Your Customers Want A Data Storage Platform

In recent years IT budgets have been cut across the board against a challenging macroeconomic environment, coupled with global conflicts and energy crises. As a result, many companies are stuck with underperforming, complex and energy inefficient legacy solutions. This is especially concerning for businesses under more pressure to leverage AI for fear of being left behind. However, this uncertainty presents a huge opportunity for your channel organisation to help customers by delivering the innovation they desperately need in the age of AI, with never before seen levels of flexibility and customisation.

Introducing the storage platform

For channel organisations to succeed, they need to understand what businesses are looking for. A major concern for organisations today is balancing innovation with the need to constantly update infrastructures to support their efforts. According to a 2024 Gartner report, IT leaders are shifting from traditional storage solutions to a platform-based approach to meet evolving business needs, and to solve this headache. So what is a platform?

A unified data storage platform delivers agility and risk reduction to organisations with a simple, consistent as-a-service experience supporting both traditional and modern workloads such as AI. Designed for the cloud era, it provides on-demand, self-service storage through a flexible subscription and intuitive interfaces, ensuring consistency across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. This kind of platform is underpinned by non-disruptive upgrades and meaningful SLAs covering performance, uptime, data resiliency and energy usage/sustainability goals. Crucially, a data storage platform must be built on a foundation of all-flash technology, and have the flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs. Lastly, AI-driven improvements and recommendations through the platform ensure optimal performance with minimal time spent on maintenance and administration.

The AI energy dilemma

The past few years have seen electricity costs soar across the globe, with no signs of slowing down. In addition, the rise of Gen AI means that the energy needs of data centres have increased many times over. . In fact, the IEA estimates that AI power usage represented almost 2% of global energy demand in 2022 — and that this could double by 2026. This is because the high power demands of GPUs strain data centres, requiring 40-50 kilowatts per rack – well beyond the capability of many data centres. Adding to this challenge, GPUs are not only incredibly expensive to purchase, but also to operate.

Because data centres can only supply so much power, inefficient deployments run the risk of GPUs sitting idle because they cannot be powered. Therefore, efficient infrastructure technologies like flash storage are crucial for managing power and space, as every Watt allocated to storage hinders a higher number of GPUs powered in an AI cluster. With the Pure Storage platform, it’s possible to achieve up to an 85% reduction in energy usage and carbon emissions, and up to 95% less rack space than competing offerings. This means power can be utilised for GPUs to drive the mission critical projects modern organisations are embarking on.

The impact of a storage platform

A unified data storage platform can be a powerful tool to address the challenges of complexity, reliability, cost, and risk. What does success look like?

Reducing Complexity
- Consolidation: A single platform that manages all types of data storage needs (block, file, and object) reduces the complexity that arises from using multiple, disparate systems.
- Single Operating Environment: Using one operating environment simplifies management and reduces the learning curve for IT staff, as well as eliminating incompatibilities.
- Centralised operations: A central management platform allows for streamlined operations and easier monitoring, reducing administrative burden.

Improving Reliability
- Peace of mind: A data platform ensures reliability with guaranteed zero downtime and 99.9999% uptime through proactive SLA management.
- 24/7/365 predictive support: potential issues are identified before they impact operations.
- All-flash technology: provides dependable storage across all use cases, from critical workloads to cost-sensitive archives.

Driving Cost Efficiency
- Reduced power and space: A modern data platform delivers significant benefits by reducing power consumption by up to 85% and occupying 95% less rack space, which enhances energy efficiency and maximises usable capacity.
- Flexible subscriptions: Tailored storage subscriptions adapt to business needs and provide unified policy management, allowing for instant application of policies across all systems.
- SLAs: Reduces risk through expanding guarantees that cover the costs of consumed power and rack space, simplifying management and cost planning.

Mitigating Risk:
- Consistency: A single, orchestrated platform reduces the risks associated with managing disparate systems and potential integration issues.
- Seamless upgrades: Evolve and innovate without worrying about forklift upgrades and infrastructure obsolescence.
- Always Current: Systems stay modern with continuous updates and no disruptions.
- Limitless Scalability: Effortlessly scale storage on demand, avoiding traditional provisioning constraints and pitfalls.

Why Platforms are the building blocks of Storage as a-Service

Storage platforms are all about simplicity and flexibility, and this flexibility must be mirrored in the way they are consumed, otherwise, the benefits will not be fully realised. Storage as a-Service (STaaS) is a service focused consumption model for storage procurement that allows organisations to provision the capacity and performance they need on-premises, in the cloud, or any other combination and pay for it on an as-a-service basis. According to research firm ATR, the STaaS market is expected to grow 16.1% by 2027 to $49.54Bn. For partners, this prediction offers a promising outlook. STaaS provides a means for the partner community to offer a modern, energy efficient platform to immediately meet some of the most challenging customer goals today.

STaaS is a great option for enterprises that want to deploy a data storage platform to accommodate different workloads for short and longer-term projects without operational or cost penalties. It removes much of the complexity and risk associated with data storage and reduces friction, costs and complications associated with sharing data across the enterprise. Crucially, STaaS doesn’t require the same substantial CapEx outlay of traditional IT infrastructure.

STaaS that delivers on its promises

STaaS alone is not a magic bullet. Nearly every vendor has jumped on this trend, which means that STaaS offerings are created far from equal. Customers are looking for a true value-added service, avoiding STaaS offerings from vendors which simply offer OpEx billing disguised as a service. This would be more like a lease, where products are deployed on a multi-year cycle and upgraded at the end as part of forklift upgrades. For your channel organisation to succeed in this competitive marketplace, you need to offer solutions with guaranteed service levels, and automated upgrades to meet performance and capacity guarantees at no additional cost.

The data storage platform businesses need today

At Pure Storage we are evolving to meet modern business needs, empowering our partners with the data storage platform their customers are looking for. Our platform offers a unified data storage infrastructure with unmatched simplicity and flexibility, saving time, money, and energy. From AI to archive, customers can benefit from a cloud experience with one unified Storage as-a-Service platform across on premises, cloud, and hosted environments. Finally, our platform is built on the unique Evergreen architecture that evolves with their businesses through non disruptive upgrades – getting newer and better every year with zero planned downtime, guaranteed.

This article was produced in association with Pure Storage and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.