ServiceNow relies on Pure Storage’s AllFlash array

Flash storage system-database

November 16, 2020, Munich, Pure Storage | Author: Herbert Wheeler

SaaS platform providers master billions of database queries

ServiceNow is about people-even when storage is involved

ServiceNow is primarily aimed at users with easy-to-use and highly customizable digital workflow solutions. This people-oriented view resulted in a 40% year-on-year growth and a 99% update rate.

However, growth brings challenges. Recently, Keith Martin faced major obstacles as the senior director of cloud capacity engineering. This is about how he keeps up with the ever-increasing amount of data and the needs of a growing customer base, which is constantly updating itself on the ServiceNow platform. To overcome this obstacle, Keith Martin hopes to modernize the storage environment and become the first major cloud provider to switch to a pure flash data center.

Rethink storage to keep up with customer innovation

Supporting custom instances for more than 6,200 customers is not easy. In one hour, the ServiceNow enterprise cloud infrastructure processed 64 billion database queries, 291 million HTTP requests, 46 million API calls and 571 TB of backup data.

Keith Martin’s job is to ensure that the infrastructure can function properly for customers. This includes performing 2.4 million backups and 5,000 database restores per month. As customers adopt new features, there are many processes that are particularly important for creating development clones. As time goes by, the task becomes more and more difficult.

“Our old storage solutions were really limited by performance and reliability issues,” recalled Martin Keith. “The backup and restore process is slow. We spend all our time on containerizing the infrastructure so that disk failures will not affect the wider environment.”

Martin Keith and his team are at a crossroads. Maintaining the status quo means increasing capacity, staffing, and working harder to maintain current service levels. Keith said: “We are working in an unnatural way, trying to make storage available below standard prices.”

Flash is changing the way IT handles the customer experience

Keith chose Pure Storage FlashBlade as the fast recovery solution, which can immediately reduce the footprint of the data center, reduce downtime, and shorten the recovery time from hours or days to seconds. This enables existing teams to manage storage environments that are ten times larger. With faster restore speeds, ServiceNow can increase the delivery speed of test clones by four times while virtually eliminating management overhead, saving Keith Martin’s team tens of thousands of hours each year.

“By completely changing our way of thinking and the way the cloud infrastructure team works, Pure Storage has revolutionized the business,” Keith Martin said. Since then, ServiceNow has migrated all production backups to a combination of Pure Storage FlashBlade and FlashArray technology. ServiceNow is the first cloud provider to use modern technology to build an all-flash data center into an excellent customer experience.

ServiceNow looks to the future with emerging technologies

Keith Martin plans to use Pure Storage solutions to support Splunk, Elastic’s ELK stack, and AI and ML initiatives. These will help ServiceNow remain competitive in a rapidly changing industry.