Unlocking Speed and Scale for Every Customer

Global enterprise ServiceNow provides an AI-driven platform that automates management workflows including IT service management, IT operations management, and IT business management. Its customers use ServiceNow technology to power their businesses and optimise their workflows. ServiceNow relies on high-speed storage that scales with their ambitions. Powered by the Pure Storage platform, ServiceNow helps customers across industries work smarter, faster, and more securely.

From Coca-Cola Euro Pacific Partners to Carrefour, leading businesses in every industry use ServiceNow’s cloud platform to optimise their digital workflows, streamline their customer experience, and scale at speed. 

Indeed, speed is of the essence for its customers, and with more businesses relying on automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to make near-real-time decisions, ServiceNow is committed to meeting their needs.

“We help businesses leverage the latest technologies to exceed their customers’ expectations. That starts with 24/7 performance and reliability, which is why we choose IT partners that are as resilient as they are powerful,” says Senior Director of Cloud Hardware, John Nelson.

With ServiceNow growing rapidly and its data workloads exploding, it replaced its legacy storage with the Pure Storage platform in 2017. The scalable foundation has since positioned the business to keep up with customers’ needs for years while strengthening its governance and security posture.    

ServiceNow has become a leader for its ability to evolve with the needs of its largest customers. Since joining forces with Pure, the company has scaled rapidly to keep up with an exponential increase in data from customers. “We couldn’t have chosen a better partner than Pure to scale with our rapid growth, and the success we’ve unlocked for our customers is a testament to that,” says Nelson.

ServiceNow has also achieved new levels of reliability. One of its largest customers—a global retailer—runs its entire logistics operation through the ServiceNow platform and expects 24/7 uptime. Pure Storage allows ServiceNow to deliver five-nines, or 99.999% availability and manage the retailer’s data across its international locations. Non-disruptive storage upgrades via the modular Pure Storage Evergreen architecture help ServiceNow consistently deliver the best performance with ever-improving storage capabilities to its customers. 

And with more customers embracing generative AI technologies to boost productivity and efficiency, ServiceNow is getting ahead of the game by partnering with GPU leader NVIDIA to build generative AI solutions that deliver value across enterprise IT workflows. The Pure Storage platform helps ServiceNow eliminate risks associated with uncertainty and long-term storage planning in dynamic scenarios such as addressing the requirements of diverse AI workloads. It pairs perfectly with NVIDIA technologies to accelerate AI, fueling innovation and improving business results at ServiceNow.

ServiceNow now runs some of their largest production workloads and all backups on the Pure Storage platform. What began with two arrays has grown into a fleet of over 1300 systems comprised of FlashArray//C, FlashArray//X, and FlashArray//XL, making it the first major cloud provider to adopt an all-flash data centre. ServiceNow also worked with Pure to migrate its backups to Amazon S3 and power its Splunk analytics platform.

The support ServiceNow gets from Pure is a major driver of its success. Nelson’s team shares their needs with Pure 18 to 24 months in advance, only to have those goals met or exceeded every time. 

“I've never worked with a partner that is so in touch with what we need to accomplish,” he says. “We often set out with moonshot projects and the next thing we know, Pure is right there with us on the shuttle.”

Pure also benefits from this close partnership. As the first company to use Pure Storage FlashBlade for rapid restore, ServiceNow helped Pure develop its SafeMode™ Snapshots. Immutable backups are now a key differentiator for Pure and a powerful data recovery solution for other Pure customers.

While many IT platform companies rely on shared storage to power their operations, ServiceNow builds its own infrastructure to meet its near-zero latency requirements. This would generally limit its access to features like data snapshots and clones, but Pure delivers the best of both worlds by combining unparalleled speed with the critical capabilities ServiceNow’s customers expect. 

Flash storage from Pure has also made ServiceNow more energy efficient. Racks of Pure Storage provide double the capacity compared to legacy storage units, allowing ServiceNow to expand storage dramatically while minimizing footprint, power, and cooling.