00:03
so I have the next person here the VP of America's Enterprise Sales from Pure Mike Arnold thank you awesome well thank you um
00:19
well a lot this morning or this afternoon we've heard a lot about the Enterprise Data Cloud which is a data platform that simplifies operations optimizes workloads safeguards resilience and you know really prepares organizations for the future
00:35
our next guest runs some of the most demanding environments you can even imagine supporting global investment banks hedge funds exchanges and fintech options it is a managed services provider
00:50
where milliseconds can mean millions and resilience agility and compliance are non negotiable so please join me and welcoming our next guest Andrea Mocha who uh
01:02
is the director of infrastructure at Options it and he's here to share his stories about how they leverage the Pure Storage platform to solve their missions so Andrea come on out
01:20
alright well I've been looking forward to this for uh all day cause we've been practicing this is great yes um so we're gonna start off with just
01:27
you know the simple stuff um you know let's start with you tell us about your role at Options it and what your team is focused on for your customers so yeah options
01:36
it is the No. 1 provider of it services for global capital markets firms and a leader in financial technology we work with banks hedge funds exchanges private equity firms
01:50
and our offerings goes from ultra low latency layer 1 connectivity into all the major liquidity centers and we have historic and real time market data we run our own private financial cloud and our latest offering is private AI obviously
02:07
and me and my team we really focus on designing deploying and optimising this critical infrastructure we need to make sure that it meets the strict requirements of the finance sector in terms of resilience
02:23
in terms of performance and compliance you can imagine my our clients are some of the most demanding in the industry they they need observability they they want elastic infrastructure
02:36
and our mission is simple build that data first foundation that allows them to stay ahead of the market that's awesome well that sounds way more stressful than running America
02:46
sales I'll tell you that um let's talk about some of the challenges you guys had what were the main infrastructure challenges that pushed you to rethink your storage and what challenges are your customers facing
02:58
yeah so Michael sector is constantly changing uh we see massive capacity spikes every time there is a market event things every time the market panics uh it's very hard
03:09
almost impossible to uh predict workloads before we were locked into this static capacity planning so we were overprovisioning everywhere just to stay ahead of the next spike
03:21
and pay for capacity we might never use or worse we would right size and then struggle when demand went up right uh we had a lot of complexity it was hard to quickly identify bottlenecks
03:36
gathering and merging good data points around our storage infrastructure uh was challenging and whenever demand went up we were playing catch up
03:46
so we really needed to dramatically simplify our operations and stop with the firefightings every time that we had a refresh cycle we were introducing potential risk and downtime
03:59
that's a hard sell for our clients our clients have a lot of the same challenges they might start on a new location or data center with modest requirements but then they take off and almost overnight
04:11
they need to scale 10x or 100x and that's not something that legacy systems can do smaller rays stay small and larger rays they start expensive yeah wow so you guys really have to plan for the unknown
04:25
yeah absolutely yeah um alright let's talk about uh why pure so with those challenges you began looking for a new platform and why pure
04:35
and how does a pure storage platform support your services and your customers today yeah Mike what really made the difference was us for us was finding
04:44
a storage platform that was able to deliver the high performance we needed while being refreshingly simple to operate from deployment to billing so yeah seven years ago
04:56
Flasharray became the foundation of everything we do from physical to containers to building machines and we have clients that need dedicated arrays and yeah we can do that but for most of them we can
05:09
just leverage the strong multi tenancy built into flash array to deliver enterprise grade storage without the huge commits what has really changed over the years is
05:20
is the feature set we now get you know ransomware Protection with Safe Mode near zero RPO with Active Dr with fusion we can manage the whole fleet and pure false services means that now
05:33
every fresh away it's a high performance fighter and that's been huge for simplification foreign structured data well Flashblade does it all uh the E series is great
05:44
we have tens of petabytes of market data they ask for ultra fast analytics and to feed our AI models and rug systems and plus those SEC compliant buckets uh they check all the compliance boxes
05:58
pure 1 is great for unified telemetry across our global fleet and especially with BM Analytics we can uh monitor every part of the stack from from a single place
06:11
from operating system to array to virtual hardware pure one really allows us to to find bottlenecks before they they even become problem especially with those like predictive insight
06:22
but Mike the piece that has been the the most transformative for us it's definitely evergreen one we were among the first to adopt that one it was still called pure as a service
06:32
and it has completely changed the way we think about storage economics now we can pay for what we consume not what might happen uh we can meet our SLA without overprovisioning
06:46
no more downtime no more migration no more procurement cycles if if a customer need to grow it just happens and it has completely changed our business model
06:56
yeah that's amazing sounds like simplifying your operations was really a key driver for you guys exactly yeah that's awesome uh
07:03
let's go to the outcomes um what results have you seen for options it and for your customers since deploying pure yeah the the the the results have been huge
07:13
let me start operationally tickets support tickets are now a fraction of what they they used to be and by the way support team as um pure support is absolutely great
07:23
they really understand our infrastructure we have analytics job that used to take hours now completing in minutes uh with smart use of snaps and replicas we can do near instant database refreshes
07:37
we have done hundreds and hundreds of upgrades and expansion painlessly and whenever there is a capacity spike or a new major client on boarding we know that the storage can cope
07:50
but what's even more interesting Mike is what this has allowed us to build a pure sits at the core of our horizon platform this is our cloud development and data analytics platform that we have built
08:03
for the financial sector uh you can think of it as a high performance compute platform they deliver it as a service well whatever is a data scientist working on AI model or a quant running back testing job
08:18
all the data is served up by by Pure Storage whatever it's market data a custom data sets anything they need to any computer environment they choose
08:27
we really could not have built horizon without pure flexibility underneath oh that's amazing to hear thank you for sharing that um last question looking ahead um you know
08:38
what's next for options it and with pure and you know what advice would you give to your peers yeah what's coming next is really exciting Mike we have just announced this new Iceland data center specifically built for AI workloads
08:53
and Flashblade is gonna sit at the center of it it's gonna feed those angry GPU at the speed they need and we are now looking at Exa for the next level of AI scale right this this island facility
09:05
it's gonna be a game changer for private AI in capital markets we're we're seeing a 72% reduction uh in power cost compared to traditional US sites and we have
09:17
sub 100 millisecond latency to New York and London what this means is that our clients will be able to run massive AI workloads potentially consuming years or decades of market data or without compromising on a compliance or privacy
09:33
and and this is what they really need uh for private AI infrastructure where where they control the whole stack from the model weights to the datasets and Flashblade is what make this possible
09:46
and this all fits in into the enterprise data cloud vision right which is all about treating data as a unified resource instead of managing storage silos and this makes so much sense for us
09:59
because whatever this this data is on a flashblade in Iceland or it's used for trading on a flash array in New York or anywhere else in our infrastructure it's all part of the same intelligent platform
10:14
we just need to define the outcomes we want and it's it's a fundamental shift from managing boxes to managing data as an asset and it's what our clients need as they scale across different GEOs and different use cases
10:28
as for a personal advice I would say invest in simplicity uh nothing is more expensive than complexity eating up all your time and if you lower complexity early
10:42
you're gonna be able to move faster when things shift and also choose partners that uh are gonna be there with you in the trenches where when things get hard because those people make all the difference
10:56
and finally remember the kiss principle keep it simple stupid admin ha ha ha ha that's awesome hey uh Andrea thank you for sharing options it stories uh
11:07
for the you and the audience uh what you just heard is really the enterprise data cloud in action they are simplifying their operations with nondisruptive upgrades
11:17
they are optimizing their workloads across Flasharray and Flashblade you're safeguarding resilience with Evergreen 1 and you're you're you're really moving
11:26
towards the future with leveraging port works and AI and really what options technology is providing or proving is that even in the most demanding markets um the right data foundation
11:38
not only keeps you ahead of today's challenges but positions you for tomorrow's opportunities so please join me in thanking Andrea and options it for joining us today thank you really appreciate it Andrea thank you
