Like a lot of working parents, when I'm walking my daughters to school or listening to them recount their days at the dinner table, one question is often on my mind: What should I be doing to prepare them for the world they'll enter as adults? When my daughters and their peers enter the workforce in 10 years, the global economy will be even more competitive, automated and technology-driven than it is today. Computing will be faster and cheaper. Artificial intelligence will be even more powerful, complemented by sensors everywhere in our environments--making it impossible to distinguish between "online" and "offline." Our greatest challenges, from climate change to economic inequality to privacy, will be even more acute.

Pure Storage has unveiled a new data-centric architecture in a bid to enable businesses to put machine learning at the heart of their operations. The US firm made a suite of announcements at its annual Pure/Accelerate summit in California this week, as part of plans to help customers' build storage solutions around their data and applications. "Our customers aggressively seek to use data to improve their customer experience and outdistance their competition," said Pure's CEO Charles Giancarlo. "[Our] data-centric architecture enhances and simplifies their ability to use data for intelligence and advantage." The company unveiled a new FlashArray//X product line equipped with NVMe to make databases, virtualised environments and test/dev initiatives faster.