Interview: Pure Storage, DevOps Excellence Awards finalist

'Our ultimate goal is to uncomplicate data storage, forever'

DevOps is an evolving methodology that facilitates speedy and superior application development, enabling the prompt delivery of novel or revised software functionalities or products to customers.

Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards showcase outstanding achievements from organisations, personalities and solutions that have successfully applied DevOps methodologies.

This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Tuesday, 14 March in London.

One of those finalists is Pure Storage, which has reached the shortlist for two categories: Best AIOps/MLOps Tool and Best Use of Microservices/Containers.

We talked to Patrick Smith, CTO EMEA, Pure Storage, to find out what makes his company different from other technology companies and what are they working on this year.

Patrick Smith has held his current position at Pure Storage since May 2018. As a senior technical advisor, he provides crucial input and leadership across engineering, product management, sales, marketing as well as presales.

Prior to his time at Pure, Patrick was head of core engineering at Deutsche Bank with responsibility for server and storage engineering; which included product evaluation and selection, testing and certification, ownership of strategy and roadmaps and technology governance. He has also run global infrastructure engineering teams at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers.

Patrick Smith: Pure Storage delivers the world's most advanced data storage technology and services, empowering every organisation to get the most from their data while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. Our ultimate goal is to un-complicate data storage, forever. Pure's commitment to providing true storage as-a-service gives customers the agility to meet changing data needs at speed and scale, whether they are deploying traditional workloads, modern applications, containers, and more.

What makes you different from other technology companies?

PS: Over the past 12 years, Pure Storage has been a constant innovator, a first-mover and always focused on customer needs. We've experienced tremendous growth in that time, and we believe that success is driven by innovation. This is why Pure Storage's investment in R&D is far above the industry standard, with nearly 20% of revenue being reinvested into Pure's innovation engine.

We are incredibly customer-centric, we place our customers at the heart of everything we do. As a result, we have the highest Net Promoter Score in the industry, which means our customers are some of the happiest in the world.

Lastly, sustainability and energy efficiency have been part of our DNA since our founding. We have always been 100% all-flash, and a big part of this decision was to be able to achieve the massive energy savings we're delivering today. Our 2021 ESG report showed that FlashArray//X delivers 84.7% savings in direct energy usage versus competing all-flash arrays. FlashArray//XL is 80% more energy efficient than the all-flash competition, FlashBlade//S is 67% more efficient than competing arrays, and FlashArray//C is 75% more energy efficient compared to disk and flash hybrid storage competition. These are not marginal improvements, they can be fundamental transformations in an organisation's sustainability efforts, which we believe can have a real-world impact on climate change.

What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?

PS: A lot has happened in the last 12 months, however, in just the last few days we announced FlashBlade//E, an all-flash scale-out unstructured data repository built to handle exponential data growth.

In 2009 our founder pioneered a vision of the all-flash data centre and proved that storage could be all-flash at the performance tier. We've since brought flash to big data analytics, data lakes, tier 2 applications, and even backup & recovery. FlashBlade//E is the culmination of this vision, enabling us to eliminate the last remnants of disk in the data centre.

Delivered at a comparable price to disk-based solutions with a significant long-term total cost of ownership advantage, FlashBlade//E makes it possible to better manage everyday file and object workloads effectively, reliably and sustainably. FlashBlade//E consumes up to five times less power than the disk-based systems it will replace, helping organisations achieve their increasingly critical sustainability goals. Not only this but FlashBlade//E is built to flex and grow on demand with 10-20x more reliability than hard disk based systems and evolving without disruption or forklift upgrades. With cloud-like simplicity, flexibility and predictable performance, FlashBlade//E remains simple to manage at any scale.

What are you working on this year?

PS: I can't give away too many details, however, I can tell you that we have our annual Pure//Accelerate event coming up in June, where we're really looking forward to engaging with our customers and partners, as well as making several exciting announcements regarding our solutions.

Why are events like the DevOps Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?

PS: I feel these kinds of events are crucial for the industry, not just in terms of recognising and celebrating DevOps teams, but bringing those teams closer to the rest of the organisation.

DevOps Excellence Awards will take place on 14th March in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.