57:54 Webinar
Transform Your Business with Everpure, a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™
Join Everpure for a discussion on how the Everpure platform can help transform your business by building an Enterprise Data Cloud.
This webinar first aired on December 10, 2025
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Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us. Before we get started, let's cover a couple of housekeeping items. As an attendee, you're all in listen-only mode. If you have any questions for our presenters, please put those in the Q&A bottom of your screen. Today's webinar is being recorded, and we'll
provide you with that link in a follow-up email in just a few days. So welcome to our webinar, Transform Your Business with Pure Storage, a leader in the Magic Quadrant. I'd like to indru- introduce our host today, Stephanie Richardson, Vice President, Product Marketing here at Pure Storage.
Stephanie, I'll hand it over to you. All right. Welcome everybody, and thank you so much for joining us today. All right. You know, the challenges that IT leaders are facing today are no joke. From AI, the rise of cyber attacks, hybrid cloud, data at massive scale, everyone is
trying to keep up with these transformational changes and trying to figure out how they are shaping their infrastructure. But while they're doing that, IT leaders are also trying to figure out how they support these new demanding workloads and how they can help their businesses to keep up every single day, because they really have to deliver on the services and meet the SLAs that their
business- businesses need to succeed. So figuring out how to build the infrastructure to keep up with today, but also figure out how to meet the needs of tomorrow, is trickier than it's ever been, especially when it comes to data storage and data management, and that's exactly what we're here to talk about today.
So we're thrilled that you're here, and here to unpack this with all of us from Pure Storage, I am pleased to welcome Edwin Yuen, and our special guest, Darryl Stevens, the systems architect from the State of Maryland Department of IT. Okay. So Edwin, we're actually gonna start with you. So AI is hitting organizations like a brick wall.
A ton of opportunity, but also a ton of change, obviously. It really is bringing change in a variety of different ways. But first off, you know, AI just as a workload is a beast. So what are the challenges that these AI workloads are really raising for IT, and why does this really change how IT needs to think about how they service these workloads?
So it's actually really interesting. As you brought up, AI/ML, these type of new workloads are extremely challenging for traditional IT, and they're really kind of fundamentally changing the requirements and the asset you have of IT. You know, a lot of traditional workloads, they're generally done in what we call the
plan and deploy mode. They're planned out weeks and months ahead of time. They have the requirements. You know how big they're gonna be. You do a lot of capacity planning, speed planning, and then you order hardware, you
deploy hardware. And even in the age of virtualization, you still kind of set it up, how many VMs you need. So everything's kind of planned out. And then you build in a little bit of growth, you know, 10% here, maybe 25%, and then if it goes beyond that, you've gotta make some big changes.
But AI/ML usage can be extremely dynamic. They both scale up, and then they scale out at, at scales that just haven't been That could be 100%, 200%, 500% bigger might normally need, and you'll need it in a very rapid timeframe. Well, we need to get this going tomorrow.
We need to get it going today. And then as fast as they scale up and scale out, they can also scale down 'cause you may not need it. So it's very, very dynamic, going up and out, back down, up and out again, and you have to be able to service that need there's the opportunity that the business has, and there's, an opportunity cost loss if IT
can't meet those requirements. And it just doesn't fit with the traditional model of that static plan and deploy process. The fundamental issue behind plan and is that if you think about it, IT systems, most notably in storage and data, they're fundamentally the same architectures that we've had since the 1980s.
So yes, things have gotten faster with speeds and latency and capacity, but about how storage and data is managed and how it's delivered, it's still restricted by the legacy designs. We still pick 'em up. We think of them as blocks of resources, and we prepare them and align them to workloads,
and then we just kind of put them together like Lego sets. And you can't do that very quickly, and they're unable to adapt. They're unable to be dynamic to meet the ne- needs of things like, AI/ML. And then in order to adapt to new needs, in order to make change, traditional IT is s- and traditional infrastructure product, they simply grafted more and more technology on top
of what they do now, which makes, everything more complicated and a lot more difficult to manage. So with today's workloads, with these advanced workload, what's needed is IT needs to be able to deliver data as a service, not as blocks of infrastructure. It's gotta be dynamic, and it's gotta be secure.
That's what meets the needs of the business. And existing storage infrastructure just isn't designed to do that. So we really need to move past simply old infrastructure and just trying to make it slightly better. We really need to transform inside to do something significantly different, something new in order to adapt to what the needs are
for today and whatever is the next big thing for tomorrow. So, so what is it about, fundamentally about those legacy, infrastructures or how they are architected that really is, is limiting? Because you're right, I mean, they were designed in the, in the '80s. They were designed a long time ago, but they've gotten us far.
We've stretched and pushed them pretty much as far as they're gonna go, but what You you're saying that they really can't adapt, and they don't have the agility and the flexibility, but what is it in their of architectural structure that makes that they are not able to adjust to these new workloads?Yeah, that, that la-lack of adjustment, the, the fundamentals is they're generally vertical silos
of hardware and software. And so what we've done in the past is we've, you know, we set up that Lego bricks, as I describe it, and then we kind of build it up, and that's how we make a builder. And it can, it can go a little bit wider, but the issue is that everything's in these vertical silos that are very specific to the workloads or specific to requirements.
Like, this is my set that does this speed and capacity, or this is my set that does this workload. This is how I, I use it. And what that does is it prevents IT from really leveraging all the resources they have to potentially deliver the services.
Like I said, it's like vertical bricks of pre-configured silos of Legos, not a big pool of Legos that I can go and dynamically build what I have, you know? It, it-- That type of architecture might have worked in the past. It doesn't work for what we need to do in the future. Imagine if you, like, if you have a house, it's like building an entire house for every
single person in your household rather than leveraging all the different things within one house to service everybody. You know, if you have five people, it's not good to have five kitchens. You have one kitchen, and then you could go ahead and do everything that you need to make, you know, as small of a meal or as big of a meal as you want, and it's
just easy to move around. So what you wanna do is try to kind of bring everything together and scale say, "Hey, look, I've got all these and all these capabilities across the board, and I can compose them as services and then deliver them across the board." the other problem is when you have these vertical silos, the existing management tools can't see across
those silos. So you can see within this logical within this configuration, but understanding everything that you have to do. So when you have silos of resources and an inability to look across, everything is just kinda too rigid to make the change. A lot of what we're doing at Pure Storage with our Pure Storage platform is to build
something that gives you a platform that delivers a consistent way to run every workload. You wanna make simple, all your resources to make it easy to deploy, to operate, to scale everything, and to get everything to work together. And when you have that platform that makes everything composable and everything, dynamic,
then you can use an architecture like we've talked about, which is this Enterprise Data Cloud. And what the Enterprise Data Cloud is, it's a unified intelligence architecture where every system, every volume, every dataset, they're aware of each other, and then you can act on that awareness and automate it.
So they're aware of what resources are available, work together. You can then automate that and then kind of deliver that as needed. And then when you have this Enterprise Data Cloud architecture, you can leverage advanced placement, you can tighten your security, you can leverage steering data so that the business gets the performance and resilience and efficiency it expects, but it's available
at a new scale of being able to scale up and scale out and being able to deploy at a pace that's just not possible with traditional systems. Got it. So, okay, first up, agreed, nobody kitchens, Everpure. Not necessary, okay?
So I'm with you there. So the Enterprise Data Cloud, you're really talking about two things here. You're talking about, first off, bringing all of your data storage resources into really one kind of virtualized cloud of data, and then you're talking about really management visibility and control and automation across that one kind of virtualized
resource, right? So I think that's, that's what you're talking about there. So that's really interesting because that brings you really new levels of, of and agility as you can really manage that, those resources across that virtualized cloud. So, so that's a really interesting and different approach architecturally than what
we've seen it before, right? Like these vertical stacks that you're talking about. So, so tell us a little bit more about, why is this shift so important, this really fundamental architectural shift to this Enterprise Data Cloud, and, and how will it fundamentally change how IT operates at that data storage and data management level?
Yeah, and, and absolutely. Just the way you describe it. It's not just adopting a new architecture or a new way to compose. In the end, it allows IT to change how it operates. It's, it's, it's, it's not just an architectural shift, it's an operational shift
into how IT operates, and the first of that big shift is we need to shift from managing infrastructure to managing data. Rather than worrying about, every single item and how it operates, how fast it is, and is it up and running, and things like that, which is how existing IT works, we ensure that the data and the services and everything that we deliver meet the needs of
the business and are completely capable of supporting the business. And we think about the outcomes and the benefits, not about what's running in the background. You know, to extend your analogy, even if we have one kitchen, right, we want to change that mindset that instead of worrying about whether or not every appliance is working, we
should worry about the food. We should worry about whether or not the food tastes good, is it coming out right, is it hot? How is it coming out? 'Cause at the end of the day, all the work that we're doing with those infrastructure, with those appliances, is for that service, for that food, so to speak, that's being delivered.
So we wanna make that fundamental kind of mind shift that says, "Hey, we don't wanna-- We wanna get away from managing bits and bytes and, and, and infrastructure. We wanna manage the data that we're supporting and how it's being used. Then the, the other big shift that you have to make, and you brought it up, is about unifying the data and enabling intelligent au-um, automation.
And so you have this Enterprise Data Cloud, this unified intelligent architecture, and once you have it-All the resources that you have are together in that virtualized pool, and it says, "Look, I've got all this capability, and I can divvy it up, and I can make it available on demand whenever it's needed in however way the workloads and the users need to consume it." And then you just focus on how that data is then delivered, not
what is composed or how you bring that together. That's all handled, you know, by the Pure Storage platform. And so you can focus on those business outcomes. And really at the end of the day, tho- those data, the, the old style day-to-day kind of maintenance type of things, all that management is abstracted and it's automated in
its management. And then instead of having admins try to figure out how to talk to each other or try to figure out how hardware you have all the resources talking and being aware of each other, so they can help coordinate and automate based on the policies that you develop. And then everything is all built in.
So you've got management that's built in, you have automation that's built in, so you don't have to do all the little bits and bytes. Cyber resilience, protection, all that is built in so that it's not something that you keep adding on like in traditional. It's all inherent as part of the platform, so that you can deliver it.
And so in the end, you can deliver STaaS. You can deliver everything as much as needed, when it's needed, with the agility and the power, you know, cloud, but you can across the entire landscape, whether the cloud, it's on-premises, it's being hosted. Everything is all kind of unified together, and then you're focused on supporting the
needs of the business by delivering SLAs, not just relying on them. Now you're delivering those SLAs, and we're focused on outcomes, not infrastructure. In the end, that's the power of the Enterprise Data Cloud. That's the power of what we're building at Pure with the Pure Storage platform. We're really enabling customers to very rapidly kind of build up this capability,
virtualize and unify their data, automate their infrastructure, so they could start delivering data rather than managing infrastructure. You know, a cou- couple of se- key things I wanna just double-click on in there. I think, you know, the shift from, from managing infrastructure to managing the data. I mean, that is a really, really interesting, pivot or refocus, right?
Especially we started the whole conversation talking about AI, says that AI is a, a data conversation, right? It is a- about-- it brings our data to a scale and a velocity that nobody before, and it really becomes doing AI properly is about getting control of your data and doing your data properly, having a, a really, really strong data strategy and really
getting control of your data. So what you're talking about here is get out of the business of managing your appliances and really kind of, you know, managing the hardware and really getting into the business of managing the data, which is really, really interesting. It's kind of a different level of focus and, kind of different level of a perspective for
IT teams, which is where they should be focusing. They should be focusing on the management of the data. They should be focusing on the compliance and the governance of the data. So that's a really interesting pivot. Just by changing your infrastructure, your kind of architectural approach to your
infrastructure, it allows you to really focus on what's important, which is the data versus the boxes. So that's really interesting. And number two, you know, as you were talking about, the power of the Enterprise Data Cloud and really kind of how that really changes the management element of it, I'd love you to just say a little bit more about, you know, how do you think that's gonna change the kind of the
role of IT in and of itself? Cause I would, I would expect that the workflows in and of itself of like how you're managing and provisioning and, and doing those types of things in the day-to-day of your storage and infrastructure are going to become easier and less manual as well, wouldn't you think?
No, no, absolutely. And when we, when we talk about automation, it's about automating the things that are repetitive and that are, generally a drag on, on IT admins and IT infrastructures where they had to do work, there's reliability concerns and things like that. So at, at a, at a fundamental stage, at the first part, you've got things such as,
templates and configurations where you can drive change management, you can drive drift control, you can drive consistency, you can make sure things are configured in the right way across the board, so you don't have to manually go ahead and, you know, go ahead and reconfigure these on a regular basis. You know, I've heard stories of admins, you know, spending, you know, of a weekly meeting.
You know, every Sunday I've got to make sure this is working, or every Monday make sure this is working. That can be all handled through the automation and the communications between the systems, right? We're really talking about all of those different resources being able to talk to each
other and being aware of each other, right? And it's not just kind of information that's on a big screen and you're like, "Well, okay, well, A is doing this and B is doing this. They're all communicating with each other. They understand it can load balance, they're ready to say, "Okay, now I can sit there and say, 'Make sure we always have this capability.' Or when these requirements need
to grow, go ahead and pull from this pool. Let me know what's going on, but go ahead and auto deploy that." and the really takes away from, the, the, the, the day-to-day drag that I think an IT has, where instead of managing, like I said, the individual pieces and just making light's on, now we're really advancing a system where we're more of a services manager.
We're ensuring things are delivered. We're being able to be proactive and visually see, okay, I see this coming up ahead. I can start planning, and being a little bit more dynamic and being proactive in terms of how we build out the infrastructure. Not very reactive, where the business come to us and say, "Okay, well, I've got a new IT
project, and so, you know, you need to go ahead, and I think this is what I need," and we get back in that plan and deploy phase again.It really is a fundamental shift. What we're talking about is very proactive IT helping the business, not reactive IT just making sure the lights are on. Yeah. That's awesome, 'cause I think, you know, each
From a compliance perspective, I mean, amazing 'cause as you said, just managing drift, managing just ensuring kind of a statewide that you're meeting the compliance needs of the organization, just from an efficiency perspective, right? Like just making sure that you're putting your resources to good use, not only your storage resources, but your people resources.
And not spending time and energy just moving data around and optimizing boxes Anyway, super, super interesting concept, and it's really interesting about how, really, it is a fundamental shift from an architectural perspective, and the ripple effects of the, and impact that it can have are really far reaching. Okay, shifting gears just a second, Edwin.
So Gartner recently released not one, but two new Magic Quadrants. So tell us a little bit more about these new MQs. Sure. Yeah. In Recently, the, Gartner released two 2025 Magic Quadrant reports. One is called Enterprise Storage Platforms, and one is called Infrastructure Platform
Consumption Services. I know, a little bit of a mouthful. You can think of 'em sometimes as ESP or PX-CSI, but, I'll expand them out. With, with Enterprise Storage Platform, that replaces two older Magic Quadrants. There used to be one for what they called primary storage, and then file and object storage. So those have now been merged together because
they see, you know, Gartner sees the unification of those, quadrants, the unification of storage together, a- as we've just talked about for, you know, the Enterprise Data Cloud and for the Pure Storage platform. The Infrastructure Platform Consumption Services, that's really focused on infrastructure services, which is delivering compute as a service, networking as a service,
and storage as a service. So for, for those who may not be really deep dive in Gartner Magic Quadrants, the Magic Quadrants are designed to ada- evaluate different vendors within the larger coverage area, within that subject area, and they evaluate both the capabilities of a vendor and also their future plans, as well as customer feedbacks and other things.
And they put that all into single measurement, a single chart. Now, this measurement is then shown through two axises. And you have the ability to execute, and that's the vertical axis or what we call the Y-axis, and that's the capa- bility of the vendor. How well can they do? How stable is the company?
How good is their delivery? How good is their, capability to support the customers? How happy are their customers? How do they go ahead and do the work that we expect today? And then there's a completeness of vision, and that is what we call the, the bottom
left-right or the X-axis. That's really talking about the vendor's future plans. Do they really understand where the market's going? Do they understand where customers need to be? And how are they planning?
How are they projecting and taking that ability to execute and extending it into the future? So for the Enterprise Storage Platform MQ, it's really again about unified storage. That's block, file, and object storage, available both as hardware and as a service. And then, that's really about how do you support all these different workloads and all
these different types of storage, and then you centrally manage with automation. So a lot of that transformation that we're talking about, that's what Gartner sees as the future for storage also. And so we're seeing that from a industry perspective. With the Infrastructure Platform Consumption Services, Gartner
deliver, again, compute, networking, and storage as a STaaS. That's across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud models. Those services have to be platform-natured. They have to have workload central ma- workload centric management, and then a focus on services and outcome through SLAs, not performance, but how do you guarantee, how do
people Azure if it's a service, how do I know what I'm getting, and how willing is the vendor able to back it up and guarantee that to ensure that my business still operates the way that it should. Gotcha. Okay. So how did we do? How did Pure do on these two MQs?
Well, I'm extremely happy to share that Pure has been recognized as a leader in both Magic Quadrants. So in the Enterprise Storage Platform Magic Quadrant, Pure was positions- positioned highest for the ability to execute, furthest for the completeness vision compared to all the other competitors, or in that upper there, a, a number of different companies
that leader quadrant. But Pure is, far and away the leader in that and the farthest in that area. In the Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure Platform Consumption Services, Pure was recognized as a leader, one of only two companies to end up in that quadrant. So, a, a little bit different than the other Magic Quadrant.
This one, only two companies in that leader quadrant. And, you know, for Pure Storage, we're a company that's focused on storage, and to do that well in a Magic Quadrant that covers compute, networking, and storage, this is really an incredible result. Gartner's consistently recognized Pure Storage as a leader in multiple different Magic
Quadrants over the past 12 years. And I think for this year, our results are very representative of our ongoing vision with the Enterprise Data Cloud and our ability to deliver a true platform. And we're gonna continue to define the future of storage and data management, where data is going, both availability of the platform and delivered as a service so that
customers can do everything they need to support all these different workloads like AI. That's great. So awesome. Thank you, Edwin. You know, those two MQs really are a great representation of kind of what everybody is doing and really what outcomes that some of these, some of these platforms are delivering to, for customers.
So why was Pure such a standout in both of these Magic Quadrants? And really, what is it that-- What did call out as really unique about the Pure Storage platform that is delivering real outcomes for our customers?Yeah, I, I think there's, you know, like you said, the, the, the industry's moving, but I think Pure is absolutely a leader in, you know, in taking it in this direction.
And there are kinda three things that I think that are unique Pure that, that I, we really believe drive why the results happen for Gartner this way. One, we call it a software-defined DNA. We use software to unlock the full power of our hardware, full power of all the different capabilities, and all the different architectures, and all the different places
where we can deliver data services. We're creating a foundation for a system that's always simple, performant, reliable, and then Evergreen. You know, always had that Evergreen promise that we've talked about. That's something that we're known since day one about, and we're continuing to use that to
set us apart as we move into, you know, the Enterprise Data Cloud future. Second, we believe we are the first true enterprise platform. So a lot of people have been building out platforms of storage, but we're really a storage platform that is really unifying the data. We're bringing efficiency, intelligent automation, and control, and we're, we're
building across one consistent operating model so that all Pure Storage customer users can really leverage all the different us- resources and all the different architecture configurations, and deliver 'em to meet the needs of those businesses. So it's not just about having the same hardware across the board. It's about building a true platform that has consistency across performance, capability,
and management. And then speaking of management, I think that's kinda the third big thing, is just Pure Fusion. Fusion unifies management of all storage into that virtualized pool. It's adaptive, it's autonomous, it speaks to each other.
It's really a transformational technology that allows data become more autonomous, it's more seamless, and it can do that scale, that scale up, scale out that I talked about for AI/ML. It can do the scale down. It can do that intelligence.
It can do everything in real time a- as quickly as the needs of the business are. So again, getting away from traditional plan and deploy, getting away from vertical silos. We're horizontally across, we're pulling everything together, and then we can just build things as easily as possible, that kitchen kinda that I was talking about really only Fusion bring these critical capabilities together.
It leverages a platform, it's fully integrated, it's built into all the Pure and services. And when you use that Pure Storage platform using all three of those differences, that's how you're able to consistently deploy and operate, and scale any of your resources. That's how we think our customers are gonna be very easily able to address those rapidly
changing IT environments, so that you can anticipate needs. So again, we're talking about being proactive, not reactive. We're talking about delivering data and not managing infrastructure. All those things are capable through those three, big differentiators for us. Edwin, thank you so much.
That was such a great overview of really the, the, the enf- en- the Enterprise Data Cloud and this r- really kinda revolutionary new architectural approach to data storage and data management that can completely change how we think about storage, how we manage our data, and how we really start to tackle some of these future workloads that our legacy approach just cannot keep up with.
There's just It's just not gonna It's not gonna work. The old way is just not gonna work. So, so thank you for that. Now I would love to transition to our special guest, Darryl. As I mentioned earlier, Darryl Stevens is here from the state of Maryland.
Darryl runs our, the IT team there. And Darryl, so happy to have you, so thank you for joining us. Oh, yeah, happy to be here. Thank you for the invite. All right. So before we kinda dive into all, all the deep dark questions, Darryl, why don't you start off by giving us just a, kind of a quick
overview of your journey with Pure? Wow, right. So, so I will start with a little bit of background about the Maryland Dept. of IT. What we do is we are charged with providing technology solutions to our, to our customer agencies throughout the state, mainly in the executive branch.
That's, that's what I, I, I like to call our first-degree end users, and then the second-degree end users would be the residents of our state. So where I focus at is our infrastructure STaaS platform. And within that we deliver virtual machine hosting, we deliver NFS, services to approximately 40 different state agencies.
So that's kind of a background on us. Now as far as our, our, our journey with Pure, so about two years ago I was, we were, we consumed a backup as a service product from a vendor, from our data center vendor. And they came to us and they said, "Hey, we can offer you, Pure Storage as a backup destination." And in my head I'm
like, "Well, I know Pure Storage is all- You're telling me that we can, that it's be economical to do this?" And they're like Then they presented the pricing, and because of the way Pure has different entry points, right, for the performance that, that you need, we were able to start, writing our backup data to a Pure Storage, FlashArray, very economically.
Now, been in this business for a while. If you were to tell me 10 years ago, "Darryl, you're gonna write your backup, data, the destination's gonna be a, an all-flash storage array," I would've said you're crazy. But we were able to achieve that with Pure. And I'll get to some of the, the, metrics, in a bit, but greatly, vastly improved the
en- environment. So from there, um-Where we're at now is that we just replaced our legacy storage vendor with a Pure Storage FlashArrays, for our VMware data environment, which has been a- an amazing thing. The, just the, just the ra- just the reduction ratios, the ease of use, the density.
I'll tell you, I looked at it when it was in the rack, and I said to myself, "We're really gonna do this? This is gonna happen?" And, and it did. Just it's unreal, what Pure Storage can offer. So currently we're really looking at designing for our W- we have a NAS also serve 40 state agencies.
Within that environment, we need to replace some C- components, and we are looking heavily at Pure Storage. In the future, we also have a, probably gonna get this pronunciation wrong with the acronym, but the SEAM environment. So we- You got it. Did I get it? Oh, that's right. Okay.
Very cool. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. so we are looking at replacing NAV, which has a lot of object storage in it, and some very high performance block storage in there as well. We just had a meeting this morning about, about, Pure's AI capabilities,
and we're looking, or Or we're It's very much in its infancy as part of, what Dell is doing with AI, but they're really getting there more, more, and more. And, today we discussed an on-prem AI pod with them, which they seem like they wanna hear some more about. And then, just about the idea that I have is I, I, I wanna use, be- because you can, different price points, people tend to think
of backup data as archive. I'm trying to shift that mentality over, and so I'm looking for, like, potentially, like, an on-premise archive solution, for, And I think that's, like, where we've been, where we're at, and then where we're going, is the way I see it. Another part of, our journey, I would just summon up in saying, you know, why Pure?
And I would say they live up to their tagline of simple storage forever, and simple permeates throughout the whole entire process. I just think it's in their ethos. Like, all companies have a ethos. Pure has one.
And, you know, I mean, I'll take it very, briefly through, I like the waterfall model, for, for us for infrastructure. So, like, from the planning and the analysis phase, you're gonna talk to a great account team. And then, you know, they're gonna be very informative.
You're probably gonna do a, te- a, a test drive, and you're gonna It's gonna be simple, and you're gonna say, "Where's the catch?" 'Cause I knew I was doing that. I was like, "Where is the catch of this? There's gotta be something that I'm missing." there was not a catch. Go into the design phase.
You're gonna talk to your systems engineers. If you're in Maryland SLED, those guys are great. So, but I'm sure they're all great. But, yeah. And the, you know, the one differentiator that as we look at different storage arrays that I
loved about Pure was that they actually gave real storage reduction numbers. They didn't play games with, like, thin provisioning. They didn't do any of that, 'cause thin provisioning is not storage reduction. Storage reduction is these are the zeros and ones, and I make the, these zeros like this. That's storage reduction.
Thin provisioning is probably storage efficiency, I'll give you that, but it's not true reduction. You will get actual reduction numbers from your systems engineers. And I love that, that they do that, 'cause o- other vendors will, around Christmas time, they'll play some reindeer games, right?
Okay, with their numbers, and they'll promise these numbers, and it's just It just, it just doesn't, it doesn't hold up. So then, you know, and I kinda kid about this one, but simplicity even in their bill of materials. My bill of materials was four lines long, that was because I, I added training in,
in there. Compare that to other vendors. Pages. Pages. So I mean, I say that, but again, it just shows you how simple they like to keep things. Yeah. So you've been with this, like, you've been with this two years now?
Yeah. Right? No, no, no, about a year. Actually, about a year. Yeah. Okay, about a year. So what Talk, so that, that's an amazing journey. You've done a lot in a short period of time. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about kinda what
business impact have you started to see, in, again, in that short period of time. Anything you can share? Oh, absolutely, yeah. Like, I know we went from three storage devices to one. That was 77U to 3U.
And f- just, just apples to apples, that was all-flash to all-flash. That was not spinning disk. That was, all-flash disks, 77U to 3U. Over a five-year periods, as we looked at replacing our VMware block storage environment, we found that the state is gonna save $1 million over five years- Wow as opposed to our
legacy vendor. It eliminates complexity. Let's go back to the simple thing. You know, it's just they're running an old Array software. Some storage vendors are running on FlashArray software that, that came out high school, and you could do the math.
So- That wasn't that long ago. Come on, Darryl. I know. That was. That wasn't that long agoNot at all. Not at all. So you look at that, and then, you know, you go through some things, but I think to sum it up, they're just constructs within that,
within the software that may That, that they have to a-adhere to, which just adds complexity. It adds inefficiency, to the usage of the storage array, you know? So yeah, that, I, I initially went f- we, we're using it as a backup destination, so we went from hours to restore to minutes.
Now, to be fair, that was coming from disk, but nonetheless, we went from hours to minutes, and we were to do that cost-effectively. Our VMware environment, went from 64 data stores, because they had to be set up a certain way, to 16 data stores, so there's a lot less to manage there too as well. That's amazing. Well, again, you've done, you've done a lot in
a very short period of time, so, so props to you and the, and the team at Pure for really kind of, again, moving quickly and seeing a lot of business impact really quickly as well. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, so you mentioned you started out actually with the data protection project, so I wanna pull on that thread a little bit and talk about cyber resilience as a whole.
What, how has Pure and the Pure solution really helped your, your cyber resilience strategy and approach overall at the state of Maryland? Yeah, sure. So it's definitely helped our cyber resilience, strategy, through resiliency and remediation, right? So first, like I said, we started storage at Pure Storage as a Service for
our backup destination e-environment. Once the backup data hits the, these, the, FlashArray, we use, SafeMode Snapshots, which gives it another layer of immutability, that the data cannot be changed, right? And I guess I, I should back up just o-one second and just say, just like there are new requirements on backup software to be immutable, I think there is emerging
requirements on storage arrays to be more cyber resilient to attacks, from hackers as well. And, one way we're taking advantage of that is with the, is u-using it for our backup destination. The other thing we're doing is, we have a disaster recovery site that we're replicating
our data from, from our production site over to a secondary data center. And the great thing that, again, you go back to different price points, we're ultra performance at our pre-production site. For the storage array that's gonna sit and, and hopefully never have to be used, we were able to get a high performing one at a good price point to allow that to sit there through
Pure Storage as a service. If you go to the storage Array itself, SafeMode Snapshots. They are snapshots that you can se- set up to occur, and then a-as they occur, you can granularly recover virtual machines if you had to. That's You can do that pretty easy.
And I, you know, I say easy, and a lot of storage arrays, they will have snapshots. They have snapshot capability. The ease of use of them and actually configuring them properly, setting them up, there's, pulling data from them, it's a high administrative overhead, so it doesn't make it really easy.
The last thing that I think this is a really cool feature is, let me try to pronounce this right. Eradication configuration. Say that a couple times. So let's say my admin creds get hacked, compromised. I can The storage array, even though I hit delete or, or the hacker hits delete on the
volume, the volume isn't gone, and I, I can specify a time period, a day, before that volume is actually gone. Unless there's a quorum of people, people that say, "Hey, yeah, go ahead and delete it," then you can delete it. But to have that ability, it just continues to protect our data, right?
Cause our data, y-y, you know what I mean, that's, that's our intellectual property, right? Like, the data is our currency, right? We have to protect it. So from the cyber resilience standpoint, Pure is definitely helping with that.
That's fantastic. Okay, so going back a second to what Edwin was talking about a, a few minutes ago, around the Enterprise Data Cloud architecture. You know, it, it really is kind of a new of thinking about infrastructure and about how to really think about your data storage and how you're
managing your data overall. What steps have H-how are you thinking about this, and what steps have, has your team taken towards starting to build out your own Enterprise Data Cloud to really take of that simplicity and that efficiency and that agility that Edwin was talking about earlier?
Right. Yeah, and I, I, you know, I guess it goes to the line, you know, every great journey starts with a first step, and that's where we're at. We have the storage as a service that's running. We just replaced two of our block storage, storage arrays, and we brought down the Nutanix the count that we have.
So, it's really through attrition and opportunity. Next opportunity is, is with our NAS data set. So I like to use the I love analogies, so I use the umbrella analogy, right? The EDC umbrella, and we're just slowly putting stuff u-underneath of it. And just to play out the, umbrella just a bit, you know, literally an
protects us from rain. Analogy-wise, the EDC umbrella PR-protects us from a lot of things, right? You got configuration drift. You have operational complexity, the, the need to perform operations manuallyIncorrect configurations, which drive me insane.
Data silos, slow insights into, like, what's happening because I have to go here, and here to find out, like, what's happening, right? So, you know, so my idea And just to give a little context here. At present, we have 19 different storage arrays, and we have a smattering of block. We have file oriented, and we have object oriented.
All of them run a different array software. So let's, let's compare that to what Pure does with Purity. Whether you're running file, object, or block, it's running the Purity Storage array software. So now me and my cohorts only have to learn one, well, we'd have to learn a couple for a while, but, once we get everything under the umbrella, we'll be able
just to learn one, right? Just to have that experience in a single 1. And I'll tell you, I'm a big And just, oh, what it pr- what it protects us from, just, configuration drift, that drives me insane. I, I am a stickler. A few years ago we had a health check, on our
legacy vendor, and the, the checker, that's I lost proper title, but we'll call him where it's at work. Um- Yeah, he's the, he's the guy. And, he came back and which, which I was very proud to hear, he said, "This storage array is in the top 10% of storage arrays as far as being clean and taken care of that
seen." I was very proud about that, but what goes along with that is a lot of manual effort and time and corrections and looking over people's shoulder, just to make sure they're not doing something wrong. So and that's what I see with the EDC. In a way it's kinda like I joke sometimes, like, I would like to just clone me.
To me, the EDC in a way is like a virtual clone of me. Like, it's a program clone of me that if a volume's gonna get created, I can trust my junior admin to hit it, and it's gonna be created the way I wanted it to be created, right? Coz, you know, one thing I always hate to see is you go into a storage array and you see
a volume, and it's called Vol1. Which is, what is Vol1? Right? Um- Yeah. So, yeah. So yeah. Um- I mean, I love that though, 'cause that's exactly what we were talking
about earlier, right? Of you- the EDC really allows you to ensure that consistency, that compliance, that governance is statewide, and apply these policies as statewide so that you, you can clone you. You can determine exactly how you want this to be applied, how you want this to be, you know,
the rules and, and, and again, policies that you want to be applied across the board. And not only are you reducing the manual effort for your team or your minies, as it were, or your clones- Mm-hmm but you are driving that consistency and that compliance, to, to, for a cleaner environment, for a healthier environment, for a more consistent environment, for a more logical environment.
So, so I love that you guys are on the journey. I love that you, again, are starting to already see the benefits of what the EDC can deliver for your org. So, so, so great to hear. All right. So Terrill, you guys, again, already done so
much, so much lies ahead. So just kinda sum it up for us here as, as we start to slide into our wrap. How, you know, how has Pure really helped deliver for you and for the state of Maryland, and what, what's ahead? What's ahead? What's next from here?
Oh, yeah. I mean, next is gonna be the STaaS and the other things, the, probably a refresh of the SIEM environment. Archiving and, like, I love the EDC and, you know, I gotta say, when, you know, when Edwin was speaking, like my head was getting tired from just vertical nodding. I'm like, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes." but you know, the possibilities are kind of
endless for us. Like, I don't think our journey will ever stop just because I don't think Pure stops, right? Like, so, like I think it's just gonna be a continual i- improvement type of a thing. But I will say that, Pure helps us satisfy the core values that our forth, which she calls our North Stars for aspiration when we design systems.
First one, it needs to be customer centered, right? And this is within the context of the storage e- ecosystem. So c- customer centered, right? I mentioned before, you know, we have first-degree users, which are our agencies, and then we have second-degree users, which would be the citizens of the state.
So for, for that, you know, for Pure, we have non-disruptive upgrades. I can tell you that we have had non-disruptive upgrades. I can tell you that we've had upgrades where not only was it disruptive, it also data, which is a complete no-no, right? Just storage array design 101.
You know, that it's financially prudent, that because we run the infrastructure as a STaaS and the figure I quoted you before, we're gonna save a million dollars over five years. That allows DOIT to keep our rates low that we charge back to the agencies. It needs to be secure. So we talked about in- immutability with the SafeMode Snapshots and here we go again,
eradication configuration. Um- Pulls up the time. Oh, it's just very simple, very simple.You know, encryption at rest, you know, the Pure storage array was built this way. It wasn't, designed again when I was in high school and then it got thrown on it later,
added in. It's efficient. We are seeing data reduction ratios from an apples to apples comparison. Our legacy vendor was getting us one point nine to one, and then Pure is giving us three point one to one on our, same data set, apples to apples. You might say, "Okay, well, great," but, you know, let's think about it.
We have about four hundred and forty-nine TiB of usable. If I'm getting, let's say, a two to one, I have eight hundred terabytes usable. If I'm getting three to one, I have one point two petabytes of usable. It's a big difference, you know? Yeah. Huge difference. You know, and, a- and just the density, right?
It's, you know, like I said, seventy-seven U and a three U. That talks to sustainability, when you wanna talk about that. It uses a lot less power. Forward-looking, like, we have to look forward, in the Enterprise Data Cloud. To me, like I said, our journey doesn't end, it's gonna continue on.
And I see Pure saying, "Hey, we're not satisfied with this. We're going to bring in the e- the Enterprise Data Cloud." Evergreen//Forever. In a few years, we're gonna be eligible for free controller upgrades, you know, without And, and that's non-disruptive as well. So as you go forward, like, that's forward-looking just a little bit.
You know, I was in one of the training classes, and I thought it was cool that Pure is not satisfied. To get a little technical for a second, they moved the NVRAM chips onto the Direct Modules, which reduces latency even further, you know. I just think, like, that kind of thinking, again, it's in your ethos to be performance,
just to not be satisfied and to keep things simple. We need big capacity. In short, because of the simplicity of the storage array, I can build junior admin skills and I can rebuild ca- capacity within our agency, with more skill sets. So we have people that have the skill set to actually execute, right?
So y- you know, that's a great thing. Capacity to scale up and scale down seamlessly. I was reading article about, you know, like we run X70s. It comes to the point where we need X90s, it's a non-disruptive upgrade. W- we can build that capacity.
You talk about FlashBlade, that scales out re- relatively easily. So we're, we're agile enough to be able to meet needs that c- that are, asked of us. And then, you know, a- outcome focus. With the different line of products, different price points that you guys an architect, it gives me a lot of latitude to, build just the right system
at just the right price. And then when you combine it with the EDC, we're just adding more tools to our storage tool chest, if you will, or toolbox, that we can pull up and, you know, we can even reuse things, for future projects i- if we had to. And you know, it's, it's c- cost conscious.
Like I s- I go back to what we saved, I'm amazed by that. So, excuse me. And then a- apply the EDC to that, and then we can, like you guys said, we can data, and I can focus on managing the data and not volume names or snapshot policies, because it's just, it this global management plane that I can leverage
and use and, and my virtual twin can help do that. There we go. There we go. Darryl, thank you so much. I mean, thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your story.
Again, it's so impressive what you guys have done in such a short period of time, and the results that you're already seeing. And, so excited to what you're gonna do next with Pure Storage. So hopefully you'll come back a year from now and share your next, your next part of your journey with us, and, and the results of the next phase of the EDC.
So thank you so much for being here. All right, folks, we are coming up on the end of our time together. We might have time for one audience question. So, unfortunately, we have, don't have a ton of time. So let's, let's see. Let's take one, maybe one or two quick
questions from the audience. I'm looking at the submissions now. Okay, Edwin, here there's one for you. There seems to be a trend around this question, so we're gonna start here. What challenges, can we face when building an EDC?
And, more importantly, actually, what are the first steps to starting to build your EDC? Where do you start? Yeah. Very simple where you start, and I think for Pure customers, is you wanna start your journey with Fusion. It is that management software that allows you, gives you that visibility that Darryl was talking about.
I, I've been in Darryl's place before. You don't need that secret decoder ring to figure out what the name of a, you know, two letters for this, two letters for this data center, two letters for this workload. All It just goes away. You can see everything. But most importantly, start with Pure Fusion 'cause it's built in.
It's in all the Pure arrays now. It's in the software. All you have to do is go in there, press a button, get it enabled. You'll start seeing a layout, and then you'll see all your different arrays systems and all your storage.
So you, you just go ahead and get that going so you get the visibility, and leverage Fusion 'cause that's gonna help you build out that EDC architecture. How do you build out your environment? How do you standardize configurations? What type of automation can I do?
You can start as big or as little as you want, but go ahead, just get Pure Fusion started. That, that's the, that's the key first step to take.Awesome. Thank you, Edwin. All right, we're gonna squeeze in one more for you, Daryl. You mentioned it really quickly, but we're gonna double-click on it.
One of the, one of our attendees is asking about sustainability. They say, "We're getting a lot of pressure on sustainability." I think this is, this is something a lot of people are feeling as the pressure of AI is coming in. They're getting asked to build out more data centers, more capacity, more scale, et cetera. So a lot of pressure on sustainability.
How does Pure help with that, Daryl? Do you wanna share? Yeah, absolutely. It definitely helped us, as I mentioned, you know, 77 U to 3U, the replacement of three storage N- devices down to one storage device. So we're getting back data center space, like within our data center.
We, we have less power consumption. To put some metrics to that, some real world, numbers to that, when we implemented our Pure X70 storage array in our production data center, we went from using 28 kilowatts to using 1.6 kilowatts, and we're holding the same data set on top of that, right? Uh- Wow the other kind of joking one that I like to say is, we went from 60 power outlets
to two power outlets, right? With the, storage array. You know, and, you know, they achieve that through the storage ratios that I mentioned. They're, you know, it's very dense, and it g- gets it done. And I Like I think I said, I, when I was in the data center and I, 'cause I still like to
rack things, racked it. I, and I, I looked at it, and I looked at everything we were gonna do and put on this thing, and I was like, "We're really gonna do this?" And boy, oh boy. That's awesome. Those are crazy numbers. And, j- folks, we do have more info on our website about our sustainability story.
These are, these are amazing numbers from Daryl, and they are not, these are not rare numbers. Pure has a really phenomenal sustainability story. And just the savings on space and power are really phenomenal. So, so please do talk to your AE for more details, or please search
it out on our website. So unfortunately, we are out of time. And for those who we didn't get to your questions, apologies, but we will reach out to you after the webinar and get back to you, with the answers to your questions. We will also follow up with you with a link to the recording. So if you want to revisit any part of the recording, you will have access to that.
So, thank you again, Edwin, and special you to Daryl for being here with us today. It was a pleasure for, a pleasure to spend the hour with you, and thank you for all of your knowledge and expertise and sharing your stories. And thank you for all of you for being here with us today. We hope you enjoyed the discussion, and have a fabulous day.
Stephanie Richardson
Vice President, Product Marketing, Everpure
Edwin Yuen
Senior Director Product Marketing, Platform, Everpure
Darrell Stevens
Systems Architect, State of Maryland Dept. of IT
Join Everpure for a discussion on how the Everpure platform can help transform your business by building an Enterprise Data Cloud. Learn why Everpure has been recognized as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrants with the Everpure platform vision helping define the future of storage and data management.
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