In this sponsored episode, Chris talks to Fred Lherault and Larry Touchette from Pure Storage on the evolution of storage in the enterprise and the impacts on storage administration. The conversation is divided into three areas focusing on the customer, the administrator and the business.

From the customer’s perspective, the requirements of on-premises data centre storage have changed significantly. Users expect resources to be deployed on demand, using APIs, CLIs or a GUI, without the intervention of a storage administrator. The self-service aspect is also aligned with 100% availability, an expectation that has evolved from the public cloud. End users have less interest in the hardware itself, but instead focus on metrics (IOPS, latency, throughput) and see storage as an endpoint to be consumed.

The role of the storage administrator has evolved to be one similar to that of a product manager. The administration role is much more focused on ensuring storage is available and operating efficiently, rather than on the mundane task of provisioning resources. This means keeping close control on capacity growth, upgrades and patching.

For the business, costs and efficient consumption models are key. With 30-40% annual growth in consumed terabytes, year-on-year costs need to decline, while systems must become more power, space and cooling efficient. Pure Storage has introduced Pure1 and Fusion, tools for the business and administrators to ensure that the storage infrastructure operates efficiently and meets the SLAs expected by internal customers.

During the discussion, we highlight Pure Storage’s annual user conference, Accelerate, which will take place in Las Vegas between June 18th and 21st. Here is a list of some useful related content that discusses the evolution of storage in the data centre.

Elapsed time: 00:49:53

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:02:25 – How has storage management changed over the last two decades?
00:03:07 – What are the modern storage requirements of enterprise customers?
00:04:32 – The speed and agility of the public cloud is driving on-premises expectations
00:06:40 – There is a mix of customer maturity in the enterprise
00:09:48 – Customers expect less focus on hardware and more on metrics of delivery
00:12:00 – Sustainability – including power costs – are increasingly important to customers
00:13:05 – Automation – via GUI, API and CLI is expected, to reduce delivery times
00:14:51 – Businesses expect 100% uptime, with no downtime requirement for upgrades
00:17:01 – Storage “arrays” are now virtual, as data outlives the hardware
00:18:46 – Do storage administrators now have an easier job?
00:20:33 – Pure Storage takes some of the admin burden off the customer
00:22:13 – Admins need to manage infrastructure, while providing access to the technology
00:24:52 – How do businesses manage the financial demands of growing storage needs?
00:27:27 – Modern consumption models are driven by architectural features
00:29:16 – Pure Storage has operational processes to manage customer on-demand consumption
00:33:15 – Efficient resource management is analogous to retail stock control
00:34:00 – Pure1 and analytics tools provide the capability to efficiently model workload placement
00:36:53 – Modern storage has many internal management functions that need AI/ML planning
00:39:00 – So what should storage vendors be delivering, as minimum functional requirements?
00:40:39 – Pure hardware and software is intrinsically linked
00:41:45 – As flash improves, vendors like Pure can address many more performance & cost use cases
00:45:00 – Pure systems started at 5.5TB, now into multi-petabytes
00:48:10 – Wrap Up