CIO’s quote perfectly describes its GDT and Pure Storage solution
“Our life is frittered away by details. Simplify, simplify,” noted American author Henry David Thoreau over two hundred fifty (250) years ago. But simple is a word that’s rarely used to describe an IT deployment of any magnitude. And prior to working with GDT, this CIO would have likely agreed. But that all changed when his rapidly growing organization turned to GDT to replace a storage solution it had previously deployed from one (1) of the IT industry’s largest OEMs.
The client, a large oil and gas company with holdings throughout the southwestern United States, needed simplicity when it came to its storage solutions—they had never enjoyed it. Their comparatively small IT team was stretched at the seams trying to keep up with the company’s precipitous growth. And in the oil and gas industry, connectivity often takes on an added challenge—many remote locations can be the most far-flung of locations.
The Challenge
The client had been utilizing a storage solution from one (1) of the industry’s most noted equipment manufacturers. “It worked well for a long time,” said the client’s CIO, “but when scalability was needed, we ran into problems.” The problems came in the form of needed upgrades, which were anything but simple. In fact, its first—and last—capacity upgrade took over forty-eight (48) hours to complete and resulted in its network downed for almost half of that time. In addition, firmware upgrades required the OEM to utilize the customer’s computer via a WebEx—neither simple nor efficient.
The Solution
As a ten-year-old, California-based company whose sole focus is on developing premier storage solutions for the IT industry, Pure Storage, which has a rich, long-standing relationship with GDT, had a solution that would perfectly address the client’s needs. They knew its FlashArray storage solutions could perfectly deliver what the customer needed, but wasn’t enjoying—simplicity and scalability. They were working with the right company—Pure Storage created the AFA (All-Flash Array) storage category.
Solutions architects and engineers from GDT and Pure Storage collaborated to design a storage solution that incorporated the Pure Storage FlashArray//X70 at headquarters, which provides up to 1.3 petabytes (PB) of storage. It is the first all-flash, 100% NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) storage solution that is designed for all apps, whether mainstream enterprise or next-gen web-scale.
After analyzing the unique demands at each of the customer’s remote locations, two (2) Pure Storage solutions were utilized—the FlashArray//X10 and //X20, which provide up to 55 PB and 275 PB, respectively. With latency as low as 250 microseconds, its FlashArray//X solutions bring new levels of performance to mission-critical business applications.
And the solution allowed all customer data to be natively replicated back to headquarters.
How’s this for simplicity and scalability?
The customer’s upgrades have been reduced from forty-eight (48) hours previously, to its current time—ten (10) minutes with GDT and Pure Storage. Incredible, but not news to the hundreds of customers who for years have enjoyed the GDT and Pure Storage partnership.
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