Cloud data storage has evolved into a more commoditized expense on the corporate balance sheet, and among the Alabama companies that have signed contracts with a California-based leader in this arena, Pure Storage, are auto giants with Alabama OEM plants, Mercedes and Toyota, as well as the Birmingham hospital Children’s of Alabama.
Pure Storage, a public company based in Mountain View, California, is among the big public cloud companies now offering utility-style pricing.
“In the near term, there’s been a move towards what I would call a service-consumption experience in storage,” Prakash Darji, general manager of Pure’s FlashArray business unit, told the trade magazine The Next Platform in a June 10 article.
Interest in this new service model in cloud storage, which promises customers they can use it easily themselves without costly third-party interface, started with such customers as high tech companies, as software-as-a-service firms, managed service providers but accelerated with other segments during the first quarter of 2020, Darji told Next Platform.
“When it comes to storage, enterprises want it to be easy to manage and scale, less complex, and more cost-efficient so that they can focus on the data on the storage and turn it into information rather than managing the storage itself,” according to Boone, North-Carolina-based Next Platform, which covers high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers and public clouds.
According to Next Platform, Pure Storage had $1.64 billion in revenue and more than 7,500 customers in the fiscal year ending January 1, 2020.
“The current environment and the economy uncertainty right now is that customers have to do more with what they have and do more with less in general,” James Gallegos, product management lead for Pure Storage’s Purity 6.0, told the trade magazine.
“You can now just think of this storage service by saying. ‘I have the capabilities I need. I have the protocol access I need, I have the data protection I need. And I don’t need to worry about these refresh cycles or licensing extortion or any of these different things,'” said Gallegos.
