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14:39 Video

Re-inventing Telecom IT Without Spinning Disks

Discover how Pure//E all-flash arrays are revolutionizing telecom IT by replacing inefficient spinning disks for robust data storage solutions.
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00:07
So we inventing telecom it without uh spinning discs. Interesting topic. So how much spinning discs are there out there? Right. Well, this is a number kind of from all industries rolled up. Uh And the number is that apparently about 90% of storage is still on spinning disc. Uh This is somewhat influenced,
00:26
of course by, by hyper scalar who use the term of this. Uh And I don't think it's probably an accurate number for Telcos. Unfortunately, nobody really tracks how much disk telcos have. So it's hard to find a number anywhere we did talk to one of our customers. I'm not gonna name them. But uh you know, a large Telco and we asked
00:43
them uh around this topic. Well, how much of your data is still, do you think on spinning disk? And they put it at about 50%? Now, that's a lot less than 90%. But given the scope of Telco uh data, there's still a heck of a lot of data. And the other issue here is that unstructured data, you know,
00:59
is not another one of those industry numbers is expected to grow by 10 X by 2030 that's only seven years from now, right? Uh So that's, it's, it's the kind of data that lives on disk for the most part is also some of the fastest growing data, right? So, OK. Well, why is that an issue? Well, because there are a lot of challenges
01:17
around disk, right? Uh The one good thing about this and the reason it's still as out there as extensively as it is, is because basically it's been a cost factor, right? It's been uh cheaper than flash uh to acquire it, you know, by the terabyte. So it still lives in a lot of places, but there's a definite downsides to it. Right. First of all,
01:37
it takes up too much space. You probably have as a, you know, as a, as a Tego, you've probably got racks and racks and yet more racks of spinning disk filling up your data centers, right? Takes up a lot of room and data centers are of course getting ever more constrained and terms of uh space, you know, as you roll out initial uh other initiatives like A I and so forth,
01:55
you know, you need that space uh just takes up too much, too much energy, right? It's mechanical, you know, keeping those drives, spinning all the time takes up a lot of energy. The spinning creates heat, which adds additional energy charges because of the cooling required, right? So they're very, very energy hungry.
02:11
And now, you know, with a lot of telcos and a lot of organizations of all kind, having uh sustainability initiatives, you know, trying to reduce power consumption, having power constraints, a lot of times in data centers and it's just, it's just getting really expensive, right? Energy is something you want to cut down where possible and this takes too many resources,
02:29
right? I mean, you think of all those racks, all the cabling, all the networking required uh And dis isn't that reliable? Uh Certainly compared to flash. Uh So you probably, if you have a big disk estate, you're probably doing a lot of disc replacement, you're probably routinely replacing discs on a weekly, if not,
02:44
you know, monthly basis. Uh those discs for data privacy reasons probably just get shredded and go into a landfill, right? So they create a lot of e waste which is also going against uh you know, a lot of uh initiatives for sustainability and so forth. So there's a lot of not so good stuff about disc, right?
03:02
In fact, uh if uh about two years ago I uh tech target had a uh a article where they surveyed a bunch of industry watchers about the state of enterprise disc. Uh And Eric Bergen, who at the time was vice president at I DC. He's no longer there, but he said there are lots of reasons why flash is better than hard disk drives. If flash cost exactly the same as hard drives,
03:25
nobody would be buying hard drives, right. Uh And I think, you know, one way you can kind of get this is if you think to yourself, if you were gonna buy a laptop today and you had a, and it was the same price and you could buy one with a hard drive or you could buy one with a flash drive. Nobody is gonna buy the one with the hard drive.
03:42
Right. There's absolutely no, no reason to do that. Uh And similarly in the enterprise, if you could get a storage array, that was all flash for the same price that you could as this, why the heck would you buy the disk? Right? The problem is until now, that's been
03:55
impossible. But with the pure E family of arrays that we've announced over the past several months, we've now got to the point where you can get all flash storage at an acquisition cost that's comparable to enterprise disc with a much lower cost of ownership over time. Now, it's always been projected like, you know, the lines would cross of the cost uh you know,
04:14
between discs and, and flash. But most analysts, I think thought it was still multiple years from now. But I think we uh you know, we have pure kind of jumped ahead of where everybody thought we were by releasing these products this year. So let me uh you know, state about these E family arrays,
04:30
which is our uh our, our family of low cost uh arrays that are, that are capacity optimized, right? They're designed for lower performance workloads. These aren't the kind of arrays you'd run, you know, your oracle database on. That's not what they're for. They're specifically designed to be high capacity, very dense,
04:48
have very good performance, but not that super high end performance. And they're really designed to replace uh a lot of the workloads that you run today on disk right now. Performance wise, just let me say, you know, just for the sake of this discussion, let's just assume the uh the E family arrays are roughly comparable to our enterprise disk array in performance.
05:08
Even though there are certain performance traits like seeking uh that are gonna be way faster on flash because there's no seek time. So you're probably gonna have better performance across multiple uh areas. But let's just for the sake of argument, let's just assume they're equal, right? Because there's still lots of reasons why you would use flash instead of disk.
05:27
So what are those reasons? Well, here's a uh here's a number of them. Well, first of all, you're looking at about 80% less power consumption, that's a huge number. And in fact, depending on what you're coming from, that could be even higher. In fact, we had a uh a case study came out recently that uh Virgin 02 Telecom
05:45
in, in the UK, they moved from a disc environment to pure and they actually, they said their power statements were 96%. I mean, it's almost like, no, no, no, no, no more power being consumed. Right. It's a crazy high number. So, you know, your number may vary a little up, a little down.
06:02
Uh, but that's a ballpark number. Uh You're looking at 1/5 of space, right? And if you're getting data center constrained, that's a huge savings. Uh And I'll give you a real roll case study about that in at the end as well, 20 times more reliable, right? Than, than this. So say goodbye to the days of constantly
06:18
replacing failed drives. And that leads to the fact that the PR A are also gonna look at about 85% less e waste, not just the drive replacements, but the way we do our evergreen model of in place upgrades and so forth, there's, you know, there's whole stories behind each of these. I'm just kind of doing high level today.
06:34
And if you are a current pure user, if you're using one of our flash array or flash blade products, the efa arrays use the same storage operating system, right. Right. Nothing different. So if you've got uh you know, automation frameworks or scripts or any of that kind of stuff built around, uh you know, pure API S, same API set,
06:52
same feature set in these arrays and as well as the pure comes with all software features included, so you get snapshots and crypto C application, blah, blah, blah, all the good stuff, all included and anything new that comes out feature wise included as well. So let's look at a quick comparison of the of the two models that are in the E family and I'm not gonna go into a deep dive of speeds and
07:12
speeds or any of that, that's all available on our website. We can certainly help you, you know, uh talk to you about uh about it. Uh in further detail, I just want to give up high level picture of the two different products. So we have flash array E and flash blade eight. Now flash A E will start, there is a unified block and file array.
07:31
It starts at a petabyte in size and goes up to four petabytes rock in a single array and that supports block protocols, NFS SMB for file. And it also supports V balls, which is interesting because if you've got like say lab environments, you know, you wouldn't probably run production uh VM ware on this. But if you've got lab environments, test environments, uh this is a great solution for
07:52
that, you know, you get fantastic V support. We have all kinds of VM ware integrations, right? So one of the things you might think about for, for using the flash array, E uh if you go with an evergreen one, which is a subscription, which is our subscription model, it's a pure subscription basis. Uh you know,
08:09
pure owns the equipment. You, you purchase uh usage based on performance and capacity. You can start in at a lower footprint of half a petabyte as a minimum commitment for, for evergreen one subscription. And that can go, you know, you can bring that up and back down as you go over time. Uh The Flash Blade E is a bigger beast that's our unified file and object platform starts at
08:32
four petabytes and goes up to beyond 10 in a single uh system that also does NFS and SMB. But adds in addition to that, it does S3 objects. So it has a lot of interesting object storage use cases. Again, if you go come in with the subscription, you can start as low as a petabyte and a half versus the four petabytes for actually purchasing here,
08:50
right? So obviously, block workloads are flashing, object workloads are flash blade, but they both do file. So which would you use when that's really gonna be a discussion? You know, we'll, we'll be happy to have you with you. It'll depend on workload characteristics size and all these kind of things.
09:06
Uh But those are your two options in the in the E family. So let's look at some key telecom specifically Telecom data repository use cases. Now pure has been saying uh for the past couple of months since we've released these, these arrays, we're, we're using the trays, disc is done, right? There's absolutely no reason to use disk
09:26
anymore. Right. If you can buy this at the same, at a similar price point, uh at the same time, of course, you're not gonna go out and replace your entire disc environment overnight. Right. Uh But as you know, as arrays come off lease or come off maintenance or get end of life, it's, you know,
09:41
interesting to start thinking about replacing them with uh with flash to get all those benefits. So what are some of the use cases you might think about? Now, this is not comprehensive, but I'm sure there's many more. But these are some of the ones, you know, we've, we've heard from customers uh where this might make sense.
09:57
Uh analytics cold tier data. Now, of course, analytics, you also have the high performance portion of that where our flash blade s is a great fit, but you also have a lot of data that's not accessed as often but still needs to be there. So things like cold tier data, elastic cold or, or frozen tier, you have these different data tiers in an analytics
10:16
environment where the the the E family is a great fit. Uh CD R is billing records, right? You're you're constrained by regulatory uh requirements to keep billing records, you know, for a certain amount of time based on uh regulation. Again, a great platform for for long anywhere from short to long term storage of those records.
10:35
And because you're getting better kind of like lead performance than you might off disc. Uh You can also start using that as an analytics repository for those building records. Uh Backup is a huge use case. I'm gonna give you an example in a minute. Uh You've probably got lots and lots of what they call purpose built backup appliances, right? Which are just, you know, those backup
10:54
appliances we all know uh you've probably got loads of those in your environments uh to think about replacing those uh customer care. Are you doing customer care center recordings? Are you using products like nice or for or you may have built a homegrown systems, right? And you're typically recording those calls for training for customer support again, for regulatory reasons.
11:13
Another interesting use case to look at uh video surveillance, whether it's your internal use or we're seeing telcos getting more and more into the business of selling video services because uh they can layer on top of that things like video analytics, which are becoming very interesting for a lot of organizations, right? Uh Classic user file share probably got lots of
11:33
that out there. Again, you can replace it with, with the E family and get all those benefits we talked about. Uh and finally a newer use case which is database object storage. Now your transactional database, like I said, you're not going to put on an E array. Uh You know, that's where we have something like flash array X or Excel is the perfect
11:51
platform for that. But we're seeing newer database models where the transactional side of the database is connecting to an object repository which might hold things like images or, or video or you know, or just other files, PDF S things like that that are being held in an object repository. Now, Flash Blade, E which does native object services is a great platform for that,
12:12
right? Where you can have these very, very massively big object uh data repositories that can be pulled into your transactional database as needed, right? So these, these are just some of the areas and that we've thought about and you may not even know like this might be something to ask about internally. Like, hey, you know, I know we're doing
12:29
customer care care recordings, you know, how much, how much disk are you using for that, right? You may not have ever really uh done a, done a an inventory across these different use cases. So it's something to consider. Uh and to look at when you're uh you know, thinking about maybe replacing some of these these disc systems and I'm gonna give you here
12:47
finally as I uh wrap up a real world example of a backup use case. Now, this was not a Telco uh but backup is kind of backup. Uh This was at a, a large manufacturing company uh that had a very, you know, commonly known dis based backup appliance. I'm not gonna say which, uh but they had 45 racks of,
13:07
of backup appliances, 45 racks. Uh There's a lot of racks and they were able to replace that with because of the density of these uh of these products with 4.2 racks of flash blade. E just a little bit over four racks. That's a 90 1% reduction in space. And they literally freed up 41 entire racks in the data center. And this is for one workload in one department
13:32
of the company, right? Uh So this is the kind of thing when we're talking about, you know, space saving. It's not, it's not like you, you know, from, from 45 racks to 46 to 41 racks or something like big deal, it's literally 90% reduction and getting 40 racks, 41 racks back for other purposes.
13:48
At the same time, they also freed up 100 and 36 network ports, right? Much less cabling, much less maintenance. Uh Lots of network capacity returned to do other stuff and an 84% reduction in energy consumption, right? So these are the kind of benefits even assuming performance is equal. Again, I think it's probably gonna be a little
14:08
better on our side. Uh But even if it weren't, right, those benefits are so uh really irrefutable, right? Why would you not want to do this uh when it comes down to it, when you get that kind of uh return on uh on uh you know, moving from disc to flash.
14:24
So that is why we think disc is done. Uh So I wanna thank you for listening to, to my uh part of the spiel here.
  • Video

The never-ending appetite for data storage capacity has led telecom service providers to deploy huge fleets of spinning disks. While disk may be cost effective to procure, it uses tremendous amounts of energy, emits torrents of heat, takes up acres of rack space, and disk drives fail, fail, fail, resulting in a never-ending series of disk replacements. This webinar explores how Pure//E™ arrays can replace spinning disk for numerous telecom workloads, including analytics cold tier data, backup, file shares, CDR and billing records, video surveillance and more. Watch the webinar to learn why disk is done at telcos.

07/2024
Pure Storage FlashArray//X | Data Sheet
FlashArray//X provides unified block and file storage with enterprise performance, reliability, and availability to power your critical business services.
Data Sheet
5 pages
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