Infrastructure modernization has come on leaps and bounds, but there’s still a long way to go

Infrastructure modernization has been the bane of many an IT leader over the last decade. It’s an expensive, exhausting process littered with perils - and it’s about as mission-critical as you can get.

Regardless, enterprises across a range of industries have powered on in a bid to optimize operational efficiency, unlock cost savings, and bolster general productivity.

The advent of generative AI in late 2022 changed the game though. While modernization was a key priority, the rapid evolution of the technology has forced many to accelerate projects to keep pace.

AI workloads are cumbersome, unwieldy beasts, and lackluster infrastructure simply cannot cope. Indeed, research from Hitachi Vantara shows that one-third of IT leaders have been negatively impacted by inadequate storage and slow performance - and that’s even before you take AI into account.

This has a domino effect across the enterprise, the study noted, hampering productivity, impacting customer satisfaction and, ultimately resulting in lost revenue.

Similar research on the impact of growing AI workloads from Gigamon showed they are placing huge strain on hybrid cloud infrastructure, with organisations not only struggling to contend with rising data volumes, but also various compliance and security-related considerations.

Pure Storage has long argued that its all-flash storage products are the key to driving performance and efficiency in the data center. It’s the message around which the company has based its strategy for over a decade now.

At Pure Accelerate 2023, the company’s annual conference held in Las Vegas, ITPro heard how the performance benefits of flash storage was the key to capitalizing on the generative AI boom while it was still in its infancy.

Two years on, Pure Storage has altered its messaging on this front. While it still champions all-flash, the broader infrastructural ecosystem and accompanying software has emerged as the main talking point at this year’s conference.

But have enterprises pounced on this call to action made back in 2023? Not exactly, according to CEO Charlie Giancarlo. During a press briefing at the conference this week, Giancarlo told ITPro it’s a complicated subject - and one that has popped up recently.

“Someone we spoke to, actually one of our attendees from Nvidia, this topic came up and he described it as a baseball game,” Giancarlo said.

While baseball analogies on data storage aren’t exactly what you’d expect, Giancarlo noted that it gives a unique glimpse into the pace of infrastructure modernization in the age of AI and the level of maturity among large swathes of the enterprise space.

“In baseball, there are nine innings, and he described it as people in the audience still taking their seats before the game,” he said. “I don’t quibble with that too much.”

That’s not to say no progress has been made, however, and as Giancarlo pointed out, customers are still “doing a lot of experimentation” - even Pure itself is still in an experimental phase with regard to some aspects of the technology and associated infrastructural considerations.

The conversations Pure has with customers, and its observations on the broader industry, are changing though. The outlook among enterprise IT leaders is increasingly shifting toward how core business processes can be augmented or altered to accommodate the technology.

“I would say last year the conversation was still around reducing expense,” he told ITPro. “I think like most fundamental transformations in technology, the real benefit comes from changing business processes and changing products.”

“I think we’re only just starting to hear about that now this year,” Giancarlo added. “We’ve gone through the same, if you will, path as every other company in terms of how we’re going to use it.”