Storage infrastructure was never supposed to be sexy. For decades, it lurked in the background of enterprise IT. Storage is essential, expensive, and largely overlooked by everyone except those responsible for keeping the lights on. But according to Matt Kimball, principal data center analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, a new day is dawning.
"Storage has really come into focus and has become the cool thing again," Kimball said in an interview with The Forecast at the 2025.NEXT conference. "I don't know if it was ever cool, but it is now."
Kimball has covered innovation in servers and storage technologies for decades. He sees AI instigating a fundamental shift in how enterprises think about data infrastructure, especially when it comes to using a variety of types of storage technologies available today. He talked to The Forecast about the innovation swirling around storage, pointing to the recent partnership between Nutanix and Pure Storage, which resulted in a new solution that integrates Pure Storage FlashArray with Nutanix Cloud Platform software released in early December 2025.
Editor’s note: Read Nutanix marries cloud-native infra with Pure Storage and agentic AI by Blocks and Files and the Forbes article, Nutanix And Pure Storage Team Up To Answer VMware Uncertainty by analyst Steve McDowell.
Storage is a Strategic Asset
He explained that the transformation of storage from commodity infrastructure to strategic differentiator didn't happen overnight.
"Storage has become so critical over the course of the last couple of years as data analytics and AI started to become more and more part of the conversation within IT," Kimball explained.
"We've started to realize the importance of data and, of course, data is driven by your storage backend."
He sees the metric that matters has moved from capacity or cost per gigabyte to speed. Specifically, how fast organizations can ingest data and feed it into processing engines for AI model training and tuning.
"How fast can I take that data from a platform and feed my processing engines, which is typically a GPU or some accelerator, to get that model trained or to tune that model and then to provide value on the other side of the equation?" he asked. In an AI-driven world, storage bottlenecks directly impact business outcomes.
The Cloud-Native Imperative
While AI grabs headlines, Kimball emphasized that storage infrastructure is equally critical for another enterprise priority: going cloud-native.
"The ability for an organization to leverage a pool of resources very easily from a software-defined perspective is absolutely critical," he noted. "And that is all sitting typically on a storage backend."
He said the dual mandate of supporting both AI workloads and cloud-native architectures is pushing storage vendors to rethink their approaches because traditional solutions that worked well in simpler times are buckling under new demands for performance, scalability, and flexibility.
Co-Engineering as Competitive Advantage
Kimball pointed to the recently announced partnership between Nutanix and Pure Storage as an example of how the industry is responding to these challenges. But what caught his attention wasn't just that two major players were joining forces—it was how they went about it.
"When you look at what Pure and Nutanix announced, it's not just, hey, we're going to take the Nutanix hypervisor AHV and we're going to connect it to storage arrays, flash arrays from Pure and we're going to call it a solution," Kimball said. "It was a year's worth of co-engineering to drive optimization."
The partnership combines Pure's FlashArray storage system with Nutanix's AHV virtualization platform, but after diving into the details, Kimball noticed that critical decisions were made, like using NVMe over TCP instead of fiber.
"It gives me better performance, because it doesn't tie me into some standard that's not open," Kimball explained. "Because it's better for my customers and because this is where the cloud is going."
This attention to technical choices matters, he explained. NVMe interfaces alongside AI-driven management deliver the speed modern workloads demand. Meanwhile, hybrid cloud and object storage provide the scalability and cost-effectiveness that AI applications require. Even traditional technologies like hard drives and tape storage remain relevant for archiving cold data that may need to be ingested again by AI pipelines.
Solving the HCI Paradox
The Nutanix-Pure partnership also addresses a fundamental limitation in hyperconverged infrastructure, a technology that Nutanix pioneered and popularized. While HCI simplified deployment and management, it came with a constraint that became increasingly problematic as workloads evolved.
"When it comes to HCI, you have to scale everything kind of linearly, right?" Kimball observed. "You need more storage, well, you have to add more compute, more network. And so over time, that can add complexity in and add cost in."
For certain workloads, including large database environments and data warehouses, this inflexibility was a dealbreaker, according to Kimball.
"If I'm deploying a really large database environment, data warehouse, I'm going to want to add a bunch of storage, but I don't need all that compute, right?"
The Pure-Nutanix solution addresses this by allowing independent scaling of compute and storage, while maintaining the simplicity and integration that made HCI attractive in the first place.
"It addresses that scale issue that maybe you were limited by somewhat in what was the old days of HCI," Kimball said.
Integration Versus Combination
Kimball distinguishes genuine innovation from marketing hype by assessing the depth of technology integration beyond certified interoperability, which often means technologies work with one another but don't deliver much synergistic value.
Kimball said the Pure-Nutanix partnership clears that higher bar.
"It's Pure taking FlashArray and exposing it or exploiting it up through (Nutanix) Prism, so I can see that environment and manage that environment from a single interface," he explained. "It's things like this that drive that deeper partnership that deliver real value."
This matters in the real world of enterprise IT, where complexity is the enemy. Kimball noted that typical enterprise organizations juggle four or five different primary storage vendors. He’s seen some manage as many as 13. He said each additional platform adds management overhead, integration challenges, and operational risk.
"This is that tight coupling that delivers a solution," he said. "It's removing risk. It's removing complexity. It's removing cost. All those things that I, as an IT leader, really care about."
The Path to Data Center Modernization
For Kimball, storage innovation isn't happening in isolation. Instead, it's a critical component of broader data center modernization efforts.
"It is the first step in going toward that agentic AI outcome," he argued.
The progression makes sense: before organizations can deploy sophisticated AI applications, they need infrastructure that can support them. That means storage systems capable of handling massive datasets, delivering data at GPU speed, and doing so in a way that doesn't require PhD-level expertise to operate.
"When you look at these efforts going on, this work that gets done between a Pure and a Nutanix, it's not just we co-engineered,” Kimball emphasized. "It's delivering to an outcome for IT."
Technology Meets Pragmatism
Kimball's enthusiasm for storage innovation is grounded in pragmatism. He sees Pure Storage and Nutanix as "innovators and the scrappy underdogs in the space that have done very well for themselves." Both have cultivated enthusiastic customer bases by consistently delivering on promises.
"With Pure, you have two companies that are, you know, in their own right, the innovators," he said. "There's a lot of enthusiasm among their customer bases. So I think you're going to see a lot of enthusiasm in the respective customer bases for this joint solution."
That customer enthusiasm, Kimball suggested, stems from vendors that understand IT leaders' actual priorities: reducing risk, eliminating complexity, and controlling costs while enabling new capabilities.
Looking Forward
As AI continues to reshape enterprise technology priorities, Kimball expects storage to remain in the spotlight. The challenges aren't going away. If anything, they're intensifying as data volumes explode and workload performance demands increase.
But he sees the industry is responding. Technologies like NVMe are maturing, with capabilities such as flexible data placement (FDP) providing host servers with enhanced control over where data resides within SSDs, thereby optimizing performance. Hybrid approaches that combine flash storage for hot data with more economical options for archival needs are becoming standard practice.
The key, Kimball suggested, is maintaining focus on outcomes rather than getting lost in technical specifications. Storage infrastructure that once seemed mundane has become a strategic enabler and the foundation on which AI ambitions and cloud-native transformations are built.
"Storage has really come into focus," Kimball said.
Video Transcript:
Jason Lopez: AI dominates the tech news headlines, often overshadowing profound shifts happening in data centers.
Matt Kimball: Storage has really come into focus and has become the cool thing again, I don’t know if it was ever cool but it is now.
Jason Lopez: The tech industry continues to innovate to keep up with the explosion of data. One of the latest developments is a partnership between Nutanix and Pure Storage which combines virtualization with flash array technologies.
Matt Kimball: It's removing risk. It's removing complexity. It's removing cost. All those things that I, as an IT leader, really care about.
Jason Lopez: The background of this story begins with the rise of hyperconverged infrastructure. Matt Kimball of Moor Insights and Strategy, in an interview at the 2025 .NEXT conference, talked about the early days of HCI.
Matt Kimball: Nutanix found a huge kind of opening in the market with HCI, and it went after, there was a segment of enterprise IT that really thrived in HCI. There were some limitations when it comes to HCI. When it comes to HCI, you have to scale everything kind of linearly, right? You need more storage, well, you have to add more compute, more network. And so over time, that can add complexity in and add cost in, but it's still a very kind of simple deployment model.
And if you went up the stack from a performance perspective, from a kind of mission criticality perspective, resiliency perspective, that ability to scale both elements, compute and storage independently, mattered a lot. If I'm deploying a really large database environment, data warehouse, I'm going to want to add a bunch of storage, but I don't need all that compute, right?
At .NEXT 2025 Nutanix Announced a Partnership with Pure Storage
With Pure, you have two companies that are, you know, in their own right, the innovators and kind of the scrappy underdogs in the space that have done very well for themselves. And there's a lot of enthusiasm among their customer bases. So I think you're going to see a lot of enthusiasm in the respective customer bases for this joint solution. And it addresses that scale issue that maybe you were limited by somewhat in what was the old days of HCI.
Commitment to Innovation and Value
Matt Kimball: When you look at what Pure and Nutanix announced, it's not just, hey, we're going to take the Nutanix hypervisor AHV and we're going to connect it to storage arrays, flash arrays from Pure and we're going to call it a solution. It was a year's worth of co-engineering to drive optimization. It was decisions like, hey, I'm going to use NVMe over TCP instead of fiber because it gives me better performance, because it doesn't tie me into some standard that's not open, right? Because it's better for my customers and because this is where the cloud is going. So it's decisions like that. It's the ability, it's Pure and taking flash array and exposing it or exploiting it up through Prism. So I can see that environment and manage that environment from a single interface. It's things like this that drive that deeper partnership that deliver real value. And that's why you get that enthusiastic response from customers.
Modern Enterprise Infrastructure
Matt Kimball: When you look at a typical enterprise organization, there are about four or five different primary storage vendors. Some have as many as 13, right? So you will see within an organization Pure and Nutanix and sometimes Nutanix and Pure. This to me is that tight coupling that delivers a solution. So as you talk about data center modernization, which is a big deal, right? It is the first step in going toward kind of that agentic AI outcome. When you look at these efforts going on, this work that gets done between a Pure and a Nutanix, again, it's not just kind of like, and it's not just we co-engineered, it's delivering to an outcome. It's delivering to an outcome for IT, and it's removing risk. It's removing complexity. It's removing cost. All those things that I, as an IT leader, really care about.
Storage Is No Longer Just Infrastructure
Matt Kimball: Storage has become so critical over the course of the last couple of years as data analytics and as AI started to kind of become more and more part of the conversation within IT. We've started to realize the importance of data and of course data is driven by or is driven by your storage back end, right? So storage has really come into focus and has become the cool thing again, if you will, right? I don't know if it was ever cool, but it's cool now. It became the cool thing again for IT organizations and became a critical part of that AI equation. How fast can I take that data from a platform and feed my processing engines, which is typically a GPU or some accelerator to kind of get that model trained or to tune that model and then to provide kind of value on the other side of the equation. It's also critical for Cloud Native, right? The ability for an organization to leverage a pool of resources very easily kind of from a software-defined perspective is absolutely critical and that is all sitting typically on a storage back end.
Jason Lopez is executive producer of Tech Barometer, the podcast outlet for The Forecast. He’s the founder of Connected Social Media. Previously, he was executive producer at PodTech and a reporter at NPR.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this video story. He is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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