By Omar Akar, VP Emerging, Pure Storage
In recent years, IT budgets have been cut across the board against a challenging macroeconomic environment, coupled with global conflicts and energy crises. As a result, many companies are stuck with underperforming, complex, and energy inefficient legacy solutions. This is especially concerning for businesses under more pressure to leverage AI for fear of being left behind. However, this uncertainty presents a huge opportunity to focus on delivering innovation in the age of AI, with never-before-seen levels of flexibility and customization.
The Storage Platform
According to a 2024 Gartner report, IT leaders are shifting from traditional storage solutions to a platform-based approach to meet evolving business needs and to solve this headache. So, what is a data storage platform?
A unified data storage platform delivers agility and risk reduction to organizations with a simple, consistent ‘as-a-service’ experience, supporting both traditional and modern workloads, such as AI. Designed for the cloud era, it provides on-demand, self-service storage through a flexible subscription and intuitive interfaces, ensuring consistency across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. This kind of platform is underpinned by non-disruptive upgrades and meaningful SLAs covering performance, uptime, data resiliency and energy usage/sustainability goals. Crucially, a data storage platform must be built on a foundation of all-flash technology, and have the flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs. Lastly, AI-driven improvements and recommendations through the platform ensure optimal performance with minimal time spent on maintenance and administration.
The Impact of a Storage Platform
A unified data storage platform can be a powerful tool to address the challenges of complexity, reliability, cost, and risk. What does the successful implementation of a data storage platform look like?
- Reduced Complexity: This is achieved through consolidation, a single operating environment, and centralized operations.
- Improved Reliability and Peace of Mind: A data platform ensures reliability with guaranteed zero downtime and 99.9999% uptime through proactive SLA management, along with 24/7/365 predictive support.
- Increased Cost Efficiency: This is achieved through reduced power and space use, flexible subscriptions, and concurrent SLAs.
- Mitigated Risk: Consistency from a single, orchestrated platform reduces the risks associated with managing disparate systems and potential integration issues. Through seamless upgrades, systems remain modern, with continuous updates and no disruptions. This provides limitless scalability on demand.
The Data Storage Platform Businesses Need Today
At Pure Storage, we are evolving to meet modern business needs, empowering our partners with the data storage platform their customers are looking for. Our platform offers a unified data storage infrastructure with unmatched simplicity and flexibility, saving time, money, and energy. From AI to archive, customers can benefit from a cloud experience with one unified ‘Storage-as-a-Service’ platform across on-premises, cloud, and hosted environments. Finally, our platform is built on the unique Evergreen architecture that evolves with businesses through non disruptive upgrades. This architecture is getting newer and better every year, with zero planned downtime, guaranteed.
