The financial industry is in a constant state of flux between moving to the cloud, and maintaining compliance with the unique requirements of on-premises datacenters. The growing need for availability and scalability, and the rising energy costs to run onsite datacenters are not helping with the back-and-forth journey.
Pure Storage’s Bare Metal as-a-Service (BMaaS), Powered by Pure is offering a compelling solution to this complex challenge. By combining the economic efficiency of a consumption-based OPEX model with the control of bare metal servers and storage arrays, it addresses the specific requirements of the financial industry.
Constraints of the Financial Industry in a Fast-Moving Environment
The financial industry is facing a strange dilemma. Stuck between the ever-increasing demand for innovative data and availability, and the need to maneuver between private and public clouds. Organizations are struck with a new realization. As they embarked on the journey to cloud, it became quickly evident that a simple lift and shift of applications wouldn’t cut it.
An application that is not cloud-aware, or cloud-native, might not perform as expected, or not work at all. It is quite common for public cloud providers to have shared environments. Running an application in such an environment, with several tenants in a shared infrastructure, might affect consistent performance as a tenant increases its compute usage or requirements, or a run-away process starts to consume more CPU cycles that the provider is unaware of.
Lastly, as finance is a heavily regulated industry, the protection of sensitive data is of utmost importance. Being unable to be certain of where the data resides is a huge challenge for organizations that are already struggling with a tonnage of internal and government-issued audits and regulations.
Moving the Physical Infrastructure to a Hosted Environment
BMaaS, Powered by Pure is a new offering that brings a different approach to solving these challenges. It is looking to combine the benefits of cloud-based infrastructure with the autonomy of on-premises datacenters. It provides customers with full control of the hardware stack and single tenancy. And it allows institutions to configure bare metal servers to their specifications, without sharing their resources with other customers.
One of the BMaaS, Powered by Pure partnerships is with Equinix and delivers Pure Storage on Equinix Metal. Equinix Metal utilizes Equinix’s datacenters around the world and provides instantly scalable, single tenant computing and networking with single tenant Pure Storage arrays directly integrated. All aspects of a local datacenter, from hardware, hosting, and integrated networking under one contract and handled by a single vendor.
Scalability, Data Governance, and Energy Efficiency
BMaaS, Powered by Pure allows organizations to move their datacenters and operate them in a hosted environment, built to the required specifications. Utilizing Equinix’s vast infrastructure allows firms to move their data closer to the edge, where compute and storage are needed. The same infrastructure enables data governance, as it is possible to define the region of the datacenter and comply with regulations, such as GDRP.
One of the biggest differences, when compared to public cloud offerings, is the single tenancy aspect of the service. Aside from performance issues that could be caused by other tenants, there is also an added security aspect. Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities surfaced years ago, and the industry is still dealing with the threat of infected systems being able to break through a hypervisor and infect other VMs running on the same host.
Another scenario is vulnerability testing on a shared system. While a tenant performs vulnerability and penetration testing against their own systems, it can have consequences for other tenants operating on the same host.
BMaaS, Powered by Pure aims to provide the flexibility to adjust to changing demands. If there is an increase in compute and storage demands, BMaaS, Powered by Pure enables the organization to spin up more resources faster than it would be possible with an on-premises data center. And while traditional data centers will occur costs regardless of utilization, BMaaS, Powered by Pure follows the cloud model as a pay-as-you-go service. Organizations only have to pay for resources being consumed.
Last but not least, an important aspect is energy footprint. As energy costs keep rising, running datacenters becomes more expensive. In recent years, one benchmark for servers that has become more relevant is performance-per-watt. Modern CPUs and higher-density servers allow for reduced power consumption. By having a hosted bare metal server, the cost for new hardware that can deliver such benchmarks shifts from the organization to the provider.
Conclusion
The financial industry has unique needs that other sectors might not be facing. With things like regulations, technical debt, and an ever-increasing demand for scalability and availability, a one size fits all approach is the least suitable solution. BMaaS, Powered by Pure presents a viable solution for organizations that want cloud like deployment and consumption benefits, but are unwilling to sacrifice performance and privacy on a shared system. It aims at combining the best of both worlds, from full control of an on-premises datacenter to the ease of availability of cloud computing.
BMaaS, Powered by Pure is available now. Learn more about it and our BMaaS, Powered by Pure Financial Services Solutions by visiting their website.
