How to Achieve IT Agility: It’s All About Architecture

In our conversations with business and IT leaders, one overarching theme comes up again and again: “How can your company help me achieve my tactical and strategic IT goals, without straining my budget and resources?” As we drill further down, often what they’re really looking for is IT agility—the ability to quickly and easily respond to the needs of the organization and achieve strategic IT objectives. Too often, these leaders have been blocked from achieving their goals by technologies that turned out to be anything but agile, despite vendor promises. 

Data storage, especially when it’s based on a legacy hard-disk-centric architecture, has been a particularly common offender in blocking IT agility. Implementing, managing, and upgrading legacy storage infrastructure can be an unwieldy, painful, and costly process. It can sap the resources of the best IT organizations if they select the wrong storage architecture. The result is the antithesis of IT agility.

To control and optimize these costs is not a destination, but rather a constant journey and challenge for IT leaders and their teams. So, it makes sense to remain critical and prescriptive in your storage selection and look for new approaches to solving these problems. It can make the difference between having an agile IT team or one that is stuck in the legacy storage quagmire.

Achieving
IT Agility

How the Pure Storage data management platform delivers tangible outcomes for customers.

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Offering a Unique Approach to Data Storage with IT Agility

At Pure Storage, we help customers break free of the limitations of legacy storage because we take a fundamentally different and customer-beneficial approach toward storage architecture.

Pure Storage architecture is truly unique, delivering tangible, measurable customer benefits that cannot be replicated by legacy storage vendors. 

Pure Storage’s Evergreen® architecture eliminates obsolescence, delivering storage that continues to stay modern to meet application and data growth. Pure Storage is the only vendor that has always enabled completely seamless and 100% non-disruptive, data-in-place hardware and software upgrades. We built this architecture into all our products so that our customers could scale performance and capacity to meet the demands of modern workloads.

This approach is markedly different from legacy storage vendors that require time- and resource-consuming “forklift” storage upgrades and data migrations that can take months to plan and execute. Contrast this with Pure Storage’s Evergreen architecture that enabled Delta Airlines to upgrade 30 Pure Storage arrays in less than 30 days with no disruption in critical application availability. This approach helped Delta to free up IT resources—both capital and operational—to focus on more strategic projects. Pure Storage has delivered users over 10,000 controller hardware upgrades over 10 years. In fact, 97% of all Pure Storage arrays ever sold are still in use today, running and looking like new arrays because they’re so simple to upgrade and keep modern. 

This focus on architecture has other benefits as well. For example, Pure Storage systems are incredibly energy efficient, using up to 85% less energy than competing all-flash systems. This helps lower your operating costs while also helping you achieve ESG and sustainability goals.

Delivering the Most Intuitive Experience in the Industry

Simplicity should extend into daily operations as well, and we’ve addressed the common storage challenges IT faces by delivering the most intuitive experience in the industry. All Pure Storage products are highly consistent and built on a common architecture—software, flash, and tools. Reporting, analytics, and day-to-day storage management have often been a weak area for legacy storage products. With Pure1® and the Purity operating environment, IT teams can achieve measurable outcomes in seconds instead of hours or days. This helps them easily meet the strict SLOs of the business. From initial array setup to comprehensive data management and data protection tools, Pure Storage delivers an intuitive interface that helps IT teams quickly finish storage tasks—and even eliminate them outright. 

The Purity operating environment simplifies the storage experience by automating common storage management tasks, without sacrificing performance, data security, or control. This is because it was designed from the start to manage all-flash storage, instead of being retrofitted from the hard disk storage world like so many legacy systems. Purity even talks directly to the flash storage in our custom DirectFlash® technology, avoiding performance and management issues related to SSD-based systems.

The Pure1 management tool not only provides a simple and intuitive interface to your data storage, but it can also eliminate costly downtime. Predictive analytics along with proactive alerts and remediation mean potential issues are diagnosed and fixed before they become problems. In fact, more than 70% of Pure Storage support tickets are generated by our monitoring services.

The simplicity that Pure Storage delivers has real-world customer results. IT teams are constantly being asked to do more and more, while budgets rarely keep pace with the demands. The infrastructure team at Česká Spořitelna, a financial services provider, saves thousands of storage administration hours per year, reducing the amount of effort involved in management by almost 30%. 

“With Pure Storage, our IT experts spend less time managing storage and more time developing new customer services or supporting critical applications.” –Milan Novák, Infrastructure, Platform and Cloud Services Lead, Česká Spořitelna 

Yes, simplicity can save on operational costs, but it also means the ability for IT teams to add value and say “yes” more often to new business-critical projects.The combination of Pure1, the Purity operating system, and our unique Evergreen architecture delivers the IT agility and lower management costs organizations are demanding. Sometimes those costs are hidden. Any time spent on more value-add activities is a win —we all want to spend more time innovating instead of just “keeping the lights on.” Let’s do storage differently, the Pure Storage way.

For more insights, read S&P Global Market Intelligence’s analysis of the key drivers behind gaining operational efficiency. Download the paper All Flash Is the Key to Efficient, Agile Storage.