At SiriusXM, storage has never been so boring… And that’s just the way the team at SiriusXM likes it.
As the Vice President of IT Infrastructure Services, Jeff Bethke and his team helped usher in a new era of storage technology in 2019 when SiriusXM replaced its incumbent storage provider with Pure Storage®. Today, Pure provides the backbone for a modern data experience, turning bottlenecks into breakthroughs and protecting data so that the broadcaster’s 150 million listeners can tune in to sports, talk radio, or music anytime, anywhere, without interruption.
“Our goal was to switch to Pure without anyone noticing,” explains Bethke. “We achieved this in spades, gaining unprecedented performance, resiliency, and visibility. Frankly, managing storage has never been easier, and the business is better for it.”
This massive transition hit all the right notes, earning SiriusXM this year’s Pure Storage Greatest of All Time (GOAT) Breakthrough Award.
A Welcome Solution to Unexpected Problems
Unlike the technology, the path to Pure was not a simple one.
After refreshing SiriusXM’s storage environment in 2017 with the incumbent provider, Bethke immediately had buyer’s remorse. What followed were three years of challenges, one morphing into the next. During that time, Bethke and his team were meeting with Pure regularly to discuss their options. They agreed to a trial period and accepted a loaner system from Pure.
“Pure not only met the challenge of the day, but solved several other issues we were dealing with,” says Bethke. “We then started to add day-to-day enterprise workloads, and it just kept working.”
When the next refresh cycle came along, SiriusXM moved 100% percent of its enterprise workloads to Pure. Today, a combination of Pure Storage FlashArray//X, FlashArray//C, and FlashBlade support all of SiriusXM’s mission-critical enterprise application and database platforms. In addition to the proven performance of Pure, SiriusXM liked the prospect of a non-disruptive upgrade down the road with the Evergreen Storage™ subscription model. And Pure takes up a fraction of the previous footprint in SiriusXM’s new data center—reducing costs and emissions.
It’s been quite a journey for the Enterprise Storage team at SiriusXM. Their tireless efforts have positioned SiriusXM for continued success with a simple, seamless, fast, and future-ready modern data platform.
Congratulations to SiriusXM on winning the Pure Storage GOAT Award. We’ve never been so excited to tell such a boring storage story.
