I’m excited to say that earlier this month I made the decision to join the Pure Storage team as a Systems Engineer. Since sharing my decision, I have been asked by friends, fellow architects and customers:
Why Pure?
Before I get into why I decided to join Pure, you first need to understand my view on an equally important topic:
Why All Flash?
Flash Will Consume the Primary Storage Market Within 5 Years
I’ve been watching the evolution of solid state in enterprise storage systems since caching and tiering became mainstream in the late 2000s. I believe this adoption is now at critical mass for a few reasons.
- The cost of solid-state storage is dropping and is already less expensive than disk for moderate to high I/O workloads. Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication and compression can provide significantly greater affordability and open flash to a wide variety of enterprise use-cases.
- The user experience and business benefits of flash are undeniable. Once a customer experiences flash for a single use-case, they immediately want those benefits expanded to the rest of the business.
Just as data reduction capabilities made disk an affordable and superior alternative to tape, the same capabilities have now made solid state an affordable and superior alternative to disk. Disk is the tape of today.
Legacy Hard-Disk Arrays are Dying
More compelling is that customer interest in all flash arrays is skyrocketing. Just as performance and complexity issues drove customers away from tape in the early 2000s, customers are now struggling with the same types of issues in hard-disk arrays.
- Hard disk storage arrays, even with updated software and faster CPUs are far from realizing the full potential of flash storage. Just as hard drives have remained largely unchanged since their inception, storage arrays designed for those drives are comprised layer after layer of archaic, hard-disk centric programming. Legacy RAID layouts and fixed data structures are not easily updated. If they were, the major storage manufacturers wouldn’t be buying or building new flash arrays, they would continue modifying the legacy platforms.
- Solid-state tiering and caching has run its course. It is complex to properly size and the tiering logic is not magic—it frequently leaves the business exposed to unpredictable performance, and occasional serious slowdowns. As drive capacities increase, pool performance becomes even less predictable.
- Further issues such as nickel-and-dime licensing models, complex cloning and replication implementations and generally awkward management will give customers little hesitation in moving to new, simplified, all-flash arrays as quickly as possible.
Flash is a quantum evolution in enterprise storage that is long overdue. It has been enterprise-ready for years and now it is finally enterprise-affordable.
So, Why Pure?
In my prior position as a solution architect, my job centered around advising customers as they considered, selected and implemented storage solutions. As part of this, I spent several months researching flash technology, the market trends and the major players. Pure impressed me in two major areas.
First, they weren’t trying to fill a niche’ in the market—they want to build a better storage company. Flash provides the opportunity for a market reset—a new beginning in storage. Pure is positioning itself to seize that opportunity by providing a genuine storage experience customers are hungry for.
- Support that is actually proactive (not just parts replacement and bug fixes)
- A storage lifecycle and maintenance approach that allows much longer useful life, without maintenance extortion and forced refreshes
- All software is included and controller refreshes are free with eligible maintenance renewals
- Non-disruptive architecture that enables perpetual, online upgrades and refreshes without multi-month, rolling-downtime, storage migration efforts
- Transparency in customer realized data reduction rates (dedup ticker) and the only manufacturer to quote IOPS with larger, 32K block sizes; instead of smaller sizes to make IOPS look higher
- A passionate, focused culture where customer experience is king—I’m blown away by how the company rallies to put customers first
Second, they have great technology. Sure, they have flash performance and sub-ms latency; those are table-stakes in the flash realm. However, they combine performance with innovative enterprise features, which are still not common, even in market-leading storage arrays.
- Adaptive Block Sizes: Processes block sizes from 512B to 128K as a single IO, which eliminates any possible alignment issues and provides much more consistent performance with real-world I/O.
- Data Reduction: 5 forms, most significant are inline (insanely granular) 512B deduplication, inline compression and an aggressive background deep-compression.
- Highly Reliable: Cached writes are stored in 4 locations before acknowledgement (2 controllers and dual NVRAM Banks). Deduped candidates are byte-level compared to avoid corruption due to hash collisions. Multi-dimensional and dynamic RAID protection enables recovery from most flash failures with little disruption while still providing at least double drive fault protection. The arrays even provide 100% performance during a controller failure.
- Data Protection: Space-efficient snapshots, clones and replication all-included
- Non-Disruptive Everything: As mentioned above, perpetual online upgrades and refreshes
Since I have joined Pure I’m very glad to see that the culture, customer focus and technology is even better than I expected. I’m really looking forward to sharing it!
