I grew up watching Super Friends during childhood Saturday morning cartoon binges. I never quite figured out which superpowers I wanted most. And I never did learn to fly. But now, with the kick-off of Pure//Accelerate™ Digital this week, I’m thinking about superheroes again. Because at Pure Storage®, we’re focused on helping you become a superhero for your business.
Instead of breaking through walls and force fields put up by cartoon villains, we’re helping you use technology to create business breakthroughs—eliminate bottlenecks, create innovative solutions to improve operations and delight customers, and leave limitations behind (in a puff of blue smoke). It’s entirely up to you whether you want to wear a cape, but it does take new tools and new capabilities to help your organization move forward.
We know it takes super-human strength, intelligence, and laser-focused vision to commit to and deliver a modern data infrastructure. We at Pure want to empower you to be the superhero your organization needs.Charlie Giancarlo, Pure CEO
Pure CEO Charlie Giancarlo kicked off the event to talk about the future and the Modern Data Experience™. The past year delivered countless challenges, many of which have shaped the future and accelerated the pace of digital transformation, bringing more business online and a need for more scalability and flexibility in delivering business services.
Your organization can realize the Modern Data Experience by taking advantage of the full spectrum of Pure’s industry-leading technology. It’s tech that never gets old and comes with Pure’s unmatched customer experience.
So how do you get there from where you are today? More specifically, how do you break free from existing infrastructure? It’s not easy. But it’s necessary to bring your traditional and modern applications into a single operating model.
Three Steps to a Modern Data Experience
Charlie outlined a path that every organization can follow.
Step 1. Modernize Your Data Infrastructure
Investing in a modern data infrastructure lets you support both the traditional applications that are working for you now and the more modern applications that your teams are developing next.
Your data infrastructure is your foundation. Start there and work to simplify your storage management to span both private and public clouds. Following the events of the past year, customers and employees alike are expecting a more digital experience. And that takes powerful digital tools and always-on secure access to data. The all-flash data center is more than just possible today: It’s more cost-effective than hybrid disk. Just like there’s no spinning disk in your mobile phone or home computer, there’s no reason to add more into your data center.
Modern spinning disk is just not a thing.Charlie Giancarlo, Pure CEO
Solid-state flash creates a modern data environment where you can make data services available to developers as code. And using all-flash everywhere means you can automate your entire data-storage environment with policy-based data management. It creates an easy path to containerization.
Step 2. Modernize Your Customer Experience
Your customers are ready for digital transformation whether you’re there or not. So it’s clearly time to get there. Turning the focus to as-a-service solutions and applying “cloud thinking” are defining the next generation of customer experience.
Charlie uses the example of laundry. It’s no longer about having the most modern washers and dryers on the market. Really, who wants to wash socks even if the machines are the latest and greatest?
“What if you provided a top-notch same-day wash and fold laundry-delivery service—at the same or lower cost, but faster, easier, and arranged with an app?” Charlie asked.
That’s Pure as-a-Service™. More than a financial model, it delivers all aspects of data management services, including:
- Transparent and uniform pricing, on-prem and in the cloud
- Scalable capacity and performance via APIs
- The ability for data to cross availability zones in both private and public clouds
- A single integrated management console for all Pure storage environments
Portworx® is also a perfect example of the as-a-service model. It’s offered as a service to support containerized workloads in hybrid cloud using Kubernetes.
And we’re extending these kinds of services to all our products.
Step 3. Embrace Modern Applications
Demand for modern business applications changes every aspect of how your organization works and serves its customers. Modern applications have different elements—and different needs. They’re:
- Based on microservices and able to change constantly
- Optimized to run across thousands (or more) containers
- Able to be widely distributed across data centers, cloud, and edge
- Orchestrated and automated via APIs
- Resilient to security threats and outdates
- Built to process and interpret data in real-time
But a truly modern infrastructure will support not just these apps, but the traditional apps upon which your critical operations depend. (Pssst… Portworx does all this.)
Pure provides an integrated control plane for data management, agility and portability for your data and applications, and an automated self-service infrastructure with Kubernetes. And all of it’s delivered with Pure1® management.
Not all of us have the opportunity to advance space exploration as part of our day jobs.Charlie Giancarlo, Pure CEO
Quotable Quotes from Today’s Guests
We were fortunate to have an impressive list of guests join us on the Pure//Accelerate stage today, from space to the metaverse and back to earth, our guests shared a combination of technology, business, and personal wisdom. Here are a few choice quotes to ponder on your commute home—or to the kitchen.
Ron Thompson, Chief Digital Officer, NASA
“We’re going to need technologies that Pure can deliver on the moon, on Mars.”
“One of the breakthroughs this year was learning how resilient we are as individuals. How resilient we are as people.”
“The largest hurdle is doing something differently than we’ve done in the past.”
Charles Zaffrey, Senior SRE Manager, Roblox
“Having the best technology partners is critically important.”
“We dogfood all of our own systems.”
“You have to make it so easy that you can’t not do it. That’s what Portworx does.”
Julia Palmer, VP Analyst, Gartner
“Infrastructure sprawl is what’s killing innovation.”
“Forget about storage infrastructure for a little bit and focus on infrastructure services.”
“What does the future hold? Is your infrastructure going to be on the moon? Will you be facing exponential data growth? Some customers are collecting more data in a week than they did in 10 years.”
Cori Gordon, CEO, Cortoyou
You can use compassion and intuition in your decision-making and still be successful.Cori Gordon, Cortoyou CEO
