“Businesses are under pressure to extract more from the data they own in order to be more competitive and to drive growth. This is important to the business and the data has to work harder.,” said McKendrick. More than just buzzwords, these methodologies are being embraced, said McKendrick, who pointed to aa study that found that 42% of companies are working on DataOps or DevOps to be able to support a continuous flow of applications and data.
The Role of Storage in Digital Transformation
To take advantage of new technologies and new ways to leverage data, first there must be modern infrastructure, stressed McKendrick. Problems appear when there are traditional or legacy storage systems that cannot scale, are prone to disruption, or are complex to manage, resulting in high administrative overhead, noted Mirashi. Legacy storage systems also frequently don’t integrate with new orchestration and automation tools. This all boils down to the need for organizations and their data professionals to evaluate whether their storage solution is really up to the task of modernization and digital transformation that their leadership has embarked upon.
Cloud Formations
Cloud or software as a service may be seen to be the easy answer to modernization problems, but hidden costs lurk behind the scenes, said McKendrick and Mirashi. “One of the perceptions of cloud is that you hand everything over to your cloud provider?whether it is AWS or Microsoft Azure—and they take care of everything, and you don’t have to worry about anything,” said McKendrick. “But the onus of security is still on you. You still need to worry about the performance.”
In addition, Ludeman pointed out, there has been a lot more focus on the issues around “repatriation,” or taking data back from the cloud, representing a pendulum swing from 5 or 10 years ago, when IT leaders proclaimed a 100% cloud mandate.
There has been a large uptick in cloud adoption over the last year with the pandemic, but now companies are taking a step back and evaluating their needs, agreed Mirashi, noting that he is hearing that some companies feel that they have “over-rotated” toward the cloud and now need to “rebalance” their usage to get to a more hybrid model. The need to get a better handle on costs is resulting from the lack of predictability caused by events such as unanticipated data egress charges and purchases made in shadow-IT scenarios. These cost concerns have led organizations to re-evaluate which workloads are best-suited for repatriation to on-premise deployment, said Mirashi. Cost efficiency has become a big reason for companies to keep some workloads on-prem, he noted.
The Outcome Matters
It all comes down to the delivery of outcomes, said Mirashi, wrapping up the discussion. Pure offers a modern data experience that can help customers deliver business breakthroughs. For data professionals, he noted, Pure delivers advantage in four distinct ways:
Optimizing database operations: Pure arrays can speed up database operations with low latency. This in turn helps them provide high application performance.
Pure helps to reduce the time and cost for common database activities, whether it's cloning or copying or refreshing, and can provide quick provisioning of data copies for DevTest environments. Pure also provides embedded data reduction capabilities, which minimizes both the capacity needs and also the capacity costs, said Mirashi.
Simplicity: “The other aspect is around simplicity,” said Mirashi, noting that traditional storage systems can be very complex. Pure solutions are easy to set up and smart enough to manage themselves, reducing overhead and risk. Organizations can right-size the capacity allocation for their database and avoid the common problems of over-provisioning or under-provisioning a storage system. Simplicity is really important when it comes to managing a system.
Scalability and uninterrupted uptime: Pure’s solutions are very scalable. And when it comes to data protection, there are a number of options that can combine to help limit downtime, data loss, and risk?whether it is instant snapshot copies, or synchronous replication with active cluster, and replication resiliency for rapid restore, backup, and recovery. All of this is important. And then there's also the active DR and the continuous replication that provides near-zero RPO, which is very critical for most companies.
Support for cloud and on-prem: “We have a really great solution when it comes to cloud and it really comes down to helping our customers build that application once and run it seamlessly on on-premise or in the cloud,” said Mirashi. Pure has a strong focus on data mobility across clouds and being able to support the deployment technologies such as containers, which are becoming very common and critical for application modernization, he noted. “And, of course, Pure also provides the APIs and orchestration capabilities and ongoing updates so all of this really comes to an investment and helping customers realize that their investment in storage is just as agile as a business. We add a lot of value for database operations in these ways.”
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