France's nuclear waste agency, Andra, has cut down its energy usage by moving from old HPE equipment to Pure Storage hardware.

As reported by ComputerWeekly, Andra has cut storage power and cooling costs by as much as 20 percent through the switch.

Having previously used HPE 3PAR arrays, Andra has now opted for Pure Storage FlashArray flash storage hardware, purchased over 10 years with non-disruptive controller upgrades.

Andra's HPE 3PAR storage arrays went out of support in 2018, and the agency reported issues with integrity between replications of arrays and a difficult user interface.

According to Olivier Tardy, head of infrastructure operations in the department of the CIO at Andra, the agency was 100 percent HPE until the 2018 end of the contract.

"The former CIO believed it was best to use just one supplier to avoid dealing with numerous support desks in case of an outage. We revisited that question in 2018 and decided it would be best to evaluate different suppliers to get the best service possible in each area of infrastructure,” said Tardy.

He added that the HPE 3PAR arrays didn't break down and worked well in terms of throughput, but the agency had redundancy issues. "For example, we had arrays that were active-active but had 200GB to 300GB at the end of the day not replicated between them. In such situations, our disaster recovery plan was a house of cards."

The agency considered Dell, HPE, and Pure Storage for a new solution.

Pure Storage ultimately won out due to a simple graphic user interface, because the company demonstrated seamless migrations, had better data reduction rations, and enabled Andra to purchase the storage arrays over 10 years, and at regular intervals to receive new controllers.

“The other vendors wanted to replace the whole array at the end of five years,” says Tardy. “In fact, Pure Storage was more expensive to buy, but if you take into account that the others required data migration while production work continues – which comes with a cost – then the least costly total invoice is the one from Pure Storage.”

Pure Storage FlashArray hardware was delivered in December 2022, and became operational at the start of 2023. It came with 300TB of capacity – the old 3PAR arrays had held 120TB – and will be expanded over the coming years in tranches of 50TB to 80TB.

VMware - which hosted Andra's core applications - handled the migration.

While mostly smooth sailing, Andra found that some configurations were not compatible with the new storage solution. At the start of 2024, Andra acquired a FlashBlade NAS array from Pure to store Veeam backups. However, Veeam was designed for an HPE StorOnce appliance and was not adaptable to FlashBlade. This issue is ongoing.

Another positive of the new system is its efficiency.

“The key benefit has been the environmental aspect,” says Tardy. “The arrays each occupy 6U, which is less to cool than 3PAR. Pure’s SSDs consume less energy than our previous storage, which mixed SSDs and HDDs [hard disk drives]. Our electricity consumption has been lowered by 20 percent.”

Pure Storage is now on track for deployment at the Andra Headquarters, and will eventually replace the arrays at radioactive waste sites, though not with Pure Storage arrays as the specs are oversized.

Pure Storage, which was founded in 2003 and has developed all-flash data storage hardware itself since 2015, also counts Virgin Media O2 among its customers, having signed a deal with the UK telco in May 2023.