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27:46 Video

Don't be Forced to Fit the Cloud, Make the Cloud Fit Your Business!

This discussion goes deep into how Equinix and Pure have come together to create a revolutionary offering, Bare Metal as-a-Service, Powered by Pure.
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00:00
Mm hmm. Hello and welcome to the session. Don't be forced to fit the cloud, make the cloud fit your business. My name is Jack Hogan. I am the vice president of technology strategy for pure storage. I'm responsible for Pure Strategy for edge
00:23
cloud and service providers. I've been up here for a little under five years but prior to that, I was actually a customer side CTO for 20 years. Was actually a pure customer for five of those years. Um, and I have experienced what it's like to actually go on a cloud journey and ultimately know what it's like to deal with the underlying infrastructure and the challenges.
00:45
I am joined today by Zack smith, head of edge edge infrastructure at Equinox Zach. Why don't you give a little background on yourself? Hey, thanks Jack. It's great to be here. So, um, I've grown up in the Internet infrastructure space um, been building, running um, fundamental infrastructure at large
01:06
scale for about 20 years. And I came to Equinix via an acquisition of a previous company. I ran a company called Packet and here I've been building our automated infrastructure portfolio. So work within our digital services business unit. And our mission is to remove friction for our customers as they try and access the global
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reach value and ecosystems that we have a cross platform aquatics. So very excited to be working here with the pure team and thanks for having me. Yeah. And Zack, thanks so much for being here. Well, let's go ahead and cover off a little bit of the agenda. We're gonna talk about today first. we're gonna talk about infrastructure and
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software speed, right? That's a big tagline that Equinox has around what they're doing with the metal infrastructure. But we'll talk about the challenges that many companies face really all different types of companies and whether it be their cloud journey or their digital transformation or modernization strategies. We'll also explore how Pure and Equinox have
02:01
partnered to offer a whole new class of service to solve some of the big challenges in this space will also discuss a reimagined cloud journey and how this is solving major business problems and records being. Then we'll talk about the key advantages of what bear mentalist service is and what it can deliver and how Equinox and cure are uniquely positioned to help you succeed here will then
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jump into the outcomes, this is driving what are the business outcomes from being able to deliver technology in record time and what does it really solving? What does it mean from a Tco and business business capabilities. And then we'll talk about a great customer story of migrating your entire data center in an in a weekend zack. I think this is going to be the best part of
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the whole thing but we'll jump into it. So let's first off start with what it is infrastructure at software speed and what challenges is it addressing now. So first of all is being a former C. T. Oh I can tell you that in every decision you have to make, you have to recognize that you have passed problems, present problems and future problems that you've always got to be thinking about and
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those past problems are really around your legacy technology infrastructure, that tech debt, you're older applications, those things that require true bare metal access or high performance databases that don't translate well into cloud constructs, even virtualized environments, virtual machines that don't naturally transition into a public cloud construct.
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Of course, the present challenges that face most companies face are really around that high volume data data driven applications, leveraging things like data warehouses or streaming analytics. And of course expecting more and more companies are expected to create insight and value from that data leveraging things like AI and Ml And of course that data is only scaling and growing and of course the future state is
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really about driving cloud native infrastructure, leveraging the constructs of cloud, native services, full service oriented architectures, leveraging things like kubernetes and next generation cloud capabilities. So these are really challenges that every CTO has to be thinking about. And many companies think that we can just jump straight into a cloud construct.
04:21
But what they don't realize is that when they do this without the right plan and the right data platform, they're really gonna face a lot of challenges that can be avoided with new and emerging capabilities like we'll talk about here and these these these challenges really manifest themselves in in a few ways. The first is legacy applications either have to be re factored or are completely incapable of being moved in a lift and shift manner.
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And so it really becomes that legacy that last 10 15 20% of an I. T. Infrastructure that doesn't get to the cloud or if it gets there it wasn't designed for it. And so you really run into massive cloud cost overruns but these legacy technology challenges can bring and of course the final element of this is that your staff, the people that are used to running this infrastructure have to be
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retrained in completely new constructs I. T. Operations folks are really not devops operators and they need to be retooled or retrained or added staff augmentation and that becomes a real challenge as these are really hard resources to find the public clouds themselves are hiring a lot of these people and so you're competing with the likes of amazon or Azure in the resources and staff that you're you're trying to ultimately achieve a positive
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outcome. But of course with what pure is doing here is this ability to have bare metal as a service that's powered by pure we are able to deliver a high performance data platform that is delivered in the same way that public cloud delivers that speed and flexibility but without these risks so that as you come up with that next new idea instantaneously able to scale out what you can do and so we'll
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talk about now. What are the key advantages here? What is, what is bare metal actually solving? So let's first of all start with like when you have a challenge and I think about when I was, when I was having to make decisions, I had full stack management uh, responsibilities. So I had to think about everything from where the infrastructure sits to the physical aspect
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all the way through to how are consumers actually accessing the data that's within these, within these platforms. And so to deliver that that full outcome, you have to think about the entire stack and so bare metal as a service becomes a foundation of that, that ability to have this hosted hardware as a service where you have the same level of control that you do in your current on premises data center where you have physical dedicated
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hardware, single tendency things that you don't get out of the public cloud. That ability to actually fully control the root level access that security element, the ability to meet regulatory compliance because you have the ability to define the specific hardware where your applications are running on it. But it's the same hardware you're used to running in a public,
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in your on premises data center. And so that skills gap is no longer a challenge because you have that ability to send the same level of control. But you get that same level of cloud, eat cloudlike ease and speed the ability to instantaneously deploy infrastructure which makes them the up stack solutions that you put on top of that, whether it be containerized, whether it be virtualized or bare metal
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applications, you have that same control to be able to do that. So zack, let's talk about how economics and and and specifically the Equinox metal platform is delivering this and driving how you're uniquely positioned, help customers succeed in this. Thanks Jack, you've done a great job outlining the opportunities and challenges. I think a lot of our customers face as they go through just an incredibly complex time in the
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in the world um as well as in their own digital transformation being challenged with moving way faster across more locations in the world with, you know, um pretty, pretty robust challenge set of challenges around accessing infrastructure and being able to deploy those resources. So we here at Equinix, we're the world's largest operator of interconnected data centers.
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You may know us for our global reach. We're in 70 markets around the world with our um 240 IBX locations um and customers have come to us for over 20 years to be able to optimize their connectivity, ecosystems um and do so in highly secure and reliable data centers all across the world. But what's become clear is that as companies go through this digital transformation that need
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to move faster, you need to use their resources. Um either investing in managing their applications or creating outcomes for their internal users or customers. Um That there's been a lot of friction in deploying physical infrastructure across such a huge platform like Equity X um spanning everywhere from uh Sydney Australia to Sao Paulo brazil to Seattle. Um and so what we've been doing here at Equinix
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is creating a suite of digital infrastructure services, you can see there on the bottom we have our foundational capabilities, uh physical data centers and then we've interconnected that thanks Jack with our connectivity connectivity services like Equinox fabric where you can programmatically access interconnection to clouds, service providers and other partners as well as across regions so virtually deploy a backbone as it were if you need.
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Um But we've been doing this this digital infrastructure portfolio to remove friction from that process. So how can we give you that physical infrastructure advantage and global reach but make it easier, make it more programmatic and make it more as a service. And that's where I'm really excited about how we've partnered with Pure taking our physical
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infrastructure platform of Equinox metal and adding unique storage capabilities to be able to really complete that I. T. Transformation for our customers. Zach I think that's that's a really great you know obviously the partnership between Pure and and equinox here is delivering new outcomes enterprise scale. Obviously Equinox is the global leader in in both the ability to have the interconnections
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and connect to the clouds connect to private data centers but also run within the transport hubs of the of where all the information flows. So how is economics uh and and specifically with metal now, how are they filling that gap? That's in the data center between the do it yourselfers that our on prem and that co location potential.
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How is this different than that and then how is that bridging the gap to the public clown? Yeah, well Equifax battle is a very, very fundamental platform and we've gone out to build an automated co location service where we can give you a fundamental access to physical infrastructure, things that you're very comfortable with from your own data center experiences or your own application stack but do so with the flexibility and automation that
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you would enjoy from a public cloud experience. So we think Equinox metal fits right there in the middle between the customizable control you can get in co location and the flexibility and agility you can get in public cloud. So with Equinix Metal, which we think it's right there in between. You get most of the control and flexibility that you would get out of um co location but
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you get the advantages of program ability, supply chain benefits as a service options that you would get out of cloud. So many many customers are seeing this as a foundational capability that really accelerates them will remove friction from, from the both purchasing and the day to management of ongoing infrastructure. So zack, what I'm hearing you say is that really allows you to completely reimagine that
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cloud journey right with pure storage and equinox metal, you have that ability to be interconnected, running very mental but all that same cloud like capabilities. So let's let's talk about, you know, what are the business values that this is delivering? What are, what are you seeing and you know, I'm sure I can add some value because we're jointly
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driving a lot of customers to this platform. But what are the core principles that that this infrastructure capability is delivering to customers and and how are they experiencing that? Yeah, absolutely. Well I love your layout here because this looks a lot like what we as a Fortune 500 company you're dealing with their own transformation but also all of our 10,000 enterprise customers
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which is everybody has legacy applications that we need to maintain and find more efficient ways to deal with and optimize at the same time, we're being pushed by our businesses to go faster to deliver better outcomes to use, you know, advanced technologies while preparing for the future. So it's a challenge for our, I think our customers and ourselves to optimize against all these different outcomes.
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What's really nice about equinox meddle with the pure storage capability is that this is applicable and can start the journey for you at any part of your, you know, like I would say can enter you and support you in any part of this journey. And so when you look at legacy applications where maybe you're still running bare metal applications or a specific hypervisors are um like VM ware and you want to be able to
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leverage those existing human capital resources as well as applications. Well we can take a lot of the friction and I'm going to call it mock out of deploying the right thing in the right place at the right time and let you get on with moving and investing in those parts of your transformation at the same time especially given are interconnected and neutral business model where we have the highest density of cloud
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interconnection in the world and the highest density of carriers and um networks in the world. You can then use these data heavy applications where you can put your data in between all of the clouds and your different partners and start to leverage best of breed applications like machine learning and one of the clouds using data that sits um in an as a service storage platform at equinox powered by pure so
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this is just an incredible um, I think accelerant to our customers transformation and does so in a relatively cost effective manner. And that's what's exciting to see is that customers are able to invest in this and um, you know, move much faster with their transformation and outcomes while still seeing pretty pretty significant cost savings and benefits. Yeah. And speaking of the total cost of this and you
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know really where we've just recently come out with a total cost of ownership of what it comparing to a do it yourself, build your own data center to what you can get out of pure storage with Equinox Medal and a bare metal as a service. So you know, we we have done some great extensive research but of course some of the other benefits that you know we're seeing with customers is that ability to not have to
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retrain their staff, the same people that are in the data center today running in on premises data center. Well they'll understand all the constructs, they know what it's like to have physical control of the device and have to deal with all of the the benefits that that brings that the public clouds don't provide. And so you know, we're very excited to be working with you to be able to provide this
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this unique capability and and really fill that gap. Um so you know, let's also talk about now, what's the ecosystem like like you know, you mentioned earlier that you can now place your data at the center of the world here, right? You have the ability to interconnect the clouds, add applications on top of that um you know, what's that ecosystem like zack and how are you,
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how how is Ecuador's building that ecosystem, How is that, how should a customer think about the opportunities that the advantages here provide? Yeah, well it actually comes back to the founding of our company in 1998 or economics. Um the name actually stands for equality in the Internet exchange. We were founded as a mutual home for networks and the Internet to grow and have been
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prosecuting that business model ever since. So we actually see ourselves as a supporting part of ecosystems like financial services or automotive and manufacturing um or for example clouds. And so our experience is that most companies are using many clouds. We believe in a hybrid multi cloud architecture or customers are taking advantage whether because of acquisitions,
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you know, diverse strategies or even just different parts within their businesses. They're taking advantage of a varying amount of cloud services. Um And those just aren't public clouds like AWS as your in google but they're using cloud platforms like sacks um including salesforce or maybe box and they need to have a way to interconnect with all of these in a high performance, secure and low cost manner.
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And that's what our fabric platform allows. So by placing your mission critical data at Equinix, you're able to use it in a very very cost effective way against all these different cloud services as well as your on prem data centers for example connecting into um telecom like MpLS networks or ston that go back to your branch offices and on premise data center or related. So it really fits right.
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There is a middle to re re home and allow you to move to an ecosystem driven approach which we believe most companies are doing versus the expense of bringing all that ecosystem back to you, whether that's in one public cloud or in one private data center. Um so this really allows that kind of ecosystem access to flourish and become part of your advantage versus part of your verdict. Yeah. And I think Zach because we're seeing,
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you know, customer use cases here being able to extend their own premises environments into this for things like data data protection or rapid recovery in the event of security breaches or just regular regular backups or the ability to extend their on premises virtualized environments or further extend into public cloud or or pull cloud workloads back and make the data sit at the center. And so it's you know,
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clearly, you know, huge amounts of advantage. So we've talked about a lot of the business advantages, um you know, one of the big topics today and we see a lot of customers being challenged by the supply chain constraints and the the issues around being able to procure physical infrastructure. So how is how is economics solving this problem? And you know,
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what are they delivering in terms of dealing with some of the problems that you know, a single buyer may not, you know, you may not be in the position that Equifax maybe here. Yeah, it's great. I mean it is a massive topic I think for all companies right now is how to react and to um deal with the supply chain challenges of our world. It started two years ago where you couldn't get
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on planes and go to the right data center to rack and stack your own gear, moving the right things and now it's moved down into. Can I get the right parts? Can I get them all at the right time? Um can I make sure that I can service and support those things? Um and so what Equinox is doing is investing um you know,
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we're an infrastructure based business. Um we invest, you know, 5 to $10 billion a year from a capital standpoint across physical infrastructure and we're using that dump in our supply chain as well as our pure focus on physical infrastructure at the data center level. Um to make sure that we can have this um as smooth for our customers as possible.
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So the first and foremost thing that we're doing is aligning data center capacity, which in this market with, you know, um the movement towards green power and um sustainable data centers is huge topic for us and our customers where the greenest data center portfolio in the entire world with over I believe 95% of our energy Source through renewable means. Um and so managing the energy portfolio,
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managing space power and cooling in the right location. Equinix metal with pure storage is available in 25 markets all around the world. So it's where you need it to be. And we will continue to manage the physical capacity, power capacity, the cooling capacity and the rack level capacity. We go a step further. And I think this is really showcases that the
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kind of depth and power of our partnership is we're able to work very closely with pure storage, logistics and supply chain and ensure, not just that we can, you know, have the right things ready in terms of optics and cables and networking and switches and everything else necessary to turn on a pure storage platform. But we can work to optimize that supply chain. So skating ahead of demand with manufacturers
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and key technology partners like you to make sure that we can get the right thing at the right place at the right time and that's everything from pre planning logistics to dealing with importing and tax duties or new types of controls that are being put in place across our borders. So it's pretty powerful when you look at it, how we can compress what used to take our customers 6 to 12 months in the best of times
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when they decided they went from, I'm looking to put a, you know, private cloud deployment or d our deployment in X Y Z location Used to take 6-12 months from the time you decided you wanted to do that um to the time you were able to actually use it. And we can take that from months to days or even hours. And that's just, I'm not sure that we can even
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state um the impact that it's having on our customers and their businesses, especially in these times. Well, speaking about time, let's talk about the value of time. Right? I mean, I think if you really look at what this is solving, you know, if I look back in the applications and the business challenges that I
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had the time is money as they say. But in this case it's opportunity in many cases the ability to even execute on a new business proposition that the business brings to technology. It, you know, you look at the time to value curve here that we have represented. That shows that the longer it takes to get something deployed, the exponentially lower value it can bring to the business.
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So the ability to immediately react fast is super important. But if you take the individual components in the stack and you look at how much each one of them take in terms of determining the time, where are you going to place this, where in the world you need to get it deployed that the physical building, right. The equinox knows a little bit about that.
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Um you have the then the power in the space and the cooling elements, the interconnections, those networks circuitry because it's not just about putting a bunch of servers in a room, they've got to be connected to the world and then you've got to have the ability to have the storage components, the server components and then the automation of all of that and then you know the physical aspect and so if we look at what equinox and
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pure are doing together and the benefit of the partnership and what we're delivering to customers is solving this down stack automation. So this isn't just the ability to leverage some amazing tools like terraform and answerable to continue to allow programmatic deployment of of workloads now in a physical sense because this is bare metal infrastructure, you're not talking about the ability to radically improve the deployment time of every
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aspect including the procurement, all the things you talked about Zach that you guys solve for everybody and it really drives you much further up that time. The value curve to the same level really where I as our infrastructure as a service or really what the public clouds deliver but you don't have all the risks and the challenges of having single tendency and so if we look at this, it's really a concierge service,
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that ability to bring your data right into the middle of the, of the ecosystem and deploy that rapidly. So we've talked about, you know, really the benefits of this, we've talked about what it can provide but let's talk about like real world stories. We got a great story to talk about about what it takes to actually move an entire data center over a weekend.
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You want to cover what we've done here and and specifically in in the european market. Absolutely. Well, thanks Jack. I mean it's great to see how we're helping customers, you know, accelerate their business, remove costs, gain back that value of time or their people, but it really hit home for us um a couple months ago when,
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you know, the conflict in europe broke out and um Equinix has a large investment um in uh in uh in Poland, from an employee standpoint as well as many, many customers throughout Ukraine. Um and so we decided to offer services to any customer who was based in Ukraine or had workload there that needed to move out. And um it was just an incredible story. We had many people reach out dozens and dozens
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of customers and one of them where we needed to help move an entire data center uh including their full storage platform from their legacy storage platform and their workload out of Ukraine to neighboring Germany to Frankfurt. And we had to do so in a weekend that we're really concerned that this dataset which was, you know, pretty important um for for some critical businesses needed to leave keep.
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And um we were able to deploy physical infrastructure, the interconnection networking including high performance routes back to um their nearest location as well as the storage infrastructure to start that replication, we all know, I mean storage, it has some gravity to it. Right Jack. And so be able to deploy this up. I mean we're racing against the clock together
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and um it was really fascinating to see how, by deploying um the pure storage with Equinix metal platform, we're able to turn that up within a few days, um customer was able to start migrating their data um and complete so complete that entire dataset move, which was in the, you know, tens or hundreds of terabytes within a few days and actually shift their entire production workload from Ukraine into Germany um over over a
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weekend. And it was incredible to see, I don't think it would've been possible without this type of partnership. Yeah, exactly, I think that's one of the most important parts of the power of this story and it doesn't mean that every businesses is going to be in a war torn situation and have this level of urgency. But I can tell you when I was in my former role,
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it certainly felt like I was in a battle to react quickly and the ability for pure and Equinix to come together and really solve more than just real world problems. This was a company who should some rocket attack or something happen to the physical data center, they were in their entire business, not just their own business, but the businesses they supported could be completely wiped and and it could have caused,
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you know, substantially other challenges. So while most companies are not under that level of stress, the capabilities are there. And I think that's the most important part of this. And you know, we really want to thank you Zach for you know, sharing that, sharing what the partnership is like. Uh you know, as we, you know, move to to wrap this up here,
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wanna provide more information for anyone that might be interested in learning more. Um we've got extensive amounts of solutions that we jointly developed here. Um you can go to www dot pier storage dot com slash bare metal to ultimately learn more, engage with Pure and economics. Note that economic sells this solution on under a single skew, which is one of the most important parts.
27:15
Right. Single partner to work with Pure provides our infrastructure as an embedded capability. You get all of the native native features that all of our array sets have really providing an incredible experience. So zack, I really do want to thank you for your participation in our session today and hopefully we've explained to the world how you don't have to be forced to fit the cloud,
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you can allow the cloud to fit your business. Thank you zack. I love it. Jack, thank you so much
  • Video
  • Pure//Accelerate

In this fireside chat, recorded at Pure//Accelerate® techfest22, Jack Hogan, VP of Technology Strategy at Pure Storage and Zac Smith, Global Head of Edge Infrastructure Services, Equinix discussed the following:

Many organizations have a legacy of building, managing, and hosting their IT environments on their own, which does not translate to effective delivery models. This can lead to massive cost overruns in cloud environments due to the fundamental differences and challenges of porting traditional applications to run in the cloud. 

This discussion goes deep into how Equinix and Pure have come together to create a revolutionary offering, Bare Metal as-a-Service, Powered by Pure. It provides a simple, on-demand, full-stack (network, storage, compute) hosted solution, with deployment and support from a single vendor, under one contract, with Pure Storage embedded.

Jack Hogan, VP of Technology Strategy at Pure Storage
Jack Hogan has been the Vice President of Technology Strategy for Pure Storage since late 2017. He is responsible for Pure’s Strategy for Cloud providers. In this role, Jack functions as a Strategic Advisor, Technology Strategist, and Customer Advocate providing guidance and insight as someone who has been on the other side of the table, as a Customer CTO for over 20 years.

Zac Smith, Global Head of Edge Infrastructure Services - Equinix
Zac has clocked 20 years in the data center and is still passionate about silicon, hardware, networks, software, and the people that make it all go. Currently Global Head of Edge Infrastructure Services, Equinix.

In addition, they discuss:

  • The total cost of ownership between a DIY approach and the Pure Storage on Equinix Metal approach. 
  • The cost implications of the do-it-yourself approach related to staff and workload refactoring.
  • The ability to provision physical, dedicated, single tenanted servers with cloud-like ease and speed.
  • How to manage hardware simply with a disaggregated, single-tenanted storage layer and easy, on-demand network and compute procurement.
  • A solution that includes hosting, deployment, and support of all physical aspects of your IT environment. 
  • How to lower operational costs and risk while enabling flexible, scalable as-a-service IT infrastructure.
07/2024
Pure Storage FlashArray//X | Data Sheet
FlashArray//X provides unified block and file storage with enterprise performance, reliability, and availability to power your critical business services.
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