driven workflows. The capabilities include Pure Fusion, Pure AI copilot, Workflow Orchestration, Pure Protect, and other integrations.

Automation

The novelty in 2025 is the introduction of Fusion Presets and Intelligent Workflows, enabling agnostic, global storage provisioning across the FlashArray and FlashBlade platforms. Workload automation also supports file workloads / protocols across FlashArray and FlashBlade.

Pure1 also now integrates a Workflow Orchestration module that sports pre-built automation templates, with ready-to-use workflows for DRaaS, database provisioning, and secure copy automation. The solution includes pre-built integrations for FlashArray, FlashBlade, and Fusion.

Cyber Resiliency

The company has partnered with Rubrik and Crowstrike to improve its platform’s cyber resilience capabilities, with integrations into Rubrik’s data protection platform and Crowdstrike’s Logscale solution. The figure below provides more details on enhanced capabilities.

Cyber Resiliency Integrations with Rubrik and Crowstrike at Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025
Figure 4 – Cyber Resiliency Integrations – Source: Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025

Services Announcements & General Availability

Pure AI Copilot and Pure Protect DRaaS are now generally available. The company also announced multiple SLAs and services, including:

  • An updated Evergreen//One Adaptative Tier with reduced complexity and better scalability / performance / pricing
  • Evergreen//One for Medical Imaging
  • Evergreen//One Snapshot Packages (predictable policy-based pricing for snapshot usage)
  • Reduced minimum reserve on UDR File & Object subscriptions, enabling adoption of archival storage starting at lower capacities

The Osmium Perspective

Pure Storage //Accelerate 2025 is figuratively and literally all about density: dense and tightly packed announcements across multiple areas (compared to last year, see here and here), and effective hardware density improvements. The introduction of 300 TB QLC 3D NAND DFMs is no stranger to this, although it will probably take several more months (likely towards the end of Q4-2025) for those modules to become generally available.

The company has made the lines recently with the launch of FlashBlade//EXA (see our interview with Patrick Smith), and the launches focused around FlashBlade//S R2 high-end systems, FlashArray//ST, and FlashArray//XL clearly demonstrate a commitment to fiercely compete for ultra-high performance / high value deployments, a hallmark feature of Pure Storage.

The main downside of this event is the ongoing lack of proper cloud support, besides some “anomalies” such as Cloud Block Store and Pure Protect //DRaaS. The vision for Edge-Core-Cloud still shows the cloud as a future integration as of mid-2025. While this is a concern compared to the competition, Pure Storage has probably some internal development initiatives in progress scheduled for 2026 or beyond.

Overall, Osmium Data Group evaluates the announcements as broadly positive, with a company clearly focused on closing the remaining gaps across its portfolio, innovating on the hardware front, and not afraid to challenge itself (see //EXA).