KDDI is the APJ GOAT winner at 2022 Pure Storage Breakthrough Awards

At Pure//Accelerate techfest22, Pure Storage, the advanced data storage technology and services provider, named KDDI its Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.) - APJ award winner in its 2nd annual Pure Storage Breakthrough Awards. The awards recognise Pure customers displaying extraordinary innovation, creativity, business breakthroughs and overarching success using Pure's portfolio of offerings.

Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, KDDI is a global Fortune 500 company and one of the largest telecommunications providers in Asia. Pure is supporting part of its always-on infrastructure with 99.999% availability. With FlashArray and FlashBlade, KDDI has succeeded in tripling input/output (I/O) performance, doubling the data efficiency, and reducing maintenance-related operational costs by 75%.

"In order to support our customers' digital transformation projects, it is important to increase the value of their experience. We chose Pure Storage because I/O performance is a part that customers directly experience. Also, as a telecom and cloud provider, our customers depend on us to provide them with a highly reliable platform and services, especially as both public and private cloud demand continues to grow. While we spent most of our time fixing issues with our previous storage infrastructure, with Pure Storage, our team can now focus on more strategic work for our customers," noted Yusuke Okano, Expert, KDDI.

"Our customers continue to impress us year after year with their commitment to technological innovation. Even with the unpredictable challenges that have surfaced over the last two years, customers continued to demonstrate resilience and creativity, with a heavy focus on global sustainability initiatives. We congratulate the winners of our second annual Breakthrough Awards Program at this year's Pure//Accelerate techfest22 for their strategic implementation of Pure's growing portfolio, and for their incredible dedication to success," said Joe Pinto, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Pure Storage.

Other 2022 award recipients include:

Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.) - EMEA - Barclays

Barclays offers consumer, corporate and investment services to millions of customers and clients across the globe, including always-on financial services via its online properties and mobile app. To ensure a high level of availability, Barclays uses Pure's FlashArray, with Evergreen//Forever and Evergreen//One subscriptions to support workloads that include many of its primary applications and databases, ultimately helping the company achieve over a 99.9999% storage uptime rate over the last seven years.

"To support our current volume of data, we would have needed substantially more gear from our previous storage vendor, which was simply a non-starter. Barclays has an ambition to become a net-zero bank by 2050. We need to partner with like-minded organisations that are not only disruptors in their markets but take their environmental responsibilities seriously. Pure is very much aligned with Barclays on this front," commented Eugene Tang, Global Block Storage Product Manager, Barclays.

Cloud Champion - Ford Motor Company

Cloud champions support their organisation's cloud strategy with Pure's Evergreen//One, Cloud Block Store, or Portworx offerings. Ford is leveraging Portworx Enterprise to manage persistent storage for cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes.

A cornerstone of its application development stack, this strategy is manifested in offerings that Ford employees, drivers and dealers rely on every day. As a result, Ford has modernised its fleet of applications – accelerating the pace of innovation and achieving unrivalled cost savings and scalability.

"We invested in Portworx Enterprise as a key pillar of our containerisation strategy because it delivers fast and reliable container storage that eliminates barriers to innovation," said Satish Puranam, Technical Leader - Cloud, Ford.

Pure Good - Folding@home:

Early on in the pandemic, over 1 million citizen scientists donated their computing power to Folding@home, a distributed computing project, with the goal of helping develop new therapeutics. Using a FlashBlade donated by Pure, Folding@home was able to massively scale capacity, boost performance, and process data faster for scientists. Amid the pandemic, Folding@home generated and managed over 0.1 seconds of simulation data – 100,000 times more data than usual, ingesting about six terabytes of data per hour, with the help of Pure.

"By separating our capacity from compute, we're able to get more out of our compute resources, which gives us the ability to ask questions at an unprecedented scale. It's as if FlashBlade was purpose- built for the Folding@home mission," observed Dr Greg Bowman, Director, Folding@home.

The winners were selected from among more than 10,000 of Pure's global customers.