CASE STUDY
FLASHBLADE IS THE FIRST ALL-FLASH
STORAGE SYSTEM PURPOSE-BUILT FOR
MODERN ANALYTICS.
Effortless management and a
clear path for the future
Man AHL benefits from more than
FlashBlade’s raw performance. “There are
significant savings from the simplicity of
operation. It just works,” Collier noted.
“The fact that Pure Storage is plug-and-
play adds to our operational efficiency.
We’ve essentially cut our headcount for
storage management from one-and-a-half
to the equivalent of a half-time role. And
going forward, it’ll approach zero. That
means we can redeploy those assets to
higher-priority activities.”
Looking to the future, Collier said FlashBlade
is a perfect fit for the firm’s expanding
storage and computing needs, but at times
is unpredictable. “For a year we had been
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thinking about the challenges of shared NFS
storage,” he recalled, “and FlashBlade came
along at just the right time. FlashBlade is
designed to scale out NFS, so it’s ideal for
the kind of use cases we have. This includes
simulations using Spark, where you are
processing lots and lots of unstructured data
and working with millions of files.”
“If we extrapolate the way we have been
growing, we double our storage needs
about every 18 months. And that’s a scary
prospect. A Pure Storage competitor that
we looked at required 4x the rack space
of FlashBlade, without the ability to add
capacity. In contrast, FlashBlade is very
compact and scales easily just by adding
blades. Having something as flexible and
expandable as FlashBlade is what our
business demands.”
Another attractive long-term benefit is
Pure Storage support for the OpenStack
initiative. “We are heavy users of Docker,”
Collier said, “so we plan to take full
advantage of OpenStack and Docker
integration on the Pure data platform.
That makes it very easy from a DevOps
standpoint to create Docker volumes and
attach them to containers.”
Above and beyond product satisfaction,
the Man AHL team has benefited from
the extreme attentiveness of Pure Storage
customer and technical support. As early
as the POC, Blackburn said: “We saw how
responsive the Pure team is. We had answers
to questions generally within an hour
of sending them, whereas we find other
vendors can take weeks to respond. We’ve
had astonishing turnaround from Pure.” n
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