February 1, 2025 • 31 mins
Discover how data storage is shaping the future of technology with insights from Troy Wright, Principal Systems Engineer at Pure Storage. What if the key to mastering the digital age lies in understanding the evolution from mainframes to cloud storage? Troy opens up about his journey and shares how Pure Storage is revolutionizing the industry with cybersecurity and AI innovations. This episode promises to give you a fresh perspective on the ever-changing world of data management, where speed and specialization are more crucial than ever.
We tackle the challenges of managing today's exploding volumes of unstructured data, driven by IoT and multimedia content. Troy sheds light on the pressing need for efficient storage solutions, emphasizing the role of flash storage and Pure Storage’s custom-built direct flash modules. Sustainability takes center stage as we underscore the importance of reducing electricity usage in IT infrastructure. Listeners can expect an engaging discussion on how businesses can leverage data for a competitive advantage while maintaining a commitment to eco-friendly practices.
The conversation crescendos with a look at cutting-edge advancements in storage technology, focusing on power efficiency and the integration of AI and machine learning. Troy shares his vision for storage as a service, highlighting its potential for business flexibility and transformational impact. As we dive into the rapid advancements in AI, this episode wraps up with the excitement and promise of what lies ahead for data management and beyond. Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of technology's future, and be prepared to see data storage in a whole new light.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Troy Wright (00:01):
There's electronic devices everywhere, and if you
can figure out how to gaininformation from them, it's
important.
Michael van Rooyen (00:08):
Yes.
Troy Wright (00:08):
It's important to our health, important to
understand traffic flow througha building or something like
that.
Ways to improve our lives iscoming from that IoT.
So people are building withtechnology that produces data so
we can improve our lifestylesand improve our businesses.
Michael van Rooyen (00:26):
Today I have the pleasure of having a chat
with Troy Wright, who is thePrincipal Systems Engineer at
Pure Storage.
We're going to talk all thingsstorage compute, what's
happening in industry in thoseareas.
We're catching up today atCisco Live the booth we're
running.
So, troy, welcome to thepodcast.
Thank you, happy to be here Forthose who are listening.
Do you mind just spending a fewminutes to tell us a little bit
(00:48):
about your career and yourjourney in the industry and what
led you to your current role asPrincipal System Engineer, peer
Storage Sure.
Troy Wright (00:55):
I'm actually coming into my 28th year working for
storage vendors.
Yeah, so a long time.
I started off with a degree inIT and sort of came up through a
customer support sort of roleand I spent a few years in
management, support management,that sort of stuff.
I spent probably 10 years inSydney.
(01:18):
I had an international stint upin Hong Kong for another five
years, but now I'm back inAustralia working for Pure
Storage, where I've been fornine years.
Michael van Rooyen (01:28):
Wow.
Troy Wright (01:29):
Yeah, so in the pre-sales role it's a systems
engineer, so we sort of help ourcustomers design solutions
based around the data that theyhave.
Michael van Rooyen (01:39):
Right right, and for those who aren't
familiar, can you provide anoverview of Pure's mission and
explain what differentiates youguys from other data storage
companies in the industry?
Troy Wright (01:50):
Sure.
So Pure Storage.
We set out to disrupt thestorage industry to really
deliver storage solutions thatmeet the customer's requirements
, and there's a multitude ofways that we do that, and
there's a multitude of ways thatwe do that.
I guess the most prevalent waythese days is people are looking
for some cybersecurity fortheir data, and we provide those
(02:13):
solutions.
We provide both on-prem andin-cloud based solutions as well
, and you probably see a lot oftrend these days around AI and
how much data plays in AI, andwe build a lot of solutions
around those stacks as well.
Michael van Rooyen (02:29):
Yeah, great, and you know.
Considering your history inworking with storage for so long
, do you mind telling us alittle bit about the trends
you've seen in the data storageindustry?
You know over your life cycleand you can talk about it from
how storage started through theother vendors, and where you are
today, and particularly.
(02:51):
Maybe you could also then touchon the rise of cloud storage
and the demand for high-speeddata access.
Troy Wright (02:57):
I think one of the bigger trends from when I
started was we moved away frommainframe.
So, mainframe storage was a bigthing where you didn't have much
of it, didn't have much storageand you had to use it very well
.
We moved on to virtualization,where we actually saw a lot of
machines and sprawl of serverscome out and everyone wanted a
(03:19):
copy of their data.
So for us in the storageindustry, we saw a big explosion
in the amount of data, theamount of virtual machines that
we saw out of there, and it wasthat was a big trend for us, and
being able to work withcompanies like vmware, yes, and
and dealing with how do you, howdo you provide storage in
multiple copies and and for theperformance levels that they
(03:40):
need.
We saw a bit of a trend movingtowards commoditization of
storage, but what we're seeingnow and what we do at pure
storage is is we realize thatyou need some, some specialties
in there, that you need to movefaster than the industry to be
to differentiate yourself, andthat's that's what we do at pure
, and driving a lot of that isAI.
(04:02):
Yes.
Michael van Rooyen (04:02):
Yeah, of course.
Troy Wright (04:03):
AI and cyber resilience.
It's very interesting in thatarea.
People, you have to protectyour data, but you need to
access your data.
Michael van Rooyen (04:14):
Of course, of course, and so if I think
about, when you started thejourney, the type of files that
might have been stored comparedto what it is today, we talked
about media rich content before.
We traditionally talked aboutmainframes.
You know low data consumption,but today we, you know, no one
deletes anything.
To be honest, right, it'srestoring the only thing.
(04:35):
It's not really restoring fromdelete, it's actually just
restoring from a failure, butgenerally people are not
deleting data.
Did you see this trajectory aswell?
Troy Wright (04:42):
Oh yeah, when I started, everything was in a
database.
It was only used by the bigorganizations.
It was structured, it wasmanually entered by people.
Now we have the Internet ofThings, we have devices
generating data, we have peoplegenerating data.
We have various types of datavideo, audio, you name it.
(05:03):
It's growing exponentially, butpeople want continued access to
it.
Yes, they always want to beable to access it and businesses
want to use that data, nomatter what format it is, to get
an advantage for their companyyes it's definitely changing.
Unstructured is is reallymassive in world.
Michael van Rooyen (05:24):
And is it fair to say, from what you're
seeing of the amount of datathat you're helping store for AI
usage, is that really thatunstructured data is becoming
the source of that information?
Troy Wright (05:33):
Yeah, in AI, people are trying to learn from that
unstructured data and we see asmall element of structuredness
and metadata when was the phototaken, like GPS coordinates
around that image or around thatvideo, that sort of stuff.
But that's a small percentageof it.
What the industry is trying todo is how do we learn from the
(05:55):
content within that image, fromthe content within that video or
that audio?
How do we take that and improveourselves, improve our
businesses?
And that's the challenge thatwe're dealing with and that's
why AI is so big.
People think about it as chat,gpt or something like that right
, Give me a recipe or a song orthose sort of things.
(06:16):
But companies are thinkingabout it differently.
Michael van Rooyen (06:19):
Is one of the other main sources of data
that you're seeing today.
Iot Can we just talk a littlebit about IoT?
Because, yeah, there's a lot ofcorporate data.
We know that there's a lot ofdiscussion by analysts that more
future trend people, that we'regoing to run out of data, that
AI is going to learn becauseeventually it'll consume
everything possible, or at leastso that it can access.
But there was a discussionabout OT or IoT becoming really
(06:41):
that next data lake ofinformation we can gather.
You know, sensor data,temperature, all those things.
Are you seeing some of yourcustomers really storing that or
moving towards more IoT storage?
Troy Wright (06:51):
Yeah, definitely.
If you just look at us now,we've got watches that are
collecting data for us.
It's sitting here, my heartrate's being collected with a
watch.
At the moment, I've got myphone sitting beside me.
It's collecting datainformation about what I'm doing
.
But there's also cameras around.
There's sensors on doors,there's you name it.
(07:11):
There's electronic deviceseverywhere and that information
if you can figure out how togain information from that, it's
important.
Michael van Rooyen (07:19):
Yes.
Troy Wright (07:20):
It's important to our health, which is hence the
watch, important to understandtraffic flow through a building
or something like that.
Ways to improve our lives iscoming from that IoT.
So people are building withtechnology that produces data so
we can improve our lifestylesand improve our businesses.
Michael van Rooyen (07:39):
So you're talking about a lot of storage,
a lot of petabytes of data,right, we've gone through these
transitions of just gigs toterabytes and out of petabytes,
and obviously you see customerswith much more than that, no
doubt.
But performance is important,right, because people want
things to load quickly, theywant to consume this structured
data.
Compute's going a long way toreally break that down, but
(08:00):
realistically, storage is realpivotal to that.
So flash storage has becomereally an essential part of
modern infrastructure.
Can you talk a little bit aboutwhat Pure has done in advancing
the use of flash storage andwhat uniqueness you guys have
brought to that?
I think you've also developedyour own products around that A
little bit different.
Can you touch on a bit of that?
Troy Wright (08:18):
Yeah, definitely If we take a look at performance
in there.
Big chunks of data.
If you can't access it, it'sworth nothing Of course.
So if it took you a week to getit out of the shed, out the
back, then you probably don'tneed it.
So what we've had to do at Pureis we've had to disrupt the
cycle and we actually build ourown flash modules.
Michael van Rooyen (08:37):
Right.
Troy Wright (08:37):
We don't take industry-off-the-shelf SSDs, for
instance.
We build what we call a directflash module and we have a flash
module on the market today.
That's 75 terabytes in a singleflash module.
Now it's quite dense, but it'sstill at flash level
performances.
So it leads us to a lot ofthings.
(08:58):
We get a lot of data stored onthere.
That's online, always online,always accessible, accessible.
But we think about the otherside of it is sustainability.
Yes, the amount of electricitythat we require to run our flash
modules is is very low.
Yes, um, it's good for theenvironment.
So our density is driving a lotof other things around the
world from sustainability.
(09:19):
But electricity costs they'renot getting any cheaper.
We, we all live at home and weknow our power bills are going
up.
Right 100%.
Well, that's happening.
In IT in general, theelectricity that you require is
increasing.
So what we're doing at PureStorage, by lowering the watts
per terabyte, by lowering that,we're allowing customers to
(09:40):
access data and gain value fromit.
Michael van Rooyen (09:42):
It's great that you touched on that,
because I was going to talk toyou about sustainability and
you've just touched on thatbecause you know we have this
continuous sprawl, shrinkage ofequipment.
There's a big drive by allvendors to do power consumption
in a much more efficient way.
On that, though, pivoting alittle bit more.
You know hybrid and multi-cloudstrategies.
Can you talk a bit about therole that storage technology
(10:04):
plays in these environments andhow they're evolving?
Of course you sell to bothsides of that coin, but can you
talk about is the shift justthere?
Is it more that people juststoring stuff in cloud and not
worrying about it anymore?
Can you talk a bit about that?
Troy Wright (10:16):
Our customers are getting smarter and smarter and
there was maybe an over-rotationto say that the cloud is the
answer.
Now they're actually going.
Actually, cloud consists oflots of things.
There's a private cloud.
You can build the cloud yourself.
It's about agility, like that,there's a public cloud and they
have a certain level of agility,and there's a private cloud
(10:37):
that you can build yourself.
So clouds it's an interestingterm.
There was a traditionalassociation with the public
cloud around cloud Hybridizationis a real thing and
understanding how yourapplication is being used, or
how your data is being used andwhere the right place for it
actually is, so your clients canaccess it, your business can
(10:59):
access it at the right price atthe right speed.
Yes, there's lots of elementsto it, but I think hybridization
is is definitely um somethingthat most businesses are looking
at yeah, I like thathybridization.
Michael van Rooyen (11:13):
I haven't really heard that term much, but
I do like that.
That's exactly where people aregoing right.
Everything's hybrid and it'llcontinue to be that way.
We're not going to get rid ofeverything on site, but
particularly we talk aboutoperational people needing
workloads, and even AI mighteven bring some of those
workloads back, and sure, theyneed a lot of compute and power
and all that.
But I think there's going to betimes when small workloads will
be able to run back closer tothe edge.
(11:34):
On that, are you seeing theneed for small edge instances?
I mean, we're talking a lotabout big data centers today,
big corporates and cloud, butare you seeing some people
wanting to do more smallerworkloads closer to the edge?
Troy Wright (11:48):
Well, yeah, it's funny, because what is big data
right?
Of course, and for one companybig data is completely different
to another company, and I thinkpersonally.
For me, big data is when it'stoo big for you to manage
yourself.
So edge is can you run ityourself?
Is it a size that you canhandle within your own business?
(12:09):
At a scale.
Do you have the skill setinternally?
Do you have the resourcesinternally to be able to do it?
And if you do, then running atthe edge is a really viable
solution.
But you may go through ajourney and you may start in one
location.
But you may go through ajourney and you may start in one
location and, as you betterunderstand how you're using
those resources and what they'recosting you, you need to move
(12:32):
it.
I think if you enter into anysolution with, this is where
it's going to remain for therest of its life.
It's not.
It's a blind entry.
You need to enter intosomething, knowing that it's
ever-changing.
Michael van Rooyen (12:47):
Yeah, sure, sure.
Data management certainly isbecoming more and increasingly
complex as Data Volumes Glow.
We talked a lot about howthey're happening.
What are some of the biggestchallenges businesses are facing
in managing their data, and howhave you seen customers address
that?
Troy Wright (13:04):
Yeah, so one of the things that we've identified at
Pure Storage is that a lot ofpeople's data sits in disparate
platforms and those platformshave different operational
processes on how to access itand how to manage that
environment.
And what we've done at Pure isactually we've built a single
operating system across all ofour solutions.
(13:27):
So, operationally, it doesn'tmatter how your data sits or
where your data sits.
Our operational process is thesame.
So one operating system,regardless of your type of data,
and that's simplifying it forour customer base.
You think about some of thecomplexities that every customer
has to deal with.
If everything is different,everything that they touch is
(13:49):
different.
There's opportunity for error.
There's opportunity forcomplexity.
Anything we can do in theindustry to simplify things is
really good.
Yeah, yeah.
Michael van Rooyen (14:01):
Off that as well.
Can you talk a little bit aboutdata security and compliance?
You know being, you know, topconcerns.
I know one of the solutionsthat you're deploying for
customers is really being ableto restore, you know for cyber
threats, but data security Imean ultimately data is the oil
of everything right.
So can you touch a little biton that?
You know what you're seeing asa concern that customers are
trying to deal with.
Troy Wright (14:21):
Yeah.
So there's obviously thingslike crypto lockers and that
sort of stuff, that if your databecomes compromised, how do you
recover your business, and whatwe do at Pure is a restore
point, but a rapid restore point, because every moment that any
(14:49):
business is offline is is anissue.
So, while at pure, we don'tactually protect the perimeter,
we're not a security company assuch.
We give our customers anability to restore and restore
rapidly into their business, soreduce the impact time.
(15:09):
But as an industry, we need toall work together.
There's got to be securityvendors protecting the perimeter
and access control vendorsprotecting the users, that type
of thing.
But our role really is aroundresiliency and rapid recovery.
Michael van Rooyen (15:24):
Yes, yes, there's been a lot of discussion
around digital transformation,right, and that can mean
multiple things to multiplepeople, but it's critical and is
there some approaches thatcustomers are seeing leveraging
some of your technology toaccelerate their digital
transformation?
Or, if I talk about data ingeneral, is it more that the
performance, the security, thedistribution of it is that
(15:47):
really helping with that journey?
Troy Wright (15:49):
Yeah, digital transformation.
You know what, when peopleembark on a transformation
journey, an old trainer'sthought was let's build a small
instance and see how ourtransformation looks.
Yes, and for a business, if youdon't build it with a
performance capability, it'sbound to fail, like if you
(16:09):
piecemeal something together andit doesn't perform the way you
expect it to perform inproduction.
The users and the testers aregoing to say actually, this
isn't doing what we need it todo.
So being an all-flash vendorand what we do at Pure Storage
allows that if you're doing atransformation project whether
that could be an operatingsystem difference, an
(16:31):
application change, somethinglike that we ensure that we
deliver it at high performance.
So you get production-levelperformance.
You get to see how yourapplication or your
transformation will actuallywork if you were to deploy it at
scale, and it gives it thebiggest opportunity for success
to understand actually we canscale this.
It's going to deliver abusiness, a difference to our
(16:53):
business, and whereas peopleused to run it up on a laptop in
the corner and see iftransformation does actually
work, that type of thing isbound to fail.
Michael van Rooyen (17:04):
Of course.
Of course If I was to thinkabout emerging technologies in
the storage space.
Are there some technologies oremerging tech that is driving
some things in the space thatreally excites you If I think
about, people think, oh, storageis storage, but there must be
some things on the horizon thatmay or may not be able to talk
about.
But is there some stuff youwant to talk on that?
Troy Wright (17:27):
Yeah, so there's things that always drive us in
the storage industry Density, ofcourse, io density, power
density, those types of things.
We store more of our clients'data in a smaller footprint, at
a lower cost and make itaccessible to them.
So that's definitely somethingthat's driving it.
But these days it's accesspatterns and how people are
(17:48):
building their applications toaccess our data.
So you see a lot of Kubernetescoming up these days, a lot of
microservices, container-basedplatforms.
Can we remove some of the extralayers that we have in terms of
accessing our data?
So different ways to access ourdata is where we're seeing a
lot of growth.
(18:08):
That involves both the networkconnectivity, whether that be
Ethernet or fiber channel, butalso the hypervisors and the
operating systems that areaccessing it.
So having a system that cancater for all those things and
allowing a customer to go on ajourney through there while us,
as a vendor, is deliveringthings like IO density and power
(18:32):
density per terabyte, it'ssuper cool.
Michael van Rooyen (18:36):
Yeah, we'd be super cool.
And you're really referringthere to the continuation of
shrinking and more powerperformance.
Where else can we fit intothese things?
It's fascinating engineering.
People just think of it as theobvious, of it's getting smaller
and using less power great.
But the amount of engineeringthat goes behind that to really
achieve that is prettystaggering.
Right, it's massive, yeah.
Troy Wright (18:57):
Who would have ever thought that you would build an
archiving platform based off ofFlash technology?
Michael van Rooyen (19:02):
That's true.
Troy Wright (19:03):
And that's what we've done.
We've found a way to deliver atarchiving prices competitive
and sometimes even tapecompetitive, using flash, using
all the benefits of flash, thethe low power, the high density,
the high performance of flash,and and that's the innovation
that we're delivered.
It's, it's huge.
Michael van Rooyen (19:21):
Yeah, yeah, and if I was thinking about then
we touched on and you're reallythe core and heart of people
wanting to store data for AI.
Right, we're going to talkabout AI and machine learning
because it's an important trendthat everyone's talking about
today.
If I take a different view fromfrom what you're seeing and
working through is not only areyou obviously providing storage
for those workloads to do that,but but what's the plan around
(19:43):
AI integration for some of your,your tool services?
Is there some thinking at thisstage that, again, you're
allowed to talk about from apure point of view, on helping
customers navigate theirenvironments?
Troy Wright (19:54):
Yeah, so look, we are using AI internally for some
intelligent services back toour customers, so giving them
the ability to save time intheir day.
If you think about anything intechnology, it has log files, it
has dashboards, it hasmonitoring, reporting, that sort
of stuff.
And if you're new to theplatform or it's, it's not your
(20:18):
day-to-day job to deal withstorage or deal with servers or
deal with virtual machines.
How can you use AI to actuallyhelp identify is?
Is my environment healthy?
Is my environment secure?
How do I check that?
And by delivering that and whatwe're doing at pure is
delivering that through largelanguage models to be able to
(20:39):
ask a natural language basedquestion and identify it is my
environment okay?
Is my environment okay?
Is my environment secure?
Do I have anything that I canimprove on in my environment?
Is all my data placed in theright location?
Yes, all those simple questionsthat our business asks us as IT
people.
Now we can ask AI and it'susing our data set, our personal
(21:02):
data set, in a secure way toanswer the question.
Michael van Rooyen (21:05):
Yeah, great, if I think about customers, the
ones you sell to, obviously,enterprises or providers, et
cetera.
But are you seeing, and aswe've talked about for a while,
but storage as a service, youknow, continue to gain
popularity in market, or, youknow, is it kind of declined,
flattened out?
And if so, could you discuss abit about that trend and the
(21:26):
business flexibility it provides?
It's?
Troy Wright (21:28):
still growing.
Michael van Rooyen (21:30):
Oh right.
Troy Wright (21:30):
Yeah, yeah, it's a growing trend.
Australia is quite welladvanced in storage as a service
.
We do see.
Personally, I don't know what'sright.
Is it access to money?
Is it because they want theservice levels?
But what we're being asked andwhat we're delivering at pure
(21:53):
storage is is sla based storageas a service.
It's not just a commercialmodel.
It's not just how much can yougive us for a terabyte of?
Michael van Rooyen (21:57):
storage yes, it's.
Troy Wright (21:57):
What else do I get when I, when I consume storage
off of you?
What do I get?
A performance sla?
Do I get a power consumptionsla?
Do I get an availability?
All those slas are built intoit and what it does is help
those teams deliver back totheir business.
Hey, I'm meeting mysustainability goals tied to it,
(22:20):
so we're ticking a lot of boxesalong the way.
But also consumption or afinancing model is part of that.
It's only pay for the storageI'm using.
Don't go and try and buy fiveyears worth of storage up front
and hope we grow into it or hopewe got it right.
We'll just pay for what ourbusiness needs today and if we
(22:40):
come up with an idea and we needmore storage, we can just
consume it, of course.
Michael van Rooyen (22:45):
Of course it makes sense, right?
The model of scaling up anddown is really beneficial to
customers.
The problem is not many peopledeliver it.
It's a little bit like physicalstorage, right?
You see so many physical storageplaces popping up because,
people consume so many thingsand they've got nowhere to put
it.
You know the Christmas tree, etcetera, coming up to Christmas,
so I thought I might mentionthat and putting it into storage
(23:11):
and then leaving it there,right, but we don't throw things
away either, similar to data,we just continue to do so.
It's fascinating how businesscan use that scale up and scale
down model, but I can understandwhat, why you're seeing it as
an increasing on consumption.
Troy Wright (23:19):
Well, I think part of the challenge that companies
can't deliver it is they don'thave the technology behind it.
What we built at Pure is atechnology that allows us to
deliver storage as a service.
We have an evergreeninfrastructure platform, which
means that our hardware doesn'tever go into support life.
It's very modular.
(23:40):
We can upgrade it and upgradesubcomponents within it, which
allows us to make systems biggerand smaller as customers grow
and shrink.
Michael van Rooyen (23:50):
If I then think about, you know,
increasing pressures tomaintaining uptime and
resilience, you know.
Can you have a bit of a word onwhat the best practices are you
recommend for organizations whoare building resilient data
infrastructures?
You know, at a high level?
Troy Wright (24:05):
Yeah, it's an absolute luxury that we are very
highly available storageplatforms so those resilience
questions are.
They're in in, built into ourplatform.
So we're lucky.
We have these conversationswith our customers all the time.
It's about redundancies.
It's about making sure youunderstand the difference
between disaster recovery.
Is my data center offline?
(24:25):
Is my power grid offline, mygetting hit by a natural
disaster flood or cyclone orsomething like that and do I
have somewhere else to go?
A pure, where the availabilityand the resiliency built into
our, our platforms is high?
But you need those othercapabilities.
You need a place to restore to,a place to fall over to in the
(24:46):
case of a disaster or somethinghappens in your environment.
And what is your businesscapable of tolerating?
Is it I?
I need to be in real time rightnow.
A recovery point needs to bezero, or?
Or can the recovery point befive minutes an hour or
something like that?
Um, and am I able to fail overto a public cloud, right?
(25:08):
Or do I need to fail overwithin another data center
within a jurisdiction?
They're all the challenges thatour customers go through.
Yes, and we're buildingsolutions for each one of them,
depending on what theirregulatory requirements are or
their personal choices on howthey want to do it.
Michael van Rooyen (25:26):
Each business needs to make that
decision, considering the timethat you've been working in this
space, if you were to thinkabout people who are aspiring to
be tech people or leading intothis industry?
Have you got any advice foraspiring people coming into the
industry to be involved?
Troy Wright (25:41):
I think one of the things that I'd advise people is
actually understand where yourdata is going, how it's all
plumbed together Like peoplethink that I save a file and
it's mysteriously goingsomewhere, but how do things
interconnect and understandinghow the communication channels
work, how things are saved, howthey're protected, that sort of
(26:02):
stuff, Understand what you'redoing with your data.
Similar to if you're into carsyou understand how the engine
works and how the brakes workand all that sort of stuff.
You don't just if you're a carperson, you don't just get in
there and push the start buttonand drive from a to b.
If you wanting to get into thedata industry, understand what
the data is, how you protect it,how you categorize it, how you
(26:24):
control it, um, or there's a lotof things around it.
It's very important tounderstand.
I'll call it the plumbing,right, the plumbing of how data
moves in our environment.
I call it digital plumbing, yeahyeah, it's interesting because
I don't know if it gets trainedthese days.
I went through university quitesome time ago, right, and we
(26:44):
did go through.
We were very short on memory.
We were very short on memory.
We were very short on cpucycles.
Everyone was taught right downto the bits and bytes.
Um, now we have an abundance ofthese resources.
Oh, we have for a long time Ithink they're getting harder and
harder or more expensive thesedays.
Yeah, so learning that, uhunderstanding all that plumbing
is, is important, so if you'rekeen to get into it, it's a
(27:06):
industry.
There's lots of ways you can doit between communication,
security, that sort of stuff.
It's all around data.
Michael van Rooyen (27:13):
Yes.
And if I was then to reflect onyour career, what have been
some of the most rewardingexperiences that you've seen and
what motivates you to continueyour passion around data storage
and infrastructure?
Troy Wright (27:24):
I think the most rewarding thing is I work with
customers.
I'm helping people run theirbusinesses and what we do with
their information, how we enabletheir businesses to thrive.
I think that's where you gainyour reward.
You sit there and go.
We've actually made adifference to this company.
They've taken something thatwas hidden away or inaccessible,
(27:48):
hard to get to, and they'vegained value from that data.
They've turned it intosomething.
They've completed a project.
They've made it an environment,highly available, those sort of
things.
So you need to gain joy fromother people succeeding, because
that's what we do in thisindustry.
We're supplying part of asolution, but our end customers
are really the ones that we'reworking industry.
We're supplying part of asolution, but our end customers
(28:09):
are really the ones that we'reworking for.
We're trying to deliver themsolutions, so you need to gain
joy from them.
Michael van Rooyen (28:16):
Yeah, and I think about this industry.
We move a lot of data around.
We're becoming core andfundamental to the way people
live, learn and play, and I justthink about, in your role, the
amount of data that's beingstored right and how that's, you
know, being used for so manydifferent variations.
It's certainly very, veryintriguing and you must be very
rewarded to think about.
You know what that's doing forpeople holistically right,
(28:38):
businesses and personal, etcetera.
Troy Wright (28:40):
Yeah, Well, you even look at your personal life.
Our watches probably have morestorage than computers 20 years
ago.
Michael van Rooyen (28:46):
True, true.
Look as we wrap up this greatconversation.
Is there any key messages ortakeaways that you'd like to
convey to the listeners of thisaround data storage, the
industry, anything else that'sfront of mind?
Troy Wright (29:01):
The internet is a good source of information.
Do your research Wheneveryou're looking at initiatives.
Don't just go and replace likefor like in your businesses.
Our industry is very good atvendors providing information.
Engage our partners, Engage ourvendors in the industry.
They're willing to share theinformation, but take it all on
(29:22):
board.
I think it's important.
We've got a unique industrylike that.
It's a lot of industries youdon't get anything without
paying upfront.
In this one, we're very open.
We share information.
We share a lot of it upfrontand if you're a good source of
information.
Michael van Rooyen (29:41):
People keep pulling that information from
you.
Yeah, excellent, excellent.
And then, look, I do have onequestion, which I do ask all
attendees of the podcast is tellme about the most significant
technology change or shiftyou've seen or been involved
with in your career, and itdoesn't have to be around
storage or data management, butanything what's been so
impactful to you in your time.
Troy Wright (29:57):
I'm going to answer that slightly differently.
I actually think, the mostexciting one.
Michael van Rooyen (30:02):
And.
Troy Wright (30:02):
I think that's what we're going through now.
I think I find AI so excitingwe're going through now.
I think I find ai so exciting.
Yes, um, it's most of ussitting there going actually.
I I think I know how to use it,but I don't truly understand,
um the potential of it and we'reall learning so so quickly of
(30:23):
how we can use it and you thinkyou understand it.
and tomorrow there's somethingbetter and it's moving so
rapidly that it's making itexciting.
Whereas a lot of other industrytrends have taken a long time
They've taken years to evolve,ai is moving so quickly and it's
keeping us all on our toesright?
Michael van Rooyen (30:44):
It sure is, and for you, it's all about that
data being the bloodline for it, right?
So a fascinating conversation,troy.
Look, I really appreciate thetime for catching up with me
here at the event Certainly veryinsightful around all things
data and look forward tocatching up sometime in the
future.
Thank you, great.
There's electronic devices everywhere, and if you
can figure out how to gaininformation from them, it's
important.
Michael van Rooyen (00:08):
Yes.
Troy Wright (00:08):
It's important to our health, important to
understand traffic flow througha building or something like
that.
Ways to improve our lives iscoming from that IoT.
So people are building withtechnology that produces data so
we can improve our lifestylesand improve our businesses.
Michael van Rooyen (00:26):
Today I have the pleasure of having a chat
with Troy Wright, who is thePrincipal Systems Engineer at
Pure Storage.
We're going to talk all thingsstorage compute, what's
happening in industry in thoseareas.
We're catching up today atCisco Live the booth we're
running.
So, troy, welcome to thepodcast.
Thank you, happy to be here Forthose who are listening.
Do you mind just spending a fewminutes to tell us a little bit
(00:48):
about your career and yourjourney in the industry and what
led you to your current role asPrincipal System Engineer, peer
Storage Sure.
Troy Wright (00:55):
I'm actually coming into my 28th year working for
storage vendors.
Yeah, so a long time.
I started off with a degree inIT and sort of came up through a
customer support sort of roleand I spent a few years in
management, support management,that sort of stuff.
I spent probably 10 years inSydney.
(01:18):
I had an international stint upin Hong Kong for another five
years, but now I'm back inAustralia working for Pure
Storage, where I've been fornine years.
Michael van Rooyen (01:28):
Wow.
Troy Wright (01:29):
Yeah, so in the pre-sales role it's a systems
engineer, so we sort of help ourcustomers design solutions
based around the data that theyhave.
Michael van Rooyen (01:39):
Right right, and for those who aren't
familiar, can you provide anoverview of Pure's mission and
explain what differentiates youguys from other data storage
companies in the industry?
Troy Wright (01:50):
Sure.
So Pure Storage.
We set out to disrupt thestorage industry to really
deliver storage solutions thatmeet the customer's requirements
, and there's a multitude ofways that we do that, and
there's a multitude of ways thatwe do that.
I guess the most prevalent waythese days is people are looking
for some cybersecurity fortheir data, and we provide those
(02:13):
solutions.
We provide both on-prem andin-cloud based solutions as well
, and you probably see a lot oftrend these days around AI and
how much data plays in AI, andwe build a lot of solutions
around those stacks as well.
Michael van Rooyen (02:29):
Yeah, great, and you know.
Considering your history inworking with storage for so long
, do you mind telling us alittle bit about the trends
you've seen in the data storageindustry?
You know over your life cycleand you can talk about it from
how storage started through theother vendors, and where you are
today, and particularly.
(02:51):
Maybe you could also then touchon the rise of cloud storage
and the demand for high-speeddata access.
Troy Wright (02:57):
I think one of the bigger trends from when I
started was we moved away frommainframe.
So, mainframe storage was a bigthing where you didn't have much
of it, didn't have much storageand you had to use it very well
.
We moved on to virtualization,where we actually saw a lot of
machines and sprawl of serverscome out and everyone wanted a
(03:19):
copy of their data.
So for us in the storageindustry, we saw a big explosion
in the amount of data, theamount of virtual machines that
we saw out of there, and it wasthat was a big trend for us, and
being able to work withcompanies like vmware, yes, and
and dealing with how do you, howdo you provide storage in
multiple copies and and for theperformance levels that they
(03:40):
need.
We saw a bit of a trend movingtowards commoditization of
storage, but what we're seeingnow and what we do at pure
storage is is we realize thatyou need some, some specialties
in there, that you need to movefaster than the industry to be
to differentiate yourself, andthat's that's what we do at pure
, and driving a lot of that isAI.
(04:02):
Yes.
Michael van Rooyen (04:02):
Yeah, of course.
Troy Wright (04:03):
AI and cyber resilience.
It's very interesting in thatarea.
People, you have to protectyour data, but you need to
access your data.
Michael van Rooyen (04:14):
Of course, of course, and so if I think
about, when you started thejourney, the type of files that
might have been stored comparedto what it is today, we talked
about media rich content before.
We traditionally talked aboutmainframes.
You know low data consumption,but today we, you know, no one
deletes anything.
To be honest, right, it'srestoring the only thing.
(04:35):
It's not really restoring fromdelete, it's actually just
restoring from a failure, butgenerally people are not
deleting data.
Did you see this trajectory aswell?
Troy Wright (04:42):
Oh yeah, when I started, everything was in a
database.
It was only used by the bigorganizations.
It was structured, it wasmanually entered by people.
Now we have the Internet ofThings, we have devices
generating data, we have peoplegenerating data.
We have various types of datavideo, audio, you name it.
(05:03):
It's growing exponentially, butpeople want continued access to
it.
Yes, they always want to beable to access it and businesses
want to use that data, nomatter what format it is, to get
an advantage for their companyyes it's definitely changing.
Unstructured is is reallymassive in world.
Michael van Rooyen (05:24):
And is it fair to say, from what you're
seeing of the amount of datathat you're helping store for AI
usage, is that really thatunstructured data is becoming
the source of that information?
Troy Wright (05:33):
Yeah, in AI, people are trying to learn from that
unstructured data and we see asmall element of structuredness
and metadata when was the phototaken, like GPS coordinates
around that image or around thatvideo, that sort of stuff.
But that's a small percentageof it.
What the industry is trying todo is how do we learn from the
(05:55):
content within that image, fromthe content within that video or
that audio?
How do we take that and improveourselves, improve our
businesses?
And that's the challenge thatwe're dealing with and that's
why AI is so big.
People think about it as chat,gpt or something like that right
, Give me a recipe or a song orthose sort of things.
(06:16):
But companies are thinkingabout it differently.
Michael van Rooyen (06:19):
Is one of the other main sources of data
that you're seeing today.
Iot Can we just talk a littlebit about IoT?
Because, yeah, there's a lot ofcorporate data.
We know that there's a lot ofdiscussion by analysts that more
future trend people, that we'regoing to run out of data, that
AI is going to learn becauseeventually it'll consume
everything possible, or at leastso that it can access.
But there was a discussionabout OT or IoT becoming really
(06:41):
that next data lake ofinformation we can gather.
You know, sensor data,temperature, all those things.
Are you seeing some of yourcustomers really storing that or
moving towards more IoT storage?
Troy Wright (06:51):
Yeah, definitely.
If you just look at us now,we've got watches that are
collecting data for us.
It's sitting here, my heartrate's being collected with a
watch.
At the moment, I've got myphone sitting beside me.
It's collecting datainformation about what I'm doing
.
But there's also cameras around.
There's sensors on doors,there's you name it.
(07:11):
There's electronic deviceseverywhere and that information
if you can figure out how togain information from that, it's
important.
Michael van Rooyen (07:19):
Yes.
Troy Wright (07:20):
It's important to our health, which is hence the
watch, important to understandtraffic flow through a building
or something like that.
Ways to improve our lives iscoming from that IoT.
So people are building withtechnology that produces data so
we can improve our lifestylesand improve our businesses.
Michael van Rooyen (07:39):
So you're talking about a lot of storage,
a lot of petabytes of data,right, we've gone through these
transitions of just gigs toterabytes and out of petabytes,
and obviously you see customerswith much more than that, no
doubt.
But performance is important,right, because people want
things to load quickly, theywant to consume this structured
data.
Compute's going a long way toreally break that down, but
(08:00):
realistically, storage is realpivotal to that.
So flash storage has becomereally an essential part of
modern infrastructure.
Can you talk a little bit aboutwhat Pure has done in advancing
the use of flash storage andwhat uniqueness you guys have
brought to that?
I think you've also developedyour own products around that A
little bit different.
Can you touch on a bit of that?
Troy Wright (08:18):
Yeah, definitely If we take a look at performance
in there.
Big chunks of data.
If you can't access it, it'sworth nothing Of course.
So if it took you a week to getit out of the shed, out the
back, then you probably don'tneed it.
So what we've had to do at Pureis we've had to disrupt the
cycle and we actually build ourown flash modules.
Michael van Rooyen (08:37):
Right.
Troy Wright (08:37):
We don't take industry-off-the-shelf SSDs, for
instance.
We build what we call a directflash module and we have a flash
module on the market today.
That's 75 terabytes in a singleflash module.
Now it's quite dense, but it'sstill at flash level
performances.
So it leads us to a lot ofthings.
(08:58):
We get a lot of data stored onthere.
That's online, always online,always accessible, accessible.
But we think about the otherside of it is sustainability.
Yes, the amount of electricitythat we require to run our flash
modules is is very low.
Yes, um, it's good for theenvironment.
So our density is driving a lotof other things around the
world from sustainability.
(09:19):
But electricity costs they'renot getting any cheaper.
We, we all live at home and weknow our power bills are going
up.
Right 100%.
Well, that's happening.
In IT in general, theelectricity that you require is
increasing.
So what we're doing at PureStorage, by lowering the watts
per terabyte, by lowering that,we're allowing customers to
(09:40):
access data and gain value fromit.
Michael van Rooyen (09:42):
It's great that you touched on that,
because I was going to talk toyou about sustainability and
you've just touched on thatbecause you know we have this
continuous sprawl, shrinkage ofequipment.
There's a big drive by allvendors to do power consumption
in a much more efficient way.
On that, though, pivoting alittle bit more.
You know hybrid and multi-cloudstrategies.
Can you talk a bit about therole that storage technology
(10:04):
plays in these environments andhow they're evolving?
Of course you sell to bothsides of that coin, but can you
talk about is the shift justthere?
Is it more that people juststoring stuff in cloud and not
worrying about it anymore?
Can you talk a bit about that?
Troy Wright (10:16):
Our customers are getting smarter and smarter and
there was maybe an over-rotationto say that the cloud is the
answer.
Now they're actually going.
Actually, cloud consists oflots of things.
There's a private cloud.
You can build the cloud yourself.
It's about agility, like that,there's a public cloud and they
have a certain level of agility,and there's a private cloud
(10:37):
that you can build yourself.
So clouds it's an interestingterm.
There was a traditionalassociation with the public
cloud around cloud Hybridizationis a real thing and
understanding how yourapplication is being used, or
how your data is being used andwhere the right place for it
actually is, so your clients canaccess it, your business can
(10:59):
access it at the right price atthe right speed.
Yes, there's lots of elementsto it, but I think hybridization
is is definitely um somethingthat most businesses are looking
at yeah, I like thathybridization.
Michael van Rooyen (11:13):
I haven't really heard that term much, but
I do like that.
That's exactly where people aregoing right.
Everything's hybrid and it'llcontinue to be that way.
We're not going to get rid ofeverything on site, but
particularly we talk aboutoperational people needing
workloads, and even AI mighteven bring some of those
workloads back, and sure, theyneed a lot of compute and power
and all that.
But I think there's going to betimes when small workloads will
be able to run back closer tothe edge.
(11:34):
On that, are you seeing theneed for small edge instances?
I mean, we're talking a lotabout big data centers today,
big corporates and cloud, butare you seeing some people
wanting to do more smallerworkloads closer to the edge?
Troy Wright (11:48):
Well, yeah, it's funny, because what is big data
right?
Of course, and for one companybig data is completely different
to another company, and I thinkpersonally.
For me, big data is when it'stoo big for you to manage
yourself.
So edge is can you run ityourself?
Is it a size that you canhandle within your own business?
(12:09):
At a scale.
Do you have the skill setinternally?
Do you have the resourcesinternally to be able to do it?
And if you do, then running atthe edge is a really viable
solution.
But you may go through ajourney and you may start in one
location.
But you may go through ajourney and you may start in one
location and, as you betterunderstand how you're using
those resources and what they'recosting you, you need to move
(12:32):
it.
I think if you enter into anysolution with, this is where
it's going to remain for therest of its life.
It's not.
It's a blind entry.
You need to enter intosomething, knowing that it's
ever-changing.
Michael van Rooyen (12:47):
Yeah, sure, sure.
Data management certainly isbecoming more and increasingly
complex as Data Volumes Glow.
We talked a lot about howthey're happening.
What are some of the biggestchallenges businesses are facing
in managing their data, and howhave you seen customers address
that?
Troy Wright (13:04):
Yeah, so one of the things that we've identified at
Pure Storage is that a lot ofpeople's data sits in disparate
platforms and those platformshave different operational
processes on how to access itand how to manage that
environment.
And what we've done at Pure isactually we've built a single
operating system across all ofour solutions.
(13:27):
So, operationally, it doesn'tmatter how your data sits or
where your data sits.
Our operational process is thesame.
So one operating system,regardless of your type of data,
and that's simplifying it forour customer base.
You think about some of thecomplexities that every customer
has to deal with.
If everything is different,everything that they touch is
(13:49):
different.
There's opportunity for error.
There's opportunity forcomplexity.
Anything we can do in theindustry to simplify things is
really good.
Yeah, yeah.
Michael van Rooyen (14:01):
Off that as well.
Can you talk a little bit aboutdata security and compliance?
You know being, you know, topconcerns.
I know one of the solutionsthat you're deploying for
customers is really being ableto restore, you know for cyber
threats, but data security Imean ultimately data is the oil
of everything right.
So can you touch a little biton that?
You know what you're seeing asa concern that customers are
trying to deal with.
Troy Wright (14:21):
Yeah.
So there's obviously thingslike crypto lockers and that
sort of stuff, that if your databecomes compromised, how do you
recover your business, and whatwe do at Pure is a restore
point, but a rapid restore point, because every moment that any
(14:49):
business is offline is is anissue.
So, while at pure, we don'tactually protect the perimeter,
we're not a security company assuch.
We give our customers anability to restore and restore
rapidly into their business, soreduce the impact time.
(15:09):
But as an industry, we need toall work together.
There's got to be securityvendors protecting the perimeter
and access control vendorsprotecting the users, that type
of thing.
But our role really is aroundresiliency and rapid recovery.
Michael van Rooyen (15:24):
Yes, yes, there's been a lot of discussion
around digital transformation,right, and that can mean
multiple things to multiplepeople, but it's critical and is
there some approaches thatcustomers are seeing leveraging
some of your technology toaccelerate their digital
transformation?
Or, if I talk about data ingeneral, is it more that the
performance, the security, thedistribution of it is that
(15:47):
really helping with that journey?
Troy Wright (15:49):
Yeah, digital transformation.
You know what, when peopleembark on a transformation
journey, an old trainer'sthought was let's build a small
instance and see how ourtransformation looks.
Yes, and for a business, if youdon't build it with a
performance capability, it'sbound to fail, like if you
(16:09):
piecemeal something together andit doesn't perform the way you
expect it to perform inproduction.
The users and the testers aregoing to say actually, this
isn't doing what we need it todo.
So being an all-flash vendorand what we do at Pure Storage
allows that if you're doing atransformation project whether
that could be an operatingsystem difference, an
(16:31):
application change, somethinglike that we ensure that we
deliver it at high performance.
So you get production-levelperformance.
You get to see how yourapplication or your
transformation will actuallywork if you were to deploy it at
scale, and it gives it thebiggest opportunity for success
to understand actually we canscale this.
It's going to deliver abusiness, a difference to our
(16:53):
business, and whereas peopleused to run it up on a laptop in
the corner and see iftransformation does actually
work, that type of thing isbound to fail.
Michael van Rooyen (17:04):
Of course.
Of course If I was to thinkabout emerging technologies in
the storage space.
Are there some technologies oremerging tech that is driving
some things in the space thatreally excites you If I think
about, people think, oh, storageis storage, but there must be
some things on the horizon thatmay or may not be able to talk
about.
But is there some stuff youwant to talk on that?
Troy Wright (17:27):
Yeah, so there's things that always drive us in
the storage industry Density, ofcourse, io density, power
density, those types of things.
We store more of our clients'data in a smaller footprint, at
a lower cost and make itaccessible to them.
So that's definitely somethingthat's driving it.
But these days it's accesspatterns and how people are
(17:48):
building their applications toaccess our data.
So you see a lot of Kubernetescoming up these days, a lot of
microservices, container-basedplatforms.
Can we remove some of the extralayers that we have in terms of
accessing our data?
So different ways to access ourdata is where we're seeing a
lot of growth.
(18:08):
That involves both the networkconnectivity, whether that be
Ethernet or fiber channel, butalso the hypervisors and the
operating systems that areaccessing it.
So having a system that cancater for all those things and
allowing a customer to go on ajourney through there while us,
as a vendor, is deliveringthings like IO density and power
(18:32):
density per terabyte, it'ssuper cool.
Michael van Rooyen (18:36):
Yeah, we'd be super cool.
And you're really referringthere to the continuation of
shrinking and more powerperformance.
Where else can we fit intothese things?
It's fascinating engineering.
People just think of it as theobvious, of it's getting smaller
and using less power great.
But the amount of engineeringthat goes behind that to really
achieve that is prettystaggering.
Right, it's massive, yeah.
Troy Wright (18:57):
Who would have ever thought that you would build an
archiving platform based off ofFlash technology?
Michael van Rooyen (19:02):
That's true.
Troy Wright (19:03):
And that's what we've done.
We've found a way to deliver atarchiving prices competitive
and sometimes even tapecompetitive, using flash, using
all the benefits of flash, thethe low power, the high density,
the high performance of flash,and and that's the innovation
that we're delivered.
It's, it's huge.
Michael van Rooyen (19:21):
Yeah, yeah, and if I was thinking about then
we touched on and you're reallythe core and heart of people
wanting to store data for AI.
Right, we're going to talkabout AI and machine learning
because it's an important trendthat everyone's talking about
today.
If I take a different view fromfrom what you're seeing and
working through is not only areyou obviously providing storage
for those workloads to do that,but but what's the plan around
(19:43):
AI integration for some of your,your tool services?
Is there some thinking at thisstage that, again, you're
allowed to talk about from apure point of view, on helping
customers navigate theirenvironments?
Troy Wright (19:54):
Yeah, so look, we are using AI internally for some
intelligent services back toour customers, so giving them
the ability to save time intheir day.
If you think about anything intechnology, it has log files, it
has dashboards, it hasmonitoring, reporting, that sort
of stuff.
And if you're new to theplatform or it's, it's not your
(20:18):
day-to-day job to deal withstorage or deal with servers or
deal with virtual machines.
How can you use AI to actuallyhelp identify is?
Is my environment healthy?
Is my environment secure?
How do I check that?
And by delivering that and whatwe're doing at pure is
delivering that through largelanguage models to be able to
(20:39):
ask a natural language basedquestion and identify it is my
environment okay?
Is my environment okay?
Is my environment secure?
Do I have anything that I canimprove on in my environment?
Is all my data placed in theright location?
Yes, all those simple questionsthat our business asks us as IT
people.
Now we can ask AI and it'susing our data set, our personal
(21:02):
data set, in a secure way toanswer the question.
Michael van Rooyen (21:05):
Yeah, great, if I think about customers, the
ones you sell to, obviously,enterprises or providers, et
cetera.
But are you seeing, and aswe've talked about for a while,
but storage as a service, youknow, continue to gain
popularity in market, or, youknow, is it kind of declined,
flattened out?
And if so, could you discuss abit about that trend and the
(21:26):
business flexibility it provides?
It's?
Troy Wright (21:28):
still growing.
Michael van Rooyen (21:30):
Oh right.
Troy Wright (21:30):
Yeah, yeah, it's a growing trend.
Australia is quite welladvanced in storage as a service
.
We do see.
Personally, I don't know what'sright.
Is it access to money?
Is it because they want theservice levels?
But what we're being asked andwhat we're delivering at pure
(21:53):
storage is is sla based storageas a service.
It's not just a commercialmodel.
It's not just how much can yougive us for a terabyte of?
Michael van Rooyen (21:57):
storage yes, it's.
Troy Wright (21:57):
What else do I get when I, when I consume storage
off of you?
What do I get?
A performance sla?
Do I get a power consumptionsla?
Do I get an availability?
All those slas are built intoit and what it does is help
those teams deliver back totheir business.
Hey, I'm meeting mysustainability goals tied to it,
(22:20):
so we're ticking a lot of boxesalong the way.
But also consumption or afinancing model is part of that.
It's only pay for the storageI'm using.
Don't go and try and buy fiveyears worth of storage up front
and hope we grow into it or hopewe got it right.
We'll just pay for what ourbusiness needs today and if we
(22:40):
come up with an idea and we needmore storage, we can just
consume it, of course.
Michael van Rooyen (22:45):
Of course it makes sense, right?
The model of scaling up anddown is really beneficial to
customers.
The problem is not many peopledeliver it.
It's a little bit like physicalstorage, right?
You see so many physical storageplaces popping up because,
people consume so many thingsand they've got nowhere to put
it.
You know the Christmas tree, etcetera, coming up to Christmas,
so I thought I might mentionthat and putting it into storage
(23:11):
and then leaving it there,right, but we don't throw things
away either, similar to data,we just continue to do so.
It's fascinating how businesscan use that scale up and scale
down model, but I can understandwhat, why you're seeing it as
an increasing on consumption.
Troy Wright (23:19):
Well, I think part of the challenge that companies
can't deliver it is they don'thave the technology behind it.
What we built at Pure is atechnology that allows us to
deliver storage as a service.
We have an evergreeninfrastructure platform, which
means that our hardware doesn'tever go into support life.
It's very modular.
(23:40):
We can upgrade it and upgradesubcomponents within it, which
allows us to make systems biggerand smaller as customers grow
and shrink.
Michael van Rooyen (23:50):
If I then think about, you know,
increasing pressures tomaintaining uptime and
resilience, you know.
Can you have a bit of a word onwhat the best practices are you
recommend for organizations whoare building resilient data
infrastructures?
You know, at a high level?
Troy Wright (24:05):
Yeah, it's an absolute luxury that we are very
highly available storageplatforms so those resilience
questions are.
They're in in, built into ourplatform.
So we're lucky.
We have these conversationswith our customers all the time.
It's about redundancies.
It's about making sure youunderstand the difference
between disaster recovery.
Is my data center offline?
(24:25):
Is my power grid offline, mygetting hit by a natural
disaster flood or cyclone orsomething like that and do I
have somewhere else to go?
A pure, where the availabilityand the resiliency built into
our, our platforms is high?
But you need those othercapabilities.
You need a place to restore to,a place to fall over to in the
(24:46):
case of a disaster or somethinghappens in your environment.
And what is your businesscapable of tolerating?
Is it I?
I need to be in real time rightnow.
A recovery point needs to bezero, or?
Or can the recovery point befive minutes an hour or
something like that?
Um, and am I able to fail overto a public cloud, right?
(25:08):
Or do I need to fail overwithin another data center
within a jurisdiction?
They're all the challenges thatour customers go through.
Yes, and we're buildingsolutions for each one of them,
depending on what theirregulatory requirements are or
their personal choices on howthey want to do it.
Michael van Rooyen (25:26):
Each business needs to make that
decision, considering the timethat you've been working in this
space, if you were to thinkabout people who are aspiring to
be tech people or leading intothis industry?
Have you got any advice foraspiring people coming into the
industry to be involved?
Troy Wright (25:41):
I think one of the things that I'd advise people is
actually understand where yourdata is going, how it's all
plumbed together Like peoplethink that I save a file and
it's mysteriously goingsomewhere, but how do things
interconnect and understandinghow the communication channels
work, how things are saved, howthey're protected, that sort of
(26:02):
stuff, Understand what you'redoing with your data.
Similar to if you're into carsyou understand how the engine
works and how the brakes workand all that sort of stuff.
You don't just if you're a carperson, you don't just get in
there and push the start buttonand drive from a to b.
If you wanting to get into thedata industry, understand what
the data is, how you protect it,how you categorize it, how you
(26:24):
control it, um, or there's a lotof things around it.
It's very important tounderstand.
I'll call it the plumbing,right, the plumbing of how data
moves in our environment.
I call it digital plumbing, yeahyeah, it's interesting because
I don't know if it gets trainedthese days.
I went through university quitesome time ago, right, and we
(26:44):
did go through.
We were very short on memory.
We were very short on memory.
We were very short on cpucycles.
Everyone was taught right downto the bits and bytes.
Um, now we have an abundance ofthese resources.
Oh, we have for a long time Ithink they're getting harder and
harder or more expensive thesedays.
Yeah, so learning that, uhunderstanding all that plumbing
is, is important, so if you'rekeen to get into it, it's a
(27:06):
industry.
There's lots of ways you can doit between communication,
security, that sort of stuff.
It's all around data.
Michael van Rooyen (27:13):
Yes.
And if I was then to reflect onyour career, what have been
some of the most rewardingexperiences that you've seen and
what motivates you to continueyour passion around data storage
and infrastructure?
Troy Wright (27:24):
I think the most rewarding thing is I work with
customers.
I'm helping people run theirbusinesses and what we do with
their information, how we enabletheir businesses to thrive.
I think that's where you gainyour reward.
You sit there and go.
We've actually made adifference to this company.
They've taken something thatwas hidden away or inaccessible,
(27:48):
hard to get to, and they'vegained value from that data.
They've turned it intosomething.
They've completed a project.
They've made it an environment,highly available, those sort of
things.
So you need to gain joy fromother people succeeding, because
that's what we do in thisindustry.
We're supplying part of asolution, but our end customers
are really the ones that we'reworking industry.
We're supplying part of asolution, but our end customers
(28:09):
are really the ones that we'reworking for.
We're trying to deliver themsolutions, so you need to gain
joy from them.
Michael van Rooyen (28:16):
Yeah, and I think about this industry.
We move a lot of data around.
We're becoming core andfundamental to the way people
live, learn and play, and I justthink about, in your role, the
amount of data that's beingstored right and how that's, you
know, being used for so manydifferent variations.
It's certainly very, veryintriguing and you must be very
rewarded to think about.
You know what that's doing forpeople holistically right,
(28:38):
businesses and personal, etcetera.
Troy Wright (28:40):
Yeah, Well, you even look at your personal life.
Our watches probably have morestorage than computers 20 years
ago.
Michael van Rooyen (28:46):
True, true.
Look as we wrap up this greatconversation.
Is there any key messages ortakeaways that you'd like to
convey to the listeners of thisaround data storage, the
industry, anything else that'sfront of mind?
Troy Wright (29:01):
The internet is a good source of information.
Do your research Wheneveryou're looking at initiatives.
Don't just go and replace likefor like in your businesses.
Our industry is very good atvendors providing information.
Engage our partners, Engage ourvendors in the industry.
They're willing to share theinformation, but take it all on
(29:22):
board.
I think it's important.
We've got a unique industrylike that.
It's a lot of industries youdon't get anything without
paying upfront.
In this one, we're very open.
We share information.
We share a lot of it upfrontand if you're a good source of
information.
Michael van Rooyen (29:41):
People keep pulling that information from
you.
Yeah, excellent, excellent.
And then, look, I do have onequestion, which I do ask all
attendees of the podcast is tellme about the most significant
technology change or shiftyou've seen or been involved
with in your career, and itdoesn't have to be around
storage or data management, butanything what's been so
impactful to you in your time.
Troy Wright (29:57):
I'm going to answer that slightly differently.
I actually think, the mostexciting one.
Michael van Rooyen (30:02):
And.
Troy Wright (30:02):
I think that's what we're going through now.
I think I find AI so excitingwe're going through now.
I think I find ai so exciting.
Yes, um, it's most of ussitting there going actually.
I I think I know how to use it,but I don't truly understand,
um the potential of it and we'reall learning so so quickly of
(30:23):
how we can use it and you thinkyou understand it.
and tomorrow there's somethingbetter and it's moving so
rapidly that it's making itexciting.
Whereas a lot of other industrytrends have taken a long time
They've taken years to evolve,ai is moving so quickly and it's
keeping us all on our toesright?
Michael van Rooyen (30:44):
It sure is, and for you, it's all about that
data being the bloodline for it, right?
So a fascinating conversation,troy.
Look, I really appreciate thetime for catching up with me
here at the event Certainly veryinsightful around all things
data and look forward tocatching up sometime in the
future.
Thank you, great.
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