Johannesburg, 15 Jan 2024
Data is increasingly the lifeblood of businesses, with organisations today creating, capturing, copying or consuming it increasing rapidly on a global scale. According to Statista.com, 64.2 zettabytes were created in 2020, and that is expected to reach 180 zettabytes by 2025.
At this rate of growth, enterprises’ ability to effectively leverage such data will depend on ensuring sustainable and efficient storage solutions. It is for this reason that Pure Storage and ETS Innovations are excited to announce their partnership.
According to Anthony Da Silva, Pure Storage Country Manager for Southern Africa and Indian Ocean Islands, storage itself is evolving to keep up with the challenge, which is why all-flash storage has become ubiquitous.
“With the exponential growth of data and the increasingly business-critical nature of storage, it has become almost impossible to achieve this with disk, which is why we have developed our own flash drives called Direct Flash Modules that optimise the flash technology,” he explains.
“In terms of our go-to-market, we work closely with our channel ecosystem to design, architect and build out partner programmes that are impactful to our joint customers. With ETS Innovations, we recognised a lot of synergies, in that they are also among the best at what they do – so this new partnership is one we are incredibly excited about.”
ETS Innovations’ CEO, Zandi Mbele, agrees, noting that flash storage is a very popular choice with ETS customers, in terms of its speed, efficiency, sustainability and how it can impact businesses. “With this in mind, we partnered with Pure Storage to provide our customers with industry-leading all-flash solutions. They have a strong reputation in the industry and as such are an organisation we trust and can work with, and a partner that offers really great support too.
“Many of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that enter our market tend to also compete with their channel partners. Pure Storage does not, which is why its commitment to the channel is so highly prized by partners.”
Mbele feels that flash storage is a real differentiator for ETS, because it is faster, can store more and has fewer moving parts and thus fewer breakdowns. What really makes the partnership, she continues, is Pure Storage enabling ETS’s end customers to obtain all the efficiencies and speed of flash, as well as their approach to partnership.
Da Silva notes that while flash has long had a reputation for being more reliable and efficient, its cost has always been a challenge.
“At Pure Storage, however, we build our flash modules – rather than use off-the-shelf solutions like much of our competition – so we have close control over everything from density to quality to reliability. With the cost of HDDs and SSDs reaching parity, there’s nowhere left for HDDs to hide. In the digital age, the rise of cyber crime and ransomware means that backing up your data is non-negotiable.
"However, if you are hit by an attack and have to recover everything, traditional tape or disk-based backups can only be restored at a rate of a few TB per hour. That’s painstakingly slow by modern standards and, depending on volume, could result in hours or days of downtime, leading to immeasurable financial and reputational loss. On the other hand, the highest performing flash-based solutions can restore data backups at speeds over 270TB an hour.” This, he suggests, is where all-flash comes into the picture.
He adds that Pure Storage also has an approach that drives non-disruptive upgrades. In other words, a company can move from the smallest array to the largest with virtually no disruption or impact on the business. “Pure Storage is excited about this partnership, as with the reputation and skills ETS already has in the industry, we are pleased to be associated with a partner that focuses strongly on data efficiencies, simplicity and has a customer-first mentality. After all, this lies at the core of what we do too, so the synergies between us are enormous.”
“ETS has a very good reputation in the market,” continues Mbele, “and it expects its partners to demonstrate similar values and levels of skill and integrity. Pure Storage represents us perfectly in this respect, and as such, we see in this partnership a future of considerable growth, in which we delight the end customers together,” she concludes.
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