Pure Storage breaks cost barrier to mainstream flash adoption with first all-flash enterprise storage array

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, entered the market with the first all-flash enterprise array, combining the performance, density and power of flash with enterprise array features including high availability, out-of-the-box compatibility, and enterprise class scalability -- all for less than the cost of disk-centric arrays, including performance disk, flash retrofits and flash/disk hybrids.

Ten times faster and 10x more power and space efficient than disk-based arrays, the Pure Storage FlashArray FA-300 Series delivers up to 20x inline data reduction, breaking the cost barrier to widespread data center adoption of flash. Pure Storage makes it affordable for mainstream enterprises to broadly deploy all-flash storage for their demanding enterprise workloads, including virtual server, virtual desktop (VDI), database and cloud environments.

"We have experienced amazing results using Pure Storage in our data centers," said Matt Kesner, CIO of Fenwick & West. "The FlashArray has reduced our data between 50 to 90% on a variety of workloads, ranging from VMware virtual machines to Microsoft Exchange and SQL, as well as reduced our physical storage footprint far beyond our expectations."

Built to work out of the box with existing application infrastructures, the Pure Storage FlashArray is a true enterprise array that supports native high availability (via active/active controllers), plug-compatibility via standard SAN interconnects and online scalability from tens to hundreds of terabytes of storage within a single array. The FlashArray and its tightly coupled software, the Purity Operating Environment, were architected from the ground up for solid state flash memory, featuring a full suite of data integrity and hardware resiliency services, as well as performance management to ensure consistent high performance.

"While logic dictates that it's only a matter of time before solid state technologies replace spinning disks -- certainly for all active workloads -- the major gating factor on adoption is for someone to crack the economic code. If a hefty price premium doesn't have to be justified, then the change to solid state storage can really start," said Steve Duplessie, senior analyst and founder of Enterprise Strategy Group.

"Pure Storage is not only meeting that bar, they're raising it by offering actual, realistic potential for price advantage over 'regular' enterprise disk. Not only that, but they have all the key operational bells and whistles of enterprise storage functionality, can slot right into existing environments and deliver great Opex advantages. I love the idea that Pure Storage is aiming beyond simply 'why not?' as the question users would ask regarding all-flash arrays -- pretty darn good in itself. Instead, they are looking to turn the question on its head and make people start to ask 'why disk?'"

What differentiates the Pure Storage FlashArray
Purpose built for flash. Instead of retrofitting flash into disk-centric arrays, the Pure Storage FlashArray is built from the ground-up to take full advantage of flash.

Flash below the cost of disk. Pure Storage couples the use of MLC flash with inline data reduction to deliver a dollars-per-usable gigabyte cost of flash that is below the cost of performance disk or disk/flash hybrids. It is the industry's first inline deduplication and compression that can deliver consistent sub-millisecond latency.

Substantial power and space savings. Pure Storage's all-flash array consumes one-tenth the power of traditional disk-based storage and can allow for a dramatic expansion of the overall data footprint without expanding the data center.

Enterprise-grade high availability (HA). The FlashArray offers an active/active HA architecture, including clustered controllers that share storage to deliver enterprise resiliency without the doubling of cost incurred when duplicating non-HA devices to achieve redundancy.

RAID re-designed for flash. Purity implements RAID-3D, a new form of RAID specifically designed to protect against the unique failure modes of flash. RAID-3D implements three layers of independent parity, protecting against multiple drive losses, flash bit errors and variability in flash performance.

Scalable to hundreds of terabytes within each array. The FlashArray was architected for scale, allowing for starter deployments in the tens of TBs and scaling to hundreds of TBs, as opposed to PCIe flash cards and flash appliances that can accelerate performance of a single application but do not support clustering for growth.

Deploy in minutes. Manage with ease. From the 10-minute install to the intuitive web-based user interface, the FlashArray frees storage administrators from the cumbersome processes of traditional disk storage management.

"Until now, flash has been the data center revolution that no one could afford. Pure Storage is breaking the cost barrier to flash so that every enterprise can get in the game," said Scott Dietzen, CEO of Pure Storage. "Flash memory has already remade storage for consumer devices and powers the web experiences of top consumer websites. We're convinced flash will have a similar impact in the data center. Pure Storage all-flash arrays are radically faster, more space and power efficient, more reliable, far simpler to manage and now cheaper than disk-centric alternatives -- so why buy disk for the data center?"

The Pure Storage FlashArray FA-300 series is available immediately for evaluation. The effective storage capacity of the FlashArray depends on the data reduction on a given data set. At a conservative 5:1 data reduction ratio, the market price for a full high availability solution is below $5/gigabyte useable. At 10:1 reduction, the Pure Storage solution is about half the price of disk and decreases with higher levels of data reduction.