The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.Peter Drucker
The last year challenged us in every way imaginable. It has challenged the way we live, how we communicate with one another, and the way we work. Through it all, organizations demonstrated an incredible ability to evolve and adapt to support their clients and meet their needs effectively.
Moving forward, this adaptability will serve us well as we adjust to the “new normal,” including anywhere access, hybrid workplaces, and the return of face-to-face interaction.
Agility Supports Success
Business success during the pandemic has been a function of agility. How easily can we adjust to the new reality—and speed? How quickly can we find opportunity in the turbulence? Modern applications have been key to the success of those organizations that have emerged stronger as we move toward exiting the pandemic.
A quick review of the financial news makes this clear:
- Pfizer and BioNTech embraced new models for research, development, and manufacturing that not only enabled the first vaccine against Covid-19 but may also play a role in speeding future vaccines.
- Amazon profits increased by 200% during the pandemic not because of a move to online shopping, but because they could handle the increased demand for online shopping. This meant using their massive data sets to optimize every aspect of their business.
- Like Amazon, Zoom grew its paying customer base by 350%. It wasn’t because of the pandemic but because its modern architectures and services enabled the company to support its customers. Zoom became synonymous with digital communications in the process.
New Thinking, New Opportunities
At Pure Storage®, we live this transition with you every day. Long before the pandemic, we’ve worked hand-in-hand with customers to enable the modern applications that allowed them to thrive in the current environment.
Legacy data infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the new requirements and pace of change of modern applications. Had they not moved to Pure, many organizations would have been forced to confront the turbulence of 2020 with yesterday’s logic.
Here are a few examples of how Pure is helping organizations maintain the highest levels of performance as their modern data needs evolve:
- One of the world’s largest video-conferencing providers relies on Pure to scale its streaming platform. The result? Clients can launch and record more meetings while also improving their quality of service and availability.
- One of the largest government-funded research organizations turned to Pure when it needed to drastically increase the speed to ingest and analyze unstructured file data. The result? The organization has the ability to develop vaccines faster.
- One of the largest telecom companies engaged with Pure when it needed to accelerate its CI-CD pipeline to deploy new applications more quickly for its 5G network subscribers. The result? They deployed apps in hours rather than months.
- One of the world’s largest software-as-a-service providers put its trust in Pure when they needed a better way to protect client data from ransomware attacks. The result? Clients can now restore from backup in under four hours.
Leaving Legacy Behind
To be ready for the modern world, these solutions required new thinking and new architectures. Compared to their traditional cousins, modern applications often need to be:
- Microservices-based, able to constantly change, and optimized to run across thousands or even millions of containers
- Widely distributed across the data center, cloud, and edge
- Able to scale out with ease within the data center and across the multicloud universe
- Fully orchestrated and automated via APIs, with minimal human interaction
- Globally resilient to security threats and outages
- Built to process and interpret data in “real-time”
Organizations that embrace these new architectures thrive in a way their competition, still leveraging legacy infrastructure, cannot. And Pure is at the heart of that modern solution.
Over the last five years, Pure partners and customers demonstrated the growing importance of modern applications to their future and success. Pure saw the opportunity to innovate beyond the bounds of traditional storage to help.
- In 2016, Pure introduced FlashBlade® to support the growth of modern applications by delivering a new unified fast file and object (UFFO) architecture, built to support the ingestion and processing of billions of small files or objects on a single platform and scale out to support any workload, with true operational simplicity. This year FlashBlade is closing in on $1B in cumulative sales with reference customers across 25% of the Fortune 100.
- In 2020, Pure acquired Portworx®, the world’s leading data-services platform for Kubernetes-based workloads on any infrastructure and any cloud. Portworx was built to compliment Kubernetes by automating data services to support the distributed, automated and data-centric needs of modern applications.
Reaping the Benefits
Customers are already benefiting tremendously from this powerful combination in a variety of ways:
- Accelerated Time to Market / Accelerated Time to Value: Containers, Kubernetes, and Portworx allow enterprises to optimize the application lifecycle across DevOps and InfraOps for radical time gain.
- Accelerated Time to Insights: FlashBlade redefines “fast” from raw IOPs to parallel processing of multiple streams of unstructured data.
- Grow with Customers, On Demand: Pure’s subscription model, simple installation and upgrades, and software-defined solutions like Portworx and Pure1® deliver support for growth across any cloud and any infrastructure.
- Always-On Data Resiliency and Ransomware Data Protection: Modern apps are increasingly targeted by bad actors due to their data richness, Pure delivers protection across data centers and clouds with rapid restore from backup at speeds of >5PB/day in the event of a disaster.
- Operating Cost Advantage: Pure provides a Simple and intuitive operating model backed by data compression efficiency and all available “as-a-service.”
I recently took on a new role at Pure to lead our newly founded Emerging Technology Solutions organization. I lead a world-class team of sales and technical professionals who understand modern applications and understand how to solve for the data challenges that they present. This team, along with our partners, have proven experience architecting and delivering solutions built on fast file, fast object, and Kubernetes.
At Pure, we are extremely proud of what we accomplished over the last 12 years modernizing and simplifying traditional storage. We are equally excited about our momentum in solving for the challenges of modern applications.
