SoftBank Corp., one of the big four telecommunications service providers in Japan, is leading the industry with large-scale multidimensional next-generation cloud infrastructure and services. At SoftBank, all cloud environments—including enterprise cloud, IT cloud, Telecom cloud, edge cloud (MEC), AI/ML cloud—are designed and developed by a single engineering division by a single architecture. Dr. Ashiq Khan heads this Unified Cloud & Platform Division which also includes managed services on public clouds.
While SoftBank continues to grow its telecom business, which serves more than 40 million mobile subscribers in Japan, the company is also expanding into non-telecom lines of business with its “Beyond Carrier” growth strategy. Working with a unified cloud and platform plays a foundational role in realizing this goal of next-generation infrastructure for a digital society.
Many SoftBank customers know the company for its innovation and groundbreaking research. As a founding member of the AI-RAN Alliance, SoftBank is facilitating world-wide innovation in next-gen telecommunications, such as the 6G revolution with AI. SoftBank also built a top generative artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) platform in-house to construct a homegrown large language model (LLM) specialized for the Japanese language.
SoftBank selected Pure Storage to provide the storage layer behind many of SoftBank’s cutting-edge services. The company is building on this foundation to drive new innovations and better serve customers. It is this forward-thinking approach that has earned SoftBank this year’s Pure Storage Greatest of All Time Breakthrough Award for APJ.
Achieving Five-nines Availability
Owning high-availability storage infrastructure is crucial to SoftBank’s uninterrupted service delivery. Whether securing mobile customers’ private information, data stored in enterprise customers’ cloud environments, or IT and OA systems for employees, SoftBank knows that any compromise to data availability and data integrity can be catastrophic.
With the Pure Storage platform, including FlashArray™ and FlashBlade®, SoftBank can take advantage of a flexible, software-centric architecture that was designed to be upgraded modularly and non-disruptively. This minimizes the risk of data loss compared to the full storage refreshes and data migrations that other storage requires. For example, replacing just a storage controller upgrades performance, while also reducing total cost of ownership as well as e-waste—supporting SoftBank’s core sustainability goals.
“Pure Storage gives us the operational agility and cost-efficiency to upgrade storage facilities when we need to, based on our engineering strategy and service availability requirements,” says Dr. Khan.
The ActiveCluster™ feature of the platform further enhances data availability. This is particularly important in Japan, which often experiences natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons. “We still need to deliver above 99.999% uptime,” says Dr. Khan. “Pure Storage gives us multiple ways to deliver business continuity without the cost and inefficiency of simply adding more data copies.”
Achieving the Highest Levels of Performance and Productivity
SoftBank uses Pure Storage to support many different use cases in its unified cloud and platform infrastructure. For Example, Pure Storage is an important element in its office automation system. The fast IOPS and reliable storage performance improves employee experiences and increases productivity.
SoftBank also uses Pure Storage for designing and offering modern software-based storage solutions. “Pure Storage provided us with excellent cost-efficiency and performance in our modern cloud services, enabling us to address new business opportunities,” says Dr. Khan.
Leveraging AI to Create a Uniquely Japanese Experience
With a solid technical foundation in place, SoftBank is now focusing on new innovations. One of the company’s biggest undertakings is a project aimed at developing homegrown LLMs with 390 billion parameters in 2024. Many of the LLMs in the market are trained using languages other than Japanese. Even when translated into Japanese, these LLMs often miss cultural cues unique to Japan.
“We want to create a truly native Japanese LLM for our customers,” says Dr. Khan. “With Pure Storage ensuring data integrity and high service availability in cloud storage domains, we are excited about what we can achieve in the future to create the next technology leap.”
We’re thrilled that Pure Storage can play an important role in helping SoftBank strive for new innovations in distributed multi-cloud environments. Congratulations to SoftBank for receiving this year’s Pure Storage Greatest of All Time Award for APJ.
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