Pure storage confident its technology can defeat high-end storage array manufacturers

Does not a VC invest in a start-up that is trying to challenge an EMC San array on a storage array alone--a stupid move--but what if it's a vmax/vnx, lower-cost flash array? Now we're talking about the company--if its product is true.

Pure storage confident its technology can defeat EMC, Dell, HDS (Hitachi Data System), HP, IBM, and NetApp FC San Arrays (Editor Note: The authors are likely to refer to high-end storage systems as FC San arrays). We've introduced its technology before, and here's a full flash array, configured with automatic compact configuration, data compression, and data deduplication to lower the cost per gigabyte than the traditional San disk array.

"We've seen a lot of flash companies in the last two years-but they're obsessed with performance," said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of the company's products, on the news release. We think the biggest obstacle is economy. ”

But it's not enough just to do the economic work or just do the technical work. Trust is a must if you are going to a corporate sales mission-critical array that used to use mature manufacturers such as EMC. Pure WINS customers ' trust through open testing and repeated long tests.

"We tested the release on 4 platforms under various parameters," Kixmoeller said. We spent millions of of dollars on interoperability testing. Some 40 companies use pure testing products. These products will be listed in the second quarter of next year. Their tests started as early as 1.5. ”

Pure even published a number of test case studies, such as Emeter. This has never been unheard of in the industry.

Our feeling is that pure will likely release the TPC benchmark results and another tool to enhance customer trust.

Software Intelligence

Pure is developing a very intelligent software to drive off-the-shelf consumer-level MLC Flash, making it fast and reliable and has a good working life. It uses a variety of Samsung NAND-drive products and works closely with Samsung. Samsung is also one of the company's investors and two major flash suppliers. Another flash supplier is STEC, which offers custom Zeusiops cards.

Pure is debugging its software so that it can manage writes to the drive to reduce the write amplification effect. When a drive fails to perform a write operation through an internal activity, the software avoids a temporary interruption, switches the write to another drive, and then writes back. "We have a 1% excess configuration," said Michael Cornwell, technical director. Our write mode means that the drive does not have to do the internal garbage collection ... We have a global garbage collection on the entire array ... This is all to reduce latency. Every millisecond/microsecond is important to the application. ”

Pure looks like a 3PAR route: for FC San markets. Pure is ready to yell to EMC's customers: "Do not buy Vmax or Vnx." By buying our arrays, you can get better performance than EMC, pay lower costs, and get the same level of enterprise reliability, availability, service, and support. "Pure knows it must be compelling to get customers out of the arms of HDS, HP, IBM and other large SAN storage array vendors."

Price and positioning

A core feature of the pure product is that it can store data such as databases, virtual machine mirrors, and so on, with smaller volumes than the disk array, thereby reducing space occupancy, power, and cooling costs.

Where the disk array cannot withstand duplicate data deletion-meaning that 100TB of data requires 100TB of disk--pure that its data compression and deduplication capabilities allow 50TB flash memory or lower flash memory to store 100TB raw data. The ratio of data de-duplication will vary depending on the actual situation and may be better. By avoiding disk-type RAID (a standalone disk lets you about the array), pure avoids a SAN array trap-the latter requires 300-500TB disks to store 100TB of raw data to prevent loss of data from drive failures.

Pure does not use more expensive enterprise-class MLC and more expensive single-tier unit flash memory, which makes it less than $5 per gigabyte, and can compete with disk drive SAN arrays.

We tend to think without thinking that the product is not listed and there is no price. However, pure has test experience, so it knows how the production cost of the flash array is compared to Vmax, VSP, FSP, DS8000, XIV, Compellent, and 3PAR. Add a little profit to these costs, and it knows what the price of its manufactured goods will be almost.

Pure positioning is different from other full flash arrays. It is an enterprise-class Fibre Channel Flash array, Solidfire is an iSCSI array for cloud service providers, nimble storage is a flash-enhanced iSCSI array for SMEs. The three-strong initial companies are located in three different markets. There is no market conflict between them, at least at the beginning.

What about the competition from Nimbus and violin memory? "The Nimbus product is not enterprise-class because it lacks scalability, high availability, and high reliability ... Nimbus and violin products are basically single controller products ..." said Kixmoeller. Our design point is a dual-controller type system. ”

Chief executive Scott Dietzen said: "There are other relatively low-key companies that may bring strong competition to nimble, solidfire and us." ”

Dietzen said he expects EMC, IBM, HDS and NetApp to launch full flash products in the next 12 months to 18 months. They may consider acquiring a flash array technology vendor.

Road Map

We learned that pure will add snapshot functionality. Pure may configure the Vcentre plug-in in a second or subsequent release to have VMware administrators manage its storage.

As for the 3-bit MLC Flash (TLC), its cost curve has not yet fallen to the commodity level. When it falls low enough, pure will consider using it. Kixmoeller talked about TLC: "I think we will occupy a good position." ”

After TLC, NAND is likely to be replaced by subsequent technology. "We've been thinking about the post-NAND era through close relationships with Samsung and STEC," says Dietzen. ”

He is not sure which NAND technology is most likely to be the future, but he says: "The phase change technology is interesting-it will first go into the NVRAM (Non-volatile random access memory)." This technology is still too expensive for us. We still want to wait until its cost is lowered to the consumer level. ”

Pure Storage's Roadmap is clear, and it needs to get corporate customers out of the arms of existing Fibre Channel array vendors. This will certainly bring fierce competition to existing suppliers.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)