Pure Storage recently achieved a significant design win with one of the top four hyperscalers. According to a company press release, this industry-first milestone marks the expansion of Pure Storage’s DirectFlash technology into large-scale environments currently dominated by hard disks.

Pure Storage describes this as the ‘beginning of a transformative shift in the industry’. Historically, hyperscalers have relied on commodity disk storage, representing nearly 70% of global hard disk drive purchases—an estimated 700 exabytes per year.

“This is the first-ever design win to provide flash for standard hyperscaler storage and it is the vanguard for flash storage providing all online storage in major hyperscale environments in the future. For reference, the hyperscale market is responsible today for 60% to 70% of all Hard Disk Drives purchased globally,” Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo said while announcing the hyperscaler win on the company’s third quarter FY25 earnings call. 

Pure Storage has been contending that by 2028, practically no new all-HDD storage systems will be sold for data center computing. In fact, HDD shipments have seen a sharp decline over the past decade. From a peak of over 651 million units in 2010, shipments dropped by nearly 71%, reaching 166 million in 2022, according to Statista.

The India Story

Ramanujam Komanduri, Country Manager for Pure Storage India, emphasized how the hyperscaler win is driving the transition to flash storage.

“Hyperscalers are possibly the largest data consumers, and they have been using commodity disk storage simply because there hasn’t been an alternative that offers comparable economics—until now. Recent improvements in flash media density, its ability to scale higher and lower power consumption have been game-changers in recent years. Our design win signals that hypercalers can manage extremely large data footprints with high-capacity flash storage at economics similar to what they have been used to in the past.”

He emphasized that the design win will add to the momentum for the replacement of hard disk drives (HDDs) in the market.  

India accounts for a significant share of the market, generating nearly one-fifth of the world’s data. “Flash storage is a more sustainable way for hyperscalers to store the growing volumes of data. With Pure’s Direct-to-Flash technology, we can provide hyperscalers better performance, reliability, and significant power and space savings compared to hard disks, all at a comparable or lower total cost of ownership,” Ramanujam maintains. 

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When Paolo Juvara joined Pure Storage in 2021, he knew he had a vastly different role to fulfill. After being the CIO of one of the largest cloud companies in the world (Google Cloud), Paolo’s role at Pure Storage as the Chief Digital Transformation was to be quite an unusual venture. 

A software developer at heart, his diverse background in both business and technology domains has helped him ace the role.

In this exclusive interview with CIO Dimension, Paolo shares his unique experiences as the chief digital transformation officer who drives Pure’s ambitious digital agenda to meet the company’s innovation and growth goals. 

Watch the full video here: 

People should be at the center of every digital transformation project 

DX is all about leveraging technology. But you really cannot succeed if you are not focusing on people and process, says Paolo. He believes that digital leaders must be empathetic towards the needs of diverse set of users. 

“If you do not involve humans to begin with, by understanding their needs and challenges, then you are not going to find the right bottlenecks – whether your goal is to improve process efficiencies or drive innovation,” he adds. One of the ways he implements this strategy is through the formation of a product management team within the DX organization.

For a company that transformed storage into an innovation technology, all of Pure’s technology and business advances are complemented by digital transformation – to greatly amplify the outcomes. The starting point of a successful transformation project, says Paolo, is often the back office. “I would say back office is the foundation of everything else in digital transformation. If operational complexities are not addressed, they start becoming a huge bottleneck for the scalability and growth of the company. My number one priority has been to focus on the back-office operations so that we can remove all the internal friction.” 

In this interview, Paolo also highlights how the traditional ways of measuring the success of DX projects are changing, the importance of employee and customers experience in such initiatives and why organizations must clearly define the business outcomes at the very outset. 

Also read:
Digital Transformation is all about questioning the status quo: Mani Mulki, Kedaara 

Pure Storage, Microsoft expand partnership to address cloud adoption challenges

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Pure Storage today announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft, integrating its storage capabilities to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) – Microsoft Azure’s fully managed VMware-as-a-Service offering. 

As cloud adoption accelerates, enterprises aspire to migrate all or portions of their VMware environments – the majority of which consume block-based storage – to the cloud but are met by challenges of inconsistent storage layer management in comparison to their on-premises deployment, and an unmet need to scale compute and storage independently to match data growth. 

The expanded partnership between Pure Storage and Microsoft eliminates this barrier. By integrating Pure Cloud Block Store with Azure VMware Solution, organizations gain access to Pure’s feature set and the ability scale storage and compute independently as workload demands change.

Sudharsan Aravamuthan, Head, Systems Engineeringing, Pure Storage India, said, “Currently migrating on-premise environments to AVS is often a cost prohibitive move as enterprises are unable to decouple the storage and compute components. With Pure Storage’s block storage option on Azure, organizations can migrate their applications to the cloud without any capability trade-offs, with the ability to scale storage and compute independently based on need.

Aravamuthan added that customers will be able to leverage the offering irrespective of the existing storage infrastructure they have in their on-premise environments. AVS will continue to have VMware’s vSAN as an option along with Pure’s Cloud Block Store for customers. 

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