Insight Zone. Data Storage. Executive Interview

Transcription

1 Insight Zone Data Storage Executive Interview

2 Not PURE PURE All-flash storage is what we do. Which is why we ve become the natural choice for accelerating the next-generation data center. Pure Storage FlashArrays are purpose-built to deliver the full advantages of flash, pushing the speed limit for business with disruptive innovation that s hard to imitate. Pure Storage is a leader in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays. Find out why, visit: purestorage.com/gartner 2015 Pure Storage, Inc. Pure Storage and the Pure Storage Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks et al, 28 August Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

3 Data Storage Executive Interview Welcome to ZONE SE7EN s Executive Interview with with Alex McMullan, Field CTO, EMEA at Pure Storage. Alex tells us why Pure Storage is disrupting the storage market and why customers should seriously consider their solution. We also find out Alex s thoughts on whether there will ever be an All-Flash data centre, and why he believes Pure Storage are wellpositioned in the marketplace, promoting the long-term viability of Flash memory.. View Alex s Executive Interview to learn why Pure Storage is a data storage provider that is fast becoming a main player in the marketplace. Pure Storage has made All-Flash storage affordable enough to use broadly across any enterprise. We believe every company should enjoy the performance, space and efficiency advantages of flash as well as the lower maintenance, power, cooling, rack space and management costs. With Pure Storage, your business can achieve things that weren t even imaginable with disk; learn how much data you can analyze, how fast you can respond to a customer, or how quickly you can launch a new service. It s time to unlock the productivity and creativity of your company while delivering a responsive experience to both customers and employees. All applications. All customers. All budgets. Alex McMullan Field CTO, EMEA Pure Storage Alex began his industry career after Bachelors and Masters Engineering degrees at Liverpool University. He started by writing flight/test software at British Aerospace, CAD 3D modelling software at Parametric Technology and the RDBMS engine at CA for Ingres before moving into infrastructure design and implementation. Alex transitioned into professional services at Sun and VERITAS through a consulting partner with numerous assignments designing and implementing large scale UNIX and storage systems in financial services. Alex then joined UBS Investment Bank to manage the storage and distributed computing infrastructure for the bank, as well as assessing innovative and emerging technology in Silicon Valley. From UBS he moved to Barclays to run the storage, database and data warehouse engineering divisions and spent 6 years there before joining the Pure Storage team in 2014 where he holds the role of EMEA CTO.

4 Question 1 For customers, why use Pure Storage as a startup compared to big vendors? The answer to that question is several-fold. Firstly, Pure is no longer a start-up company. We have been in existence for more than five years now; we have more than eight hundred staff; we have our fourth release of our major operating system code base right now that s a representative feature set of maturity that many other vendors in this space do not have. The key message here is that Pure is no longer just funded by venture capitalists, but also by longterm mutual investors, like Fidelity and TRowe Price, who look at us as a long term proposition with a long-term growth curve. At this point in time, Pure, as positioned by the Gartner Magic Quadrant, is in a position of a visionary and a leader in comparison with EMC, for example, a company ten-fold our size but still in that same place in the Quadrant overall. Our message is, Pure is here with the maturity, the capability and the quality; we re here to serve and store your data. Question 2 How is Pure Storage actually disrupting the storage market? Pure Storage was founded with the express purpose of disrupting the storage market in two ways. Firstly, by using technology, such as Flash memory, to provide a better, more simple and more resilient way of storing your data. We leverage our own IP to compress, reduce and store that data in a very efficient, very resilient way so that you can get the benefits from your application on your workloads. controller upgrades every three years whilst you stay on maintenance. We commit to you on the way in that the unit price you pay for maintenance will go down over time. We also give you a support experience that is secondto-none, and our net promoter score is in the eighties right now compared with our competitors who are in the low fifties; that s a reflection on the experience that our customers receive from us, even as we are evolving our product over time. The second way in which we re disrupting the market is our business model whereby we offer you free The key message here is that Pure is no longer just funded by venture capitalists, but also long-term mutual investors... Data Storage

5 Question 3 Will there ever be an All-Flash data centre? Again, another very interesting question. There has been a lot of speculation in the press, both online and written, in the last few months over the long-term viability of Flash memory compared with other technologies. The answer to that question from Pure s perspective is very much yes. We have a carefully mapped out cadence to deliver the density and the price point for the All-Flash data centre that includes archiving, that includes back-up, that includes all of your data, There are several view points on whether storage manufacturing can keep up with the rate of disk and Flash manufacturing. My response to those outlooks is, our data reduction technologies allows us to place more data physically on Flash memory than on magnetic disks because of its inability to de-dupe and compress. Therefore, mechanical magnetic disks are not used to the same extent that Flash memory is in terms of utilisation and efficiency. Therefore, we are able to cope with the data curve and the increased levels of consumption on that basis. So, our resounding answer is absolutely yes.

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