Pre-GITEX Interview with James Petter from Pure Storage

TECHx secured an exclusive interview with James Petter, VP International, Pure Storage, as part of its pre-GITEX coverage to learn more about what Pure has been up to. Take a look at the responses we received.

TECHx: How excited are you for GITEX Technology Week? What are your hopes from this year’s event?

James:Over the past several years, GITEX has served as the platform for us to showcase innovations that have disrupted the storage market. This years’ GITEX is particularly significant for us as we announce our vision for what modern data storage and management should be: services-driven and delivered as code. This evolution will enable organizations to gain a competitive advantage in their data-driven innovation.

On a personal note, I’m excited for the possibility of meeting our customers and partners again.

TECHx: Please tell us about your most recent enterprise solutions.

James:On September 28, we announced the launch of two new solutions — Pure Fusion and Portworx Data Services — that will significantly progress our vision of modernizing how customers work with data.

Visitors to our GITEX stand will get an opportunity to learn how Pure is meeting the demands of modern business by making data infrastructure fast to deploy, provision, and manage. With Pure, infrastructure is automated, API-driven, and transparent, and application developers are accelerated with access to the fully-integrated and deployment-ready database tools they need.

• Pure Fusion

Pure Fusion brings the cloud operating model anywhere with a new self-service, autonomous storage environment built for limitless scale that marries the best of enterprise storage with the agility and scalability of the cloud. With on-demand consumption and back-end provisioning, organizations can deliver a new scale-out storage model that unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly.

• Portworx Data Services

Portworx Data Services — the industry’s first Database-as-a-Service platform for Kubernetes — enables DevOps engineers to deploy a managed, production-grade data service on Kubernetes from the industry’s broadest catalog of options. Portworx Data Services fully automates Day-2 operations, making running data services on Kubernetes dramatically simpler than other approaches.

TECHx: What challenges do infrastructure teams face when it comes to deploying multi-cloud

There are four key challenges to successful implementation of a cost-optimized and easy-to-manage multicloud data management strategy:

• One-size fits all approach

Many organizations lack a well-defined way to manage their data across heterogeneous environments. Some may even take a one-size-fits-all approach, starting with a single cloud and applying that same methodology enterprise-wide. The risks of this shortcut are limited collaboration, governance concerns, and integration challenges.

• Data silos

The ability to manage and migrate data and applications between data domains is essential. However, on-premises and cloud environments are very different and don’t always speak the same language. The same can be said for different cloud environments. The resulting data silos can create management and efficiency challenges that can lead to friction and limited collaboration in a broad range of use cases.

• Waste and overspend

According to a recent survey conducted for Pure Storage by Spiceworks Ziff-Davis, IT executives say cost efficiency is a top reason to stay on-prem. Data repatriation to on-premises is common, and regress charges are a major pain point for any cloud deployment. This challenge grows as cloud use increases.

• Meeting regulatory compliance and data sovereignty

Using more than one cloud for data and analytics can make data management, governance, and integration even trickier. This is often driven by corporate compliance requirements, which are also sometimes government-mandated. For example, if your company is global or in the process of expansion, you’ll likely require new disaster recovery (DR) zones in multiple regions. These often need to meet strict data governance regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This would mean certain data, including customer information or personally identifiable information, cannot leave the region.

TECHx: What would you say sets you apart from your competition?

Pure’s founding and enduring vision has been to bring simplicity and reliability to enterprise storage. Through our portfolio and services, we’ve proven that storage should be dynamic; can deliver a cloud experience; be consumed on-demand; and be responsive to application needs. 

Key differentiators include:

• Evergreen™, Pure’s subscription service which eliminates refresh cycles and forklift upgrades: no competitor has been able to replicate it. 
• A comprehensive container strategy following Pure’s integration of Portworx to enable modern cloud-native applications
• The entire portfolio can be delivered as-a-Service with no lock-in, complete flexibility and comprehensive Service Level Agreements
• A focus on solutions which are services driven and delivered as code — through our latest announcement, Pure Fusion.