00:04
Fred, good to see you. How important is sustainability in data storage? Sustainability should be at the heart of everything, right? And storage is no exception. Sustainability is more important than ever.
00:16
How widely understood is that in your industry? Not very well. It's the submerged part of the iceberg. Organizations are very often going to look at more visible things that they don't necessarily realize
00:28
all of the carbon emissions that come from just running data centers. Fred, sustainability comes in many forms for many companies, it's just a box ticking exercise. Tell me a bit about the ethos behind the sustainability in Pure Storage®. Yes. So indeed, for a lot of our competitors, it's all about greenwashing.
00:46
But for us it's been at the heart of what we do. We've always designed systems to be as efficient as possible because we know that reducing the number of components that are manufactured and reducing the amount of power that our system use is the best way to be sustainable.
01:03
But also, we have designed our platforms to be what we call Evergreen®, meaning that unlike a lot of solutions that basically end up being replaced every three, four or five years, ours will stay current over time and you can just upgrade just what's needed over time and keep them much longer. And at the end of the day, generate less e-waste.
01:25
So the question is then how do you build a sustainable data center? So obviously you could start by going and building a data center in locations where you get green power and you do not need to cool your data centers such as Iceland, for example. But that's just not very realistic for most organizations.
01:44
So the way to build a data center for a lot of organizations, a sustainable one, is actually going to look at how do I reduce the power consumption of everything that gets into that data center and how do I measure how and when power is being used. And what is a green server?
02:02
How do we quantify a green server? Well, the greenest server is the server you don't need, the server that you don't use. One of the ways you can do that is by actually removing storage from those servers and put it in very efficient
02:16
storage systems such as Pure Storage arrays. What are you offering in terms of a more sustainable data center, in terms of the size, in terms of what it can do, in terms of how much it will cost to run? So we we basically design and offer our own data storage systems
02:32
that are all-flash, extremely efficient in terms of data center footprint, both from an energy point of view where we can basically reduce power consumption by up to 85% as well as data center physical space, where we can reduce the amount of space by up to 96%. And we basically enable a lot of organizations
02:54
to reduce the total power envelope by the data center, store their data on systems that are not only more efficient, but that are also faster. That's quite extraordinary. But also, that's quite a promise. That's right.
03:07
And very often when we have conversations with customers, we're first met with disbelief when we talk about those numbers. We actually do have a calculator on our website where customers can estimate how much energy savings they can get to and actually even get a view of the sort of cost savings of all that energy they’re not using.
03:27
So do you embrace a future? Do you have a vision of a future where all this IT, all this data storage is a more sustainable practice? Yes, indeed. So our goal is to literally remove every single spinning disk
03:42
from data centers and help everyone store data on all-flash systems that are ten times more efficient on a per-terabyte basis than spinning disks. Great to see you, Fred. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Andrew.