Data is driving Federal agency missions, and as data volume surges amid soaring artificial intelligence (AI) needs, unlocking and harnessing information is even more critical. But managing and securing massive data stores poses significant challenges. In a recent interview with MeriTalk, Bryan Thomas, vice president of U.S. public sector at Pure Storage, shares practical and actionable strategies to help agencies overcome obstacles and utilize their data for impactful mission outcomes. He also offers insights into the future of data storage and what it takes to support the evolving needs of Federal missions.
MeriTalk: In what ways is data becoming even more important to agency missions, and how can agencies fully harness and optimize it?
Thomas: Data has become the tool that every agency is trying to unlock, because it allows Federal leaders to make focused and insightful decisions that enhance their programs and services. In the new administration, we’re seeing a focus on transparency and accountability, which is exactly what data can provide within agencies. Plentiful and secure data instills trust that the government is making the right decisions with public funds. So many services are driven by efficient data analysis, from public safety and fraud detection to procurement. And as we continue on the AI journey, agencies will leverage growing data stores to feed the quantitative analysis that is enabled by AI. Unlocking and harnessing that data is the key to most agency missions.
MeriTalk: The traditional data storage life cycle can limit the ability of agencies to maximize their data’s potential. How is flash a differentiator for these challenges?
Thomas: Flash is not only a differentiator – it is the foundation of modernization for data. Pure Storage was founded around the idea behind software driving our DirectFlash Module Technology, which is a holistic approach to storage that provides better performance, giving the user increased reliability and durability. It is much less prone to mechanical failures and data corruption than traditional disk drive storage, and its speed allows for much faster data retrieval and analysis. As a result, applications that rely on data access will run more smoothly and efficiently with our best in class platform.
MeriTalk: How can agency leaders address the historical problems that come with data management and storage, embracing digital transformation and getting out of the mindset of “maintain vs. innovate?”
Thomas: In the traditional storage acquisition model, customers do their best to buy enough storage with a measure of increase to protect growth over, typically, a five to seven-year cycle. And if their estimates are really good, that number can be 70 to 80 percent accurate, meaning they are buying more storage capacity than they need. That increases cost, footprint, and maintenance. Eventually, they’ll do a forklift upgrade, which creates a legacy system with technical debt, increased cost, and a lack of technology innovation.
To address these issues, Pure Storage designed a platform subscription model called Evergreen that improves how data is stored, mobilized, and protected. We deliver the storage service to the customer based on an agreed-upon capacity and size, and it becomes a fixed cost, with upgrades included. It is also on-premises, essentially an on-prem cloud operating model for your enterprise flash storage plan. This means the customer doesn’t actually have to own the enterprise storage solution; they own the data. It’s true enterprise storage-as-a-service.
MeriTalk: As Federal agencies increasingly adopt AI to drive mission critical initiatives, data center demand is exploding. How is Pure Storage helping agencies address power consumption and efficiency challenges with sustainable energy efficient solutions that can meet the performance needs of AI driven workloads?
Thomas: We are all leveraging AI and machine learning and large language models (LLMs) in our lives today, and those LLMs rely heavily on data centers. Data centers were already consuming vast amounts of electricity for the power of computing, storage, and cooling. And now, as the AI adoption curve continues to grow along with data demands, it is extremely important for data centers to be more efficient in consuming power. It is vital to our country’s commerce and our national security.
As we think about these trends at Pure, we see an opportunity to help customers with the AI transformation. We are providing a substantial footprint reduction through our flash storage models while still increasing performance and capacity. Through our AI-ready infrastructure — an NVIDIA DGX BasePOD-certified, full-stack solution — we are harnessing the compute power to drive LLMs but with a smaller footprint, reducing cooling and power needs.
Also, with our Purity operating system and DirectFlash® technology – organizations are using up to 80 percent less power and space and cutting carbon emissions by 85 percent more than before. With storage consuming up to 25 percent of data center energy, these savings can reduce overall energy use and emissions by 20 percent. Further, the lower electricity demands minimize water usage for cooling and power generation by 5x the standard.
All of this will allow for a massive increase in efficiency as AI demands continue to soar.
MeriTalk: Security and zero trust in particular are top of mind for Federal leaders. How can agencies mitigate risk, comply with regulations, and protect against cyber threats without compromising performance and scale?
Thomas: Being a data company, we really think about how to serve that data in the fastest and most secure way possible. We have closely aligned our security portfolio to the zero trust maturity model that the Federal government is aligned to. We also go a step further by trying to help our customers stay ahead of the security curve by offering features such as our SafeMode snapshots that allow a proactive, data-focused stance against ransomware. We even have a “kill switch” on our units that will eliminate and erase any data upon request. The bottom line is that both physical and cybersecurity are absolutely top of mind for us.
MeriTalk: Cloud is an ongoing priority for agencies, which often have data in multiple locations and may be considering repatriation to secure data centers. How should agencies approach this dispersion of data to gain benefits from the cloud?
Thomas: When we think about our relationship with the cloud, we would encourage agency customers to think about selecting the right applications to migrate to the cloud, versus the innovation that they could bring inside of their own facilities by increasing capacity. Unquestionably, the cloud will continue to produce great use cases, but I think agencies have realized through education and time that it’s not always efficient to run mission critical applications in the cloud, and it may not be cost effective in the long run. When you migrate to a public cloud provider, consider whether you can migrate data when it’s scattered across multiple sites, facilities, countries, domains, classification codes – and whether you can get it back. Are you perhaps better off looking at a hybrid approach, where certain applications have moved to the cloud and you’re getting a nice value out of that, while others are on prem, with data as close to the end users as possible?
In short, we believe that there’s a growing relationship among the cloud, on-premises storage, and networking and server providers, and that these ties will only grow tighter as customers leverage cloud and on-premises environments. Both environments have driven innovation in ways that will allow our Federal customers to make better decisions as they work through their current and future mission requirements.