INTERVIEW: Flash storage to boost 6G adoption says Charles Giancarlo, Pure Storage Chairman and CEO

In the age of AI, do you feel that companies are giving due thought to the idea of data storage, be it in terms of budget or in any other aspect?

No, I think this has been an issue for data storage for some time. Data storage has been treated as a commodity. It’s been purchased at the subject-matter-expert levels inside of companies, not at a technical or strategic level.

I do think that AI is calling more attention to data storage inside companies. We as consumers have gone from using external hard drives to the cloud. Enterprises don’t work that way. Data storage is still treated like individual hard drives, except they’re larger. The data is captive, it’s siloed to that application environment.

And so, companies are still operating on decades old architectures. Now, AI wants to be able to access any of the data at any time, immediately to give a response. So, we think AI is really going to cause a revolution in the way that customers look at their data environment.

Do you feel that if India incorporates flash storage into these data centers, it could catapult development of technologies like 6G?

There’s very little question about it. First of all, data centers will be all flash going forward. The reason: it’s more performant, uses less power. And power is a critical concern right now for every country and data center operators because their trouble is not so much the cost of power, but access to more power.

We can reduce the total power of a data center by something like 20 per cent which can be used for other things like compute, AI. It’s 20 per cent of their total data center power we can now give back to them. So it’s like a new power source.

So, if flash storage is as lucrative as you’re saying, what is still keeping things like SSD in the fight?

Part of the reason is a hard disk has been very cheap for decades and Flash used to be very expensive.

Now Flash is still a little bit more expensive than hard disk, but it’s coming down at a faster rate than hard disk. And then our technology, we’re the only company that provides what we call Direct Flash. that is more efficient and provides greater performance than say SSDs.

And because of that, it allows us to be the first to get into these major data center opportunities.

Infrastructure-wise, would I be seeing a very drastic change in how data centers look?

You would. About 25-30 per cent floor space in a data center today are these racks of hard drives. We can replace that with something like 5 per cent of the floor space. So you wouldn’t even see the storage in a sense.

Also, all of those hard drives are making a huge amount of noise. Our system is almost entirely quiet, except for the fans.

Have you been in talks with the government, the Indian government recently, in terms of data centers?

Not so much, although it’s our plan on a worldwide basis. We’ve been getting much more involved with government authorities, because power is a big concern.

We need to make governments aware that they can save, reduce the amount of power constraints, both for a business and for consumers, by this. It’s like - if you think about LED lighting, it was expensive at the beginning but governments globally encouraged its use as they used less than one-tenth of the amount of power of the incandescent light bulbs.

What kind of security challenges have you been facing over the time?

Ransomware has started to become a very large concern. For storage vendors, there’s been a great demand to provide “immutable copies.” Say your data has been encrypted by ransomware. You either you pay the threat actor, or if you’ve made a copy before it was encrypted, and you can recover from that copy rapidly. That’s a set of capabilities that we provide; the ability to detect whether your data’s being violated.

Will Pure Storage be able to protect against quantum computer attacks?

One of the concerns around quantum computing is it’s very good at factoring prime numbers, on which many algorithm encryptions are based.

And so the fear is that when quantum computing gets large enough, it could decrypt everything that we do today.

That is about 10 years off right now, but the National Institute of Standards (NIST) in the US is already standardizing post quantum cryptography, algorithms not based on primes that quantum computers are not good at.

So, algorithms for encryption that quantum computers are not good at, will become a set of standards probably in the next year. As soon as the standards are set, we’ll move to those and we should be in good shape.