Intelligent Data Centres Issue 01 | Page 45

END USER INSIGHT OUR INVESTMENT IN PURE STORAGE IS ROOTED IN OUR RECOGNITION THAT WE ALL NOW LIVE IN A DIGITAL WORLD. Rao added that with Pure Storage, MDC BMS had been able to reduce its rackspace to 6U, stating that the TCO has also been reduced. He was also struck by the ease of deployment for Pure Storage FlashArray//X solution, stating: “With other storage vendors, it takes a minimum of a month to complete implementation and sometimes up to two or three months. “We completed this project, including patch upgrades, the migration of close to 400 TB of data and around 280 TB of disaster-recovery replication, in a single week – something that I would never have thought would be possible. production, disaster recovery and remote- sites operations. FlashArray//X is an all-flash, 100%-NVMe, shared, accelerated storage designed for mainstream enterprise deployments and optimised for performance and density. It is a decision which has been lauded by Mansoor Almarzooqi, CIO, MDC BMS. He said: “Mubadala Group’s brand is all about the transformation of society and the laser-focused investments that make that happen. “Our investment in Pure Storage is rooted in our recognition that we all now live in a digital world. Timely, accurate information and the confidence in the safety and security of that information are vital components of a successful enterprise. Because of the dedication and innovation of Pure – and our own team – we can make faster, better decisions that ultimately allow us to grow our asset base.” www.intelligentdatacentres.com “Another advantage of Pure is its solutions don’t require a lot of training. Pure Storage technical resources was on site for the first two days, for protocol reasons, but after that the hardware and software were so simple, our internal team managed the rest of the implementation.” A further benefit of the Pure Storage solution that became apparent to MDC BMS was the ease with which it could be maintained. Through the Pure1 monitoring tool, the MDC BMS team can oversee the entire infrastructure from a single point, receiving rich views and alerts in real time. Upgrades were also simplified with FlashArray//X. “We normally need to really plan upgrades and involve the vendor, and rely on them to complete it, which is a very tense time for us,” he recalled. “With Pure, not so.” An all-flash storage architecture has also enabled MDC to achieve sub-millisecond latency for all its critical apps. The company previously relied on server memory to enhance app performance but FlashArray//X can now fulfil this need. In addition, with Pure Storage, the MDC BMS team can provision storage for new apps in just a few seconds, as opposed to the days it would take with the legacy storage infrastructure. This is ultimately helping Mubadala employees that use these business- critical applications to take better, faster real time decisions. “Another point worth noting is that, with our legacy storage, we were facing major performance issues in pre-production,” he added, “but now, non-production, pre- production and production environments are all run on Pure Storage, so all environments get the same benefits as production. This allows IT to get a very accurate feel for how well apps will work in production.” Cost savings – a solution that pays for itself in four years Through de-duplication and compression, FlashArray//X has also reduced MDC BMS’s cost per terabyte, even though the company migrated from a disk infrastructure. “There is a misconception in the market that disk storage is cheaper than all- flash, but per terabyte, it is actually cheaper with flash because of the data reduction feature that Pure has built into their storage solutions,” Rao noted. “One rack runs about AED 250,000 (approx. US$68,000) a year in colocation costs. But since we moved from seven racks to one seventh of a rack, we are looking at potential savings of up to AED 2 million (approx. US$544,000) per year. “Also, power consumption for a disk- storage rack is anywhere between 12 and 16 kW, but with the Pure solution in place, this reduces to 1 kW, so we save more than 90% in power costs. “This all translates to a massive overall saving in TCO and the solution will have paid for itself within four years. We are delighted with the outcome – any remote sites we deploy in the future will be run on Pure Storage solutions.” ◊ Issue 01 45