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20:42 Webinar

Pure//Accelerate® 2023: The All-flash Data Center

CEO Charles Giancarlo looks back at how the music and video industries were disrupted when streaming emerged. Today, we’re seeing a similar tectonic shift in data storage—the data center of the future is all flash.
This webinar first aired on June 15, 2023
Click to View Transcript
00:06
Well, good morning, everyone. So great to see you all here. Fantastic to see people standing up in the back uh with no seats available in the middle. Uh Really you do us a great honor. Uh Coming as far as you have spending uh you know, your valuable time with us.
00:23
Uh I know that there are um I have met people that have traveled halfway around the world to be with us here today. Uh That's just amazing and I want to just thank you so much for spending your time with us. I, I want to start with a story um as it turns out it's a true story and it's way back in time. Uh 1984.
00:44
Um Actually not that far back in time. Uh But uh you know, maybe and even there were color, color photos, but this was my last semester in business school and a friend of mine decided to do an independent study and believe it or not, that independent study was studying a new data recording technique called optical recording.
01:09
And we analyzed it as thinking, OK, is this going to replace magnetic recording? And we analyzed the curve if you will, the price decline curve, the improvement curve of optical and we measured the improvement curve of magnetic disk storage. And what we determined was that magnetic disk storage was going to continue to improve at an exponential rate for decades to come.
01:37
And that optical recording would not be able to catch up. Now, my friend continued to, to study this uh even after uh graduate school and later that year, that same year, 1984 he and his new wife got together with myself and my new wife for dinner. And he started to explain how in fact, op op optical recording in the form of C DS was going to replace
02:08
LP S. OK. Vinyl records. And my wife was absolutely incredulous. She said there is no way that these little C C DS are gonna replace LP S. What are people gonna do with the artwork? They love their artwork, they love having the words on the LP S. Well, I think we all know what happened with that story that was 1984 when C DS were first
02:32
introduced. And within six years, by the end of that decade, cds just took over that entire market, right. LPS were almost entirely gone. You know, this was repeated about 15 years later with another favorite digital recording technique. OK. And that was in the video realm, right? V H S V H s which everybody purchased
02:58
or or rented to be able to watch a movie at home. We all loved our V H S recorders. Right. Well, DVD S came out and only took five or six years for DVD S to completely take over the market from V H s. Now, what was interesting here is it wasn't just the recording media that changed,
03:20
but it changed the fate of companies. If we look at the major distribution for V H s and for DVD S, it was Blockbuster when, when DVD S started to take off. So we look at 2006 and within five years, Netflix that was sending out DVD S versus Blockbuster that started out in V H S completely
03:46
changed in terms of share. And in fact, five years later, if you look at, uh, you know, 2000 and, and 11 12, what happened to that light blue color? Well, Blockbuster went bankrupt and what about Netflix? Well, today it's over $30 billion in sales and by the way,
04:08
over $300 billion in market cap. So when media changes, it can change the fate of companies. So what does all this have to do with hard disc? Well, let's take a look at hard disc over the last decade or so. Um, relatives of flash now, hard disk used to be in everything we did.
04:31
Remember when hard disk was in an ipod, it's no longer in an ipod, is it, it's no longer in your laptop. And if you, if you still have a desktop, it's no longer in your desktop. In fact, hard disk is still only in two places, enterprise mass storage and hyper scalar. The two last remaining bastions of hard disk.
04:54
And as you see, N has continued to climb, it's in everything now except those two areas. And this is why we are so confident that in five years time by 2028 there will be no new hard disks sold. So the question is, are we going to get in front of that or are we going or is the industry, are individual companies in the industry going to fall behind?
05:23
So now let's take a look at pure pure was started on the basis of flash replacing hard disk. And of course, we're not quite there yet in terms of replacing it all. But over that period of time, we have grown faster than the market every single year. And in fact, this is a pure versus the entire enterprise storage market,
05:44
not just the old flash market. So we've gone from 0 to 8 point share of the entire mass storage market and all of our competitors have declined. And the real thing that we should be asking about this slide is why, why can an upstart company that, you know, had the smallest of the sales forces
06:07
that you know, it didn't have when we first got started all the features and functionality that all of the big players had, why were we able year after year to gain more market share? Well, it starts off with the fact that we deliver outcomes with our products. And what do we mean by that? Well, Matt went over some of this, but compared to our all flash competitors, we are 2 to 5 times more power and space
06:35
efficient and 10 times when you compare to hard disk systems that we replace. Most importantly, we are more than 10 times more reliable. And that's not even considering the non disruptive upgrades that we put in place. Because when our competitors do upgrades, they have what's called scheduled downtime, which they don't count in their reliability numbers.
06:58
We are, we require according to our customers, many of them in this room, you report that you're able to manage the same amount of data with 5 to 10 times less labor. I mean, that's amazing. Right? I mean, who wouldn't want to put less labor into mundane tasks having to do with their data
07:20
storage? We want to focus on more useful tasks and you add those three things together and that puts us about 50% lower total cost of ownership, including the original purchase price of the equipment. Another thing is we have the world's most consistent product line. What do I mean by that, most of our competitors have assembled their storage estate and they
07:45
cover, you know, the entire environment that most customers need, but they assembled that product line. By acquisition, they have different operating systems, they have different management systems, they have hardware that doesn't, that can't be interchanged among the different systems. We and I'll go into this, have the world's most consistent product line.
08:06
And then finally, we're the only company frankly in the system's business that can sell a product and tell our customers the product will never go obsolete. It will never cause a disruption in your environment due to an upgrade that we can keep your products new all the time. We recently uh did yet another upgrade for a customer that first purchased our product 10 years ago,
08:33
that product that they bought then without additional capital investment. So based on just the subscription now looks like in their environment, the product that we sold last week because basically we did sell it last week, we did make it last week. I mean, that's pretty amazing. It's like driving your five year old car to
08:52
work. And when you step out of the car, after arriving at work, you notice it's a brand new car. I mean, that just doesn't happen in the system business. So these are the outcomes we deliver. Now, someone who doesn't know us might ask, well, how do you do this?
09:08
How is it possible that you do this and nobody else does. So that's where we get into things that really make us quite unique. We have the most modern product line and the reason for it is starts and ends with our operating system purity purity, which operates on all of our products and supports block file and object and is the only storage operating
09:33
system that manages flash directly. It does not need to have an intermediate layer called S SDS. S SDS are designed to mimic a hard disk. Why would you take a semiconductor and mimic a hard disk that's like making a laptop computer? Mimic a typewriter. It's so much more powerful than what a mechanical device can do.
09:58
We don't need that. We are able to manage flash across the entire array or set of arrays more efficiently than companies that use their hard disk software to manage sds. This software, these uh uh direct flash modules operate on just two hardware architectures, scale up and scale out, scale up so that we can scale up and down in terms of of overall price performance,
10:25
provide very low latency scale out in terms of very large sizes, very high performance across parallel workloads D F MS and purity operate on all of these different systems, everything from the most performant to the most price competitive. And this operating system also operates on the cloud today on Aws and Azure. So a very flexible, very consistent operating system and all of these systems are managed by
10:58
one management system pure one where you can find all of the information necessary to manage and operate your data environment. Now these are all for traditional workloads. But wait, we have port works that can help you to then migrate and move to next generation cloud native workloads on kubernetes and containers operating both on our products
11:25
as well as on the cloud. And then finally, all of these things together operating with our evergreen capabilities that is always modern, always new, always non disruptive upgrades. And we're also the only company that really promises a cloud operating model, both in the sense of allowing you to manage your data,
11:49
not array by array, but really as a fleet, as a pool of storage and offer that as a service to your customers, your developers and to be able to do that again across clouds. So both on prem and in the cloud. So as you can see very modern, very consolidated, very consistent,
12:13
you don't have to deal with multiple operating systems with different API S with different management systems. You can now manage all of your environment in a simple consolidated set of solutions that are simple to operate non disruptive and allow you allow you to be able to operate the system with less training and less labor overall.
12:39
All right. So what's let's pull this together in terms of what are the four things that really distinguish pure storage? The first is we are the only vendor in, in the enterprise storage environment and frankly, the only one anywhere that has direct to flash management with our software. It's taken us 10 years to develop this software, 10 years.
13:03
It's going to take anybody else who attempts to do this many years to be able to get to the point where we are. And it's what gives us our efficiency, our effectiveness. It's also what gives us the longevity of our systems as you know, we guarantee our flash for life. And the reason is because by the, by the time it will last for easily 10 years or more,
13:24
and by that time, you will probably have moved on to larger and larger systems. We have, as I mentioned, the world's most consistent portfolio which saves you time, energy saves you from having to keep spares on all different types of systems, makes it easier to operate. Three. Is we have the cloud operating model where we will work with you so that you can manage your data storage environment across clouds like a
13:51
pool of storage to manage it in a fully orchestrated fashion, to make it easier and more consistent for you to be able to manage all of your data, not array by array, but as a pool of storage. And then finally, our unique evergreen uh life cycle. Again, this is something that has to be engineered right at the beginning of your core
14:12
software development engineered at the core of our purity system, you can't reengineer it into systems that are already in place. These are four unique attributes that I really doubt competitors will be able to mimic in any shape or form in the years to come. Ok. So um moving on, um that consistent set of products, all with one operating
14:39
system, all on D F MS can support everything from the most high performance application environment such as machine learning, such as artificial intelligence. And we have the chops to prove it. These are just a few of the customers that have ordered over the last year, but we have well over 100 A I customers. And this product line that we've shown you can operate at those high performance levels
15:06
including meta which has built with our product, both flash blade and flash array, the largest A I supercomputer in the world pretty impressive, right? But now this exact same set of products will now be able to operate at the most price sensitive areas. And this is something that Matt gave you a hint on something we spoke about at our last uh
15:29
earnings call. We have now pierced the 7200 R PM disk drive systems market with pricing at 20 cents per gigabyte, which we can do right now. Uh We can get that 15 to 20 cent per gigabyte pricing with uh flash blade that we had announced last quarter and now flash array E as well. And this is just the beginning by next year, we'll be able to go down yet again into that
15:58
next layer of mass storage. And the year after that 2025 into the next layer and even pierce into the price performance that hyper scale get with their disk estate. Again, this is why we know that disk is, is at the end of its days, there's just when you can provide at the same initial price point a product that
16:24
requires less than five, if not 10 X the amount of space and power not to mention less labor, less replacement of disc. Then how is it going to be possible for the former data standard to continue? Right? There's going to be no place left for disk to be able to operate. It's a huge market.
16:46
You know, we're talking about tens of billions of dollars and the time is now to go after it for the partners in the room, we're going to work with you to make this viable at, you know, in all of these different environments for the customers in this room. We're going to be very, very aggressive in enabling you to take out the discs in your environment. So work with us, work with our team.
17:10
We're really looking forward to really plowing ahead being the the sharp tip of the spear in this market to go after this to make your life easier. To let your teams. As Matt mentioned, go home on nights and weekends, not have to worry about their disc estate. So, uh you know, there's um if you will today, there's really no reason to not
17:35
use flash and no reason not to use pure. We provide a cost effective solution now for all of your storage needs and you know, we can time it as we go forward over the next couple of years. But you layer by layer, we can help you to finally make this a thing of the past. And there's a side benefit to this. After all,
17:57
it is greener, you know, 1/5 to 1/10 the power, 1/5 to 1/10 the space and cooling. You know, this is not even assuming any advantage in data reduction. That's on top of this. You know, our comparisons on this pricing are based on raw, raw.
18:16
So your results could vary but it only vary up only be better. We are less than 1/10 of space and power as we mentioned, but also less than 1 50 E waste. First of all, it doesn't fail as often it lasts longer. And even if it didn't, the amount of waste on flash is far less than on hard disc, so you can improve your E S G scores as well.
18:45
And by the way, the other benefit, you get more than 10 times the reliability. I mean, who doesn't want that? Right? So um I have to say that this is a big deal, not just for each of you individually, but data centers take up about 1 to 2% of total energy usage in the world. That's an incredible figure,
19:05
isn't it 1 to 2% of all energy in the world? If data takes up about 20 to 25% of the power in an average data center, which is in fact the case. And if we take the lower figure that going to flash, going to pure flash is 1/5 the power of the hard disks that it replaced 1/5 to 1/10.
19:31
That means that we will save roughly 20% of all data center power, right? Take your entire data center power, you save 20%. Imagine that. I mean that is a lot of the world's power that gets saved by one simple action. And I don't think there's anything else that you can do in your data center that will save
19:50
any one thing you can do in your data center that will save 20% of total power. So pretty amazing. So if we put all these things together, you know, similar cost but lower T C O um lower power, lower space, better performance better. Um Total cost of ownership uh overall more reliable, a green
20:17
environment, more consistent product. Why wouldn't you standardized and pure? Tell me why, what are the reasons I can't imagine. So we're looking forward to you to make pure your standard. I want to thank you for your time today. You're going to hear a lot more from our team.
  • Video
  • Pure//Accelerate

Charles Giancarlo

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Pure Storage

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.
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