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21:47 Webinar

Pure//Accelerate® 2023: The Benefits of Continuous Innovation and Non-disruptive Upgrades

FlashArray GM Shawn Hansen sits down with Scott McIsaac of NTT Managed Cloud Services to hear about their nearly 10-year journey with Pure Storage. Pure’s simplicity, continuous innovation, and non-disruptive upgrades helped the multi-cloud provider.
This webinar first aired on June 14, 2023
Click to View Transcript
00:07
Good morning and welcome. We are so grateful to have you here with us today. We have met some amazing people already and I wanted to say and express our deep gratitude that you've chosen to come all this way on the way here, I met two, what felt like twins from Sweden. And they shared with me their story about how they are building a company.
00:29
They intend to reinvent the entire space of the data storage market. They started six months ago, they flew all the way out from Sweden and I just felt so grateful that they would take that bet together with us yesterday. When I was on the elevator, I met a different gentleman, an amazing leader from a fine East Coast University in the United States.
00:51
And he said he was not a member of our community. He was here because he had heard about what had happened over the years and he wanted to understand what it was all about. Well, I hope that he can see in you what we see in you. We see the finest minds, the greatest data scientists, some of the very best in this
01:10
industry, true pioneers. So if you see him and he works for a university that begins with the first letter N, please wrap your arms around him and give him a warm embrace from the pure community. Welcome. We hope you have a wonderful experience. We have some amazing news for you today, some exciting news.
01:28
But I wanted to first pay tribute to your journey as pioneers and as innovators. Let me start by sharing a similar story about a different innovator who reinvented and dramatically changed a different industry. For many years, British cycling developed a terrible reputation. In 100 years of Olympics, their teams were rarely placed.
01:52
They seemed to try everything but nothing worked. However, in 2003, a new coach, Sir Dave Brailsford joined the British cycling team. He was different from previous coaches that tried to completely overhaul their teams. He developed a strategy that he called the aggregation of marginal gains. This is the principle that small gains compound very quickly over time.
02:18
For example, if you just improve 1% every day, that would result in a 37 X improvement. In one year, they improved everything from wind drag to maintenance routines to crash risk. And these compounded quickly into incredible results. The team went on to dominate and sweep in the last four Olympics.
02:40
There is a parallel here to what you have done when you are the world's most efficient at what you do, you win. So let me start with three pioneers who won in efficiency. Three of the early adopters of pure storage, the city of Davenport, Iowa, Sierra, Nevada and Nielsen IQ.
03:00
In 2014, they adopted the first flash array, the first flash array four hundreds with 18 terabytes of flash storage. What they pioneered was the third Brailer of data storage. Of course, I am referring to what Charlie talked about non disruptive upgrades or what we called Evergreen like the cycling team cutting wind drag.
03:22
Let's talk about the compounding effect of not having traded data migrations. In 2014, customers need a giant arrays stretching across multiple racks for the kinds of problems they solve with those early flash arrays. These mega arrays shrank from 77 rack units on average to 12 with the introduction of flash array and now that same flash array from 2014 has more than 10 to 20 times its original
03:48
storage capacity in just three rack units. Three. What's interesting is that even though these arrays have served business critical workloads for over nine years, they look nothing like they did. Originally, everything has changed new drives, power supplies, chassis controllers all without disruption or down time.
04:06
It simply keeps getting better. These three pioneers began adding improvements that compounded rapidly direct flash modules. 10 volume and snapshot scale best in class of VOLS NV. Always on QS mobility between on prem and the cloud cloud block store. QC continuous replication, self service upgrades, the ability to move workloads,
04:31
transparently, the list goes on and on the area under this curve is amazing. Now, the entire fleet of pure rays has evolved from five nines of up time to almost 79 S. It's important to note that 79 S or even five is impossible for other companies that caveat theirs with scheduled maintenance downtime. We call that a fake S L A.
04:58
This year, your top racing team gets even better at improving the maintenance experience. First, self service upgrades, automate security fixes and increase how fast you can, you can deploy value on your timing. Second, we brought simplicity in the Evergreen model to traditional NAS services with the introduction of the industry's first truly unified block and file platform.
05:22
It simply keeps getting better. And so now we're pleased to introduce your racing team to new ways to mitigate crash risk, flash array, safe mode, snapshots have been extended to new volumes in all arrays with self service to keep it simple. The new Evergreen one ransomware recovery so guarantees you can recover after an attack to a
05:46
clean environment after a razor lockdown for forensics, new A I driven anomaly detection alerts you to suspicious activity by adding an slate for data protection. Evergreen one continues to lead as the industry pioneer in data storage subscriptions, it simply keeps getting better. So in the spirit of getting better, I am proud to announce the biggest performance and
06:14
efficiency gains in flash array history, meet flash array XR four and flash array cr four. Our next generation flash array platforms. I'm so excited by this 40 to 60% greater performance high end scale built for three petabytes of raw storage. 35% more data compression with direct compressed technology. These are all things that have come from the
06:46
high end XL line 18 months ago and now have been pushed down to our full portfolio and new C models to expand the product line. The new generation is 30 to 40% greater performance per watt. It consumes 85% less energy than other all thought alternatives and powerfully, it requires 95% less space than hybrid disk arrays.
07:07
Charlie talked a little bit about direct flash. This is rapidly diverging from hard drives and off the shelf SSD S you can expect this density to dwarf the alternatives. Imagine what a 300 terabyte DFM means for a spinning disk industry that will max out at 40 today. We are excited to show you the latest and largest in flash module technology.
07:33
I love the orange of the heat sink I have in my hands. A 75 terabyte DFM. This is amazing with on board NV Ram and PC four bus speeds. This creates the most dense power effective footprint on the planet. The pace of innovation just keeps getting better.
07:57
As Charlie said, this is rooted in the simplicity of purity. A unified platform across flash array, flash blade and even cloud blocks store. This has brought you four new platforms at breakneck speeds. Xcel for the most demanding mission critical workloads, flash blade, S for high performance workloads like A I and HPC flash blade E which radically changes the
08:21
market for disk space arrays and now XR four and C four. But wait, we have one more announcement. You may have heard it from an earlier speaker on the stage. Flash D lets you replace aging disk at the revolutionary price point of less than 20 cents. A gigabyte. I am excited to announce the newest addition to
08:42
our E family, the flash array. Thank you. I'm so excited by this complimenting flash blade E which starts at four petabytes. Flash blade, E lowers the barrier of entry to one single petabyte of data where flash blade E supports file and object flash array, E will support unified file and block this new E
09:09
family will forever change the landscape for disk. So let's return to the earlier graph. We need to realize we are only at the beginning. Let's take a second to imagine the compound benefits of getting on the right curve as we zoom out. You are the pioneers of the next 10 years.
09:32
You are investing to capture the gains under this new curve driven by simplicity, Evergreen and the cloud operating model. I am so grateful to live at this time to be able to see this with you. This is the most exciting time in history to be alive. Please buckle up. We haven't seen anything yet.
09:52
And like Matt said, if you don't, you didn't know this already disk is done and you don't need it anymore, sir. Brailsford. You would be proud. Thank you very much. Let me pause for a second. Let me pause for a second because hearing from a customer who's been on this journey themselves will tell it best
10:20
at N TT we push the boundaries of what is possible. We trusted globally to connect data things and people in ways that transform and improve business, society and the planet. Every day, we work together to create new connections, new insight and new value, delivering it services and solutions across the breadth of world class technologies in
10:46
collaboration with leading partners, helping our clients across healthcare, education, smart cities, manufacturing, retail, and more to accelerate positive change. We're renowned for some major inventions like emojis used by billions globally to express themselves without using words and launching the first enterprise multi country private five G solution.
11:12
We're one of the world's leading network providers and we're the technology partner that powers the tour de France, revolutionizing the viewing experience for the world's most watched sporting event. It's our belief in possibility that drives us, but it's our people that make it happen. Welcome, Scott, great to have you here with us. Thanks Sean.
11:37
Welcome Scott MS V P. Of global operations and managed cloud services at N TT Limited. Let me just introduce maybe Scott and N TT for a few minutes. N TT is a global brand. It's number 29 on the global 500 a very highly respected data services organization. And we are so excited to have you here with us today, Scott.
11:58
Please share a little bit about your role and maybe your team's rutter. Yeah, absolutely. So, um I'm responsible for our managed cloud business. Um We have, we're part of what we call cloud services division with N G T. Our mission is to really become all things cloud for our clients.
12:13
Um You know, we lead with advisory services and financial operations. We can do modernization where we take clients on a journey to help make their applications cloud native and redevelop things. And then ultimately, our goal is to manage and secure the environment um long term. Um So if you look at, you know, kind of what we've built,
12:32
we're helping our customers navigate the cloud paradigm and I call it a paradigm because it's, it's not a destination, it's not a technology cloud is, is something that's redefining businesses today and how they leverage technology. Um Our cloud, our private cloud is backed by pure storage. It's about 60 to 70% of our current business is private cloud.
12:50
Um And we've been a customer of pure storage since 2014. Wonderful. Well, we really consider you a thought leader. You've been with us since almost the very beginning. Tell us a little bit about your pure journey and how you got started with us. Yeah. So um I come from a company called Secure 24
13:05
that N TT acquired back in uh 2018. Uh and in 2014 time, we were having a lot of problems with our storage platform. It was very complex. It was we needed a lot of engineering talent to be able to accommodate how to architect and how to solution. And we're coming on the, on the backs of a lot of failures.
13:25
I remember Matt Burr showing up at my office and saying, hey, why don't you guys check out this new technology? And my immediate thought was, oh, great. Here we go. Another storage vendor, another start up in the flash base. He's like, no, just put it in your environment, try it for a little bit.
13:37
I guarantee you're gonna like it. So we rolled it out. Um And, and there's a few people in the audience here that were part of this. And I remember we were like, hey, let's let's load, test this thing. Let's see if it's actually going to perform, like they're saying, and we loaded it up to the point where it was,
13:51
it was almost hitting failure. And we got a call from the, the, the support team and they said, hey, we just noticed that you have a huge spike in I O we're making sure everything's ok. Right. You know, I wanna make sure that things are working as expected. And we were like, how did they, how did they called us before?
14:05
We knew there was a problem even? And, you know, so that was kind of our entry point. We're like, hey, this is great. Um So we decided to continue rolling that out. Um We were able to deploy it for all of our clients. We removed all of our spinning disc from a performance tier back then and did it at no
14:20
cost to our clients. So they immediately went from, you know, spinning disc, poor performance to high performance with no cost. And I remember a conversation with a customer back then and they were like, hey, we have this report that take 3 to 4 hours to run. They ran in 10 minutes last night. What, what did you do?
14:37
You broke something in our environment. We're like, no, we, we told you we're moving you to this new platform and they immediately were able to take advantage of it. So, you know, as, as things progress, this is now our, our primary tier of storage for um our private club today. And uh as said, I have the uh I have the shirt on as well.
14:53
So, oh, that's great. Explain how pure fits with N TT I'm very interested. Yeah. So I said it's, it's flash Ara X is our primary uh platform. Um So it's, it's for a multi purpose workload. We put, we don't really think about how we architect, we just put our customer data on this. It's very, very simplistic.
15:11
It allows our engineers to, to really focus on better things, helping customers solve business challenges. But flash Ara X is the primary uh flash array C uh is something that we help push pure on. Um I always said back in 2015, I'm like guys paint the data center orange. Let's let's get this thing out there. Let's become become an all flash data center. And at the time,
15:30
obviously, it was too expensive to do that. But flash AA C came along and we were able to use this for our primary backup star uh target. We're replacing about 17 petabytes of oracle Z F S um with this at a, at a much lower cost and a better performing experience. We use flash blade for our elastic data data lake. So it's a pretty sizable footprint we're processing, you know,
15:52
billions of logs a day through this using flash blade. And then we've just started moving down the evergreen one path and you know, trying to look at how do we use more subscription to be able to deploy capacity where we need it on demand? Wow, that's amazing. You know, I talked a little bit about pioneers and you're a pioneer in your industry.
16:09
Let's talk a little bit about innovation where have the innovations that have in the data storage space that you've most benefited from? Let me just talk a little bit about your approach to innovation. So I I would say, you know, the flash AA C is something that we pushed very hard for. Um we didn't need high performance. We knew fast enough is fast enough for general
16:27
purpose workloads we don't need. So we, when we, I remember sitting in an advisory board and I was pushing this message of, hey, give us something cheap, right? We just want a cheap solution. It's high capacity, we don't care about the performance um and help us and really drive that. So that's, that's something that's really
16:43
helped us. We're able to again simplify our environment with multi, with removing multiple vendors now and things like that. Um And then the other thing is we, we've been asking for it for a long time and we finally just achieved, this was NFS on top flash array. Um And that's been a, that's been a game changer in our backup space.
16:59
Thanks for, thanks for pushing us. I appreciate it. So if you were sitting in that with that gentleman from that university and you had to talk about like why pure, what would you tell him simplistically? I mean, this was our, we had so much complexity in our environment and how we, how we had the solution, an architect. Um This was the number one thing that we wanted
17:20
to push for. We wanted a simple solution that we could have all of our engineers managed. I didn't want to have storage engineers. I wanted to have cloud engineers that could focus on again business outcomes for our customers. Um And it had to be a very simplest approach. So that's the first thing. The other one would be the support that
17:35
experience that we had when support called us. We were like, OK, this is just because it's we're a new customer, but that has been the same, this entire experience with purism has always been a very high performance support organization knows about problems before we do and it can help fix our environments. Uh The other, the other place for us was we struggle with data center capacity like
17:56
everyone else in power capacity, you know, we were to take, you know, 678 cabinets down to a couple U, right? And that's big for us because we can get higher density, we can get more things in there, which is why we're really excited about the future of the R fours because again, fast enough is fast enough for us, we can get more density in that environment and we can
18:16
again, simplify our environment and reduce our costs. All right. So you feel like you're Sir David of N you've had, you've been with us for nine years now. I think how many disruptive upgrades or non disruptive upgrades have you had during that period of time, we, this is, this has become table stakes for us like these non disruptive upgrades are
18:35
something we do on a regular. Um I think we've had non 85 of them, roughly of the 85 most of them are going to be controller upgrades and life cycling out legacy and, and end of life hardware into the new version. But again, we, we look at this as just it's table steaks. Now we expect this from pure and it, it's been, it's been a very,
18:53
very um good process. Uh You know, we, I remember we used to have to plan weekends and, and hours and hundreds of hours of getting ready to upgrade array. And now we, you know, we call support, we work with you guys press a button and it gets upgraded with no impact. Oh, interesting. I met an analyst just yesterday who said I've heard about this non disruption thing.
19:10
Is it real? Does it really work? 85? That's pretty amazing. Yeah, it's real. So talk about like what this does for data protection in your environment. Yeah, from security is always at the heart of everything we do. As I mentioned, you know, we,
19:22
we've tried to underpin all of our services with true integrated security offerings and, you know, you hear the buzzword of secure by design and those things, but we, we really live that our engineers live. It, our, our, our teams live it together. Um But we, we've had a lot of uh experience in migrating customers.
19:38
And the one that sticks out the most is we were, we were mid migration of about 2000 systems onto our private cloud. Um And the customer got hit with ransomware before we were managing the environment. We were managing a small portion of it. Uh The systems, we had about 1000 systems moved over in 1000 systems that weren't of that. We were able to recover those 1000 systems that got hit within 30 minutes to an hour.
19:59
The rest of the 1000 systems took weeks. So it's very, very important to us. So as we paint the the area under the curve for the next 10 years, what's next, uh you know, higher density, you know, flash blade E is something we're looking at. Uh We have a pretty sizable S3 object store
20:17
that we support today for our clients. And we're looking at how do we leverage flash blade E for that? Um And now with obviously the new introduction of uh a Flasher A E, that's gonna be something that's very, again, higher density workloads, paint the data center orange type environment. So, wow,
20:30
that's amazing. Well, I just wanted to express our deep gratitude for the journey that we've been on together. Um I think you've taught us a lot. I, I have one thing for you if that would be OK. Sure. I have uh uh we, we were trying to think, what kind of award could we give you for a lifetime
20:44
of achievement and really pushing us on all these fronts. And so we had something special made for you that would be ok. Um This is our, this is our special X C R four um gold plated award that was just made for him. And uh I'm looking forward to your next album. You can get us on the cover.
21:04
So I'd like to maybe anoint you with this if that would be ok. And uh thank you so much. Yeah. And if anybody wants to touch this, if you want to touch and feel how heavy this really is, please see him in the hallway. I just wanted to say thank you so much. Thank you, Sean. Appreciate it.
21:21
Thank you. Thank you so much as you've heard from Scott N tt reaped the benefits of continuous innovation, a true pioneer in a space as a result. They got better over time. It's why we want to partner with you with pure as we continuously innovate and make things better, you get better.
  • Video
  • FlashArray//XL
  • Pure//Accelerate
  • FlashArray//X
  • FlashArray//C
  • FlashArray//E

Shawn Hansen

Vice President and General Manager, FlashArray

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