Pure Storage - The Cutting Edge of Flash Storage

Flash storage adoption is growing at an exponential rate and is becoming the go-to option for IT Managers looking to solve their storage problems. More than half of the respondents of a recent 451 survey said that their organisation had already deployed flash, and with good reason - we generate more data than ever (2.5 quintillion bytes per day to be exact).

Currently, hybrid storage solutions rule the market share (37% of respondents) due to flash being considered an expensive unattainable solution by many. However, with the evolving data reduction technology and vendors transforming the storage landscape, flash has finally become at a similar or even better acquisition point than its counterpart.

The all-flash array (AFA) market share still remains relatively small with only 6% of respondents declaring their organisations had deployed all-flash arrays. However, with the incoming data tsunami, even hybrid arrays consisting of both flash and spinning disk will not be able to alleviate the potential performance issues and support the rising data volumes. That’s why the question is not whether to move to AFA, but which AFA solution to choose; and since not all storage solutions are made equal we are here to tell you about one in particular with a very impressive story to tell.

Pure Storage has become the fastest growing storage vendor in just four years of selling, growing approximately 10 times faster than any other vendor ever did! They have been recognised by Gartner as a leader in the solid state array market for 3 consecutive years. An instinctive question to ask at this point is, ‘Why?’ Our list below will help answer this and show just how disruptive Pure Storage is in the market right now.

Our Disruptive Technologies team at Wavenet, responsible for our strategic alliance to Pure Storage, knows the compelling story of Pure well. Simply put, Pure enabled all-flash storage to go mainstream by completely changing the economics of storage acquisition and total cost of ownership (TCO).

So here it is, 5 things you need to know about Pure Storage:

1.All-Flash all the way

Forget the old hard disk storage, with Pure Storage (unlike other vendors) they focus purely on all-flash arrays.

‘Even modern hybrid storage approaches - those that pair flash and disk designs - are inadequate, as they suffer from the speed of the far slower disk operations,’ Pure Storage says in its prospectus.

2.Storage that is Evergreen^®

Pure Storage has pioneered an entirely new storage ownership model called Evergreen Storage. As its name suggests, with Evergreen you only buy your storage capacity once, and then scale and upgrade it when needed, with no forklift upgrades. This model goes beyond expectations of many storage managers who have become accustomed to the traditional, expensive approach when dealing with upgrades and refreshes, usually involving hours or sometimes days as well as downtime.

Evergreen enables more customers to take advantage of flash since it eliminates many costs including forklift upgrades, refresh and re-buys, it requires less floor space and also reduces the demand of IT staff. The cost and resource savings are impressive in a word.

‘We came to market and said there is an opportunity to deliver storage that actually costs less to buy and is at least 10 times better in every dimension that businesses care about,’ Pure’s CEO

3.All-Flash made easy

Simplicity is another one of the slogans Pure live by as their storage solution come with plug-and-play installation and are designed to be up and running in less than 30 minutes. Their installation instructions come on a business card. No, we are not joking - it’s that simple. The configuration required is effortless and Pure’s solutions leverage intuitive, web-based management consoles with non-disruptive upgrades. Additionally, 24/7 proactive support is provided, constantly monitoring the health of your arrays to ensure full performance.

4.Performance and efficiency like never before

Another reason why Pure is so unique is that it was one of the first vendors to deliver AFA with some form of data reduction capability. Through deduplication and compression, Pure’s AFAs reduce both data storage footprints and transmission loads. The FlashReduce technology provides the best data reduction available as it implements five forms of in-line and post-process data reduction to offer the most complete data reduction in the industry. It operates at a 512-byte aligned variable block size, to enable effective reduction across a wide range of mixed workloads without tuning.

Another key factor that makes Pure Storage a market leader is the high performance of their all-flash arrays - 96.6% of their arrays have achieved 100% availability which means zero downtime.

5.Storage based on a customer-first approach

Pure Storage has recently announced that their Net Promoter Score (NPS) has increased to 83.5, PR News Wire reports.

Wikipedia defines NPS as :

An index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer's overall satisfaction with a company's product or service.

Pure’s increased NPS means that they rank in the top 1% among all B2B brands in terms of customer satisfaction. The industry average is only 16 points, so the fact that Pure ranks more than 65 points above it proves once more Pure’s dedication to their customers.

‘For our Net Promoter Score to increase through a year of massive growth for Pure Storage is a true indicator that a customer-first approach has been thoughtfully and permanently built into our company DNA,’ said Scott Dietzen, the CEO of Pure Storage.

This blog was originally published 17 February 2017 14:37