Everybody loves a great success story. Especially when that story begins in 1690, when two goldsmith bankers set up shop in London’s financial district. Little did they know that their modest business would flourish into a global financial powerhouse that, more than 300 years later, remains committed to serving its communities.
That company is Barclays. Today, the bank offers consumer, corporate, and investment services to millions of customers and clients across the globe. Customers rely on these offerings to calculate loan payments, manage retirement savings, and pay bills. And unlike the bankers’ hours of the early days, Barclays now provides always-on financial services via its online properties and mobile app.
To help ensure this level of availability, Barclays uses Pure to support workloads that include many of its primary applications and databases. With an over 99.9999% storage uptime rate over the last seven years, it’s clear why customers continue to choose Barclays—our regional Pure Storage Greatest of All Time Breakthrough Award winner.
Building on the Currency of Trust
Barclays has deployed a single Pure Storage FlashArray™ to support its virtual desktop environment. Today, many of the bank’s production workloads reside on nearly 100 arrays. Barclays also recently adopted a consumption-based, as-a-service storage model with Pure Evergreen//One, built on Evergreen™ architecture.
“With Evergreen//One, we can enable capacity when it’s needed,” says John Rattray, Managing Director, Hosting Service Delivery at Barclays. “This gave us a tremendous advantage during the pandemic, when we rolled out more digital services to help customers through difficult financial times.”
Indeed, Barclays reached many customers with new service offerings that provided critical financial assistance during lockdowns. And with industry-leading data reduction technologies from Pure, Barclays is optimising its data center footprint and reducing energy consumption.
“To support our current volume of data, we would have needed substantially more gear from our previous storage vendor, which was simply a non-starter,” says Eugene Tang, Global Block Storage Product Manager at Barclays. “Barclays has an ambition to become a net-zero bank by 2050. We need to partner with like-minded organizations that are not only disruptors in their markets but take their environmental responsibilities seriously. Pure is very much aligned with Barclays on this front.”
96 Non-disruptive Upgrades – and Counting
During its seven-year journey with Pure and its Evergreen//Forever and Evergreen//One subscriptions, Barclays has eliminated the need for forklift upgrades, which are time-consuming, disruptive, and expensive. Remarkably, Barclays has successfully completed 96 upgrade cycles without interruption, with plans to continue scaling to support new digital banking initiatives.
“Modern banking requires a modern architecture, which is exactly what the Evergreen model provides,” says Michael Myrick, Global Head of Storage at Barclays. “We, and by extension our customers, benefit tremendously from the agility it enables, not to mention the reliability of our services.”
After centuries of building its legacy, Barclays is setting the stage for the next chapter of its history, which will be powered by digital innovation. The bank plans to leverage Evergreen//One for longer data retention periods and is considering Portworx adoption to support cloud-native data services.
In the meantime, we celebrate Barclays’ service and achievements with the well-deserved distinction of being named the winner of the Pure Storage Greatest of All Time Breakthrough Award. Congratulations, and we look forward to growing, together.
