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We're here to talk about energy and sustainability. Now, global data consumption is rapidly increasing, but Pure Storage® has the answer. With me is Fred Lherault, Field Chief Technology Officer, EMEA from Pure Storage.
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Fred, we're here to talk about data. What do we mean when we say data is a problem? So data centers and data transmission networks already use about 2% of the energy of the planet. At the same time, we're looking at a total amount of data
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on the planet growing by 10x over the next seven years. So if we don't keep that under control, we may be looking at the emissions coming from data centers are going to be as much, if not more, than the airline industry. Would it be fair to say that Pure Storage has seen this coming, that you've been working on this and been aware of this moment
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perhaps a lot earlier than a lot of other people? Energy efficiency has been something that's been at the heart of our design from the beginning. We decided to build all flash data storage systems, and even ten years ago we decided to build our own devices,
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our own DirectFlash® modules to store data that are more efficient, even than SSDs, because we could see that that moment was happening when there would be a transition going from spinning disk from HDDs to flash. Okay, so talk to me about solutions. How can I reduce my data center footprint?
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So in terms of physical space, by using our Pure Storage arrays to store the data, we can reduce the footprint by up to 96%. It’s the same as taking three large fridge freezers and replacing it by three pizza boxes. And in terms of
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power, we can reduce it by up to 85%. That's quite extraordinary. What reaction do you get from your clients when you present them with the possibilities open to them if they go with Pure Storage? Very often the first reaction is disbelief.
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And the way we address this is we’re actually the first storage vendor to come with what we call power efficiency SLAs. So what we do is we guarantee that the amount of watts on a per-terabyte basis are never going to exceed a specific value. So as a customer, how do I reduce my server power usage?
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One of the way organizations can actually reduce the total server power usage is by taking data out of those servers, storing it on efficient data storage solutions such as Pure Storage systems. So is it easy to make that transition? It is.
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It's just a matter of deploying our systems that are extremely energy efficient and also have a very small physical footprint. So they're easy to deploy, easy to install in existing data centers, and then it’s a question of migrating data to those. So to take this seriously, a company will need a proper
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strategy, an energy saving strategy, an energy transition strategy. Is that something that Pure Storage can help with? One of the way we help with those is obviously by again, bringing our solutions that are much more efficient from a power consumption, from from a physical footprint.
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But we also expose all of the power usage metrics of our system, so that organizations can use those and correlate against what's happening on the applications, what's happening in their environment. So in ten, 20 years time, what kind of data storage centers would you like to see being used?
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Actually, our goal is to make sure that there's no spinning disk in the data center anymore, and we're hoping to do that much faster than ten to 20 years because we do know that all-flash systems are more than ten times more efficient in terms of watts per terabyte than systems using spinning disks.
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Presumably a lot of companies thus far haven't been looking that carefully at how much energy they are using, particularly on their data storage. Indeed, they've been looking at the tip of the iceberg, but as we all know, it's what's below the water that's important. And very often that's what's happening when it comes to data centers.
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They are not what a lot of organizations are going to be focusing on. However, as many organizations have been tasked with reducing their energy usage, sometimes up to 10% per year it all falls down on IT and data centers to actually reduce how much power they consume.
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Always a pleasure, Fred. Thanks very much. Thank you for having me.
