The Death of Hard Drives at Data Centres
At the start of 2024, companies such as AdaniConnex, Reliance, Sify, Atlassian, Yotta, and AWS ramped up investments in India’s rapidly expanding data centre industry. AWS alone had announced a significant commitment of $12.7 billion to bolster its presence in the country. According to a report, India’s colocation (colo) data centre capacity across its top seven cities reached 977 MW by the second half of 2023. This marks a substantial addition of 258 MW during 2023, reflecting a 105% year-on-year growth compared to the installed capacity in 2022. The country is poised for even greater expansion, with 1.03 GW of under-construction colo capacity slated for completion between 2024 and 2028. Against the backdrop of such exciting developments, Pure Storage India, an advanced data storage platform, makes a bold prediction: Hard drives will likely be phased out in three to five years. In an exclusive interview with AIM, Shawn Hansen, general manager/VP at Pure Storage, compared this transition to DVDs, which were once everywhere, but were quickly replaced by streaming media. “It felt like an overnight shift,” Hansen expressed while anticipating a similar trajectory for hard drives. He believes that Flash storage is increasingly seen as the future, offering efficiency, speed, and sustainability that hard drives just can’t match. What is so Special About Pure Storage? Pure Storage’s core mission is to create the most efficient and dense storage solutions. Hansen mentioned that the company started with a 2-terabyte Flash module and has now developed a 75-terabyte one, with plans for a 150-terabyte module soon. However, these upgrades come with no increase in power or cooling requirements. He explains that hard drives, by contrast, are limited by their mechanical nature and consume much more power. “AI is incredibly data-hungry, and traditional hard drives just are not viable anymore,” Hansen explains. Flash storage, which uses one-tenth the power of hard drives, is the clear winner. This transition is especially crucial as data centres face the challenge of growing demand while managing costs and energy consumption. Pure Storage’s flash technology allows companies to reduce power use, free up space, and lower cooling requirements. This efficiency translates to more capacity for AI workloads without the need to expand data centres. Flash storage is not only efficient but also becoming more affordable. “We’re reaching price parity with hard drives, and that’s driving a dramatic shift in the market,” Hansen noted. Pure Storage is confident this shift will accelerate as vendors exit the hard drive market, making way for denser storage technologies like flash. Why is Pure Storage in Bengaluru? Hansen claimed that India, owing to its incredible pool of technical talent, is at the heart of this shift. Pure Storage credits Bengaluru, a city known for its startups and innovation, for having found some of its brightest engineers. “The talent density here is incredibly high,” he remarked. Over the past two years, the company has doubled its team size annually in Bengaluru, focusing on projects that require deep expertise in storage and AI. “The talent here is not just benefiting us but the global tech ecosystem. We are incredibly impressed with the leaders we have met here and look forward to continuing our partnership with this region,” he said. Bengaluru is not just another location for Pure Storage. It is one of their three main innovation hubs, alongside Santa Clara in Silicon Valley and Prague in Europe. Each hub has its speciality, and Bengaluru plays to its strengths by tackling challenging storage and AI projects. “It’s not just about outsourcing,” Hansen shared proudly. The company has developed technologies like DirectFlash, which makes storage solutions more efficient and reliable. “All our firmware for DirectFlash is developed in Bengaluru. The team here gives us a multiyear lead over competitors,” he said. Another key innovation is Fusion, which lets companies manage storage like a public cloud—simple, flexible, and scalable. Pure Storage also works closely with major players like NVIDIA, collaborating on solutions like the SuperPod NGX, which combines GPUs and storage for seamless AI infrastructure. Besides, the company has secured a partnership with one of the top four hyperscalers (name undisclosed) to integrate flash storage into their data centres, hinting at a major milestone in the industry’s shift from hard drives. Meta’s AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), one of the fastest AI supercomputers globally, is built to train next-generation AI models on massive datasets spanning petabytes. Powered by Pure Storage’s FlashArray and FlashBlade, RSC efficiently meets the GPU and storage demands while keeping operational costs low. “We contacted a number of storage vendors of both disk and flash to evaluate their highest performance and highest density offerings. From a combination of performance and power and cost, we ended up selecting Pure Storage,” Vivek Pai, AIRSC storage lead at Meta, remarked. “Today, 80% of storage purchases are concentrated in a few companies, but that’s about to change,” Hansen explained. Pure Storage is ready to provide the storage solutions needed to power this next phase of AI.
‘Today, 80% of storage purchases are concentrated in a few companies, but that’s about to change.
‘Today, 80% of storage purchases are concentrated in a few companies, but that’s about to change.
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Shalini is a senior tech journalist, exploring the latest advancements in AI. When she's not reporting on the latest innovations, you can find her immersed in her next literary adventure.