Company

Pure Storage Advances FlashArray with Ethernet Connectivity, Protection, and VMware Integration Features, Enabling More Customers to Join the Affordable Flash Revolution

Hot On the Heels of Its GA Release, FlashArray Now Offers iSCSI, ZeroSnap Snapshots and Complete Management Within VMware, Extending Its Reach to a New Set of Enterprise Customers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – August 23, 2012 – Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, today unveiled a bevy of new software features for its flagship product, the Pure Storage FlashArray, adding iSCSI connectivity, ZeroSnap™ snapshots, and complete integration with, and management within, VMware via a new vCenter Web Client Plugin. The new enhancements build on the success of the company’s market entry early this year, which introduced the FlashArray as the first scalable all-flash enterprise array capable of driving the cost of all-flash storage below the price of spinning disk, with sub-millisecond inline data reduction capabilities. The new release will enable Pure Storage to now address a broader set of networked storage needs for companies who want to leverage flash memory for their performance-critical applications.

“The first generation of flash appliances predominantly focused on performance and were far too expensive to use in mainstream enterprise applications,” said Joe Unsworth, research vice president at Gartner. “Combining more affordable flash with enhanced support for performance critical applications and virtualized environments, will be crucial to capture any significant share of the emerging mainstream flash appliance market.”

Pure Storage revealed last week that it has raised a $40 million Series D funding round, bringing total funding to date to $95 million. The company will use the new capital to expand its US-based operations and extend its global footprint to the Europe and Asia Pacific.

New Pure Storage FlashArray Features:

• iSCSI / 10Gb Ethernet Connectivity for Cloud Readiness: Pure Storage now offers the industry’s two most popular block storage connectivity choices—Fibre Channel and iSCSI—enabling FlashArray to fit seamlessly into Ethernet-centric public and private cloud data centers. iSCSI offers substantial cost savings, compatibility, scalability and ease of use benefits that make it an ideal choice for newer, web-scale data centers as well as cost-conscious midsize enterprises.
• ZeroSnap™ Snapshots: Simple, limitless snapshots – with zero compromises. Traditional array-based snapshots have been riddled with limitations, due to the underlying constraints of spinning disk: performance overhead, complex planning, and restrictions on quantity and use. ZeroSnap Snapshots were designed to harness the power of 100% flash memory, delivering snapshots with so little overhead that literally 1,000 can be taken in a single minute. ZeroSnap snapshots require no planning, pre-allocation of space, are taken instantly, have full read/write capabilities, are maximally space-saving (thin, compressed, and deduped), and can be used to recover any volume from any snapshot in the array.
• VMware vCenter Web Client Plugin: Enables comprehensive management of the FlashArray within vCenter, a UI designed for use by Virtual Infrastructure (VI) Admins. VI Admins live in the world of hosts, clusters and VMs—not LUNs, WWNs, RAID, multipathing policies, and IOPS. Pure Storage partnered with VI administrators to design the simplest block storage management for vSphere, using the Pure Storage Web Client Plugin to fully-automate the process of datastore creation, and to provide complete visibility into datastore capacity and performance.
• Fully VMware-Ready Certified and VAAI-Enabled: FlashArray has now achieved VMware Ready status in its HA configuration, meaning that the entire FlashArray 300-Series is fully-supported by Pure Storage and VMware for production deployments. The FlashArray is also VAAI-enabled, ensuring the highest levels of performance under vSphere.

“Pure Storage has succeeded in delivering the performance, usability, and cost benefits that Yodle needed from flash,” said John Merryman, CTO at Yodle. “The FlashArray product has provided us with considerable improvement on the performance limits that you typically get with a mechanical disk.”

Pricing and Availability

The new features will be made available to customers as a software upgrade to the Pure Storage Purity Operating Environment (Purity 2.5), at no additional charge for customers with a current maintenance agreement. Purity 2.5 is currently in beta testing, will be demonstrated next week at VMworld 2012, and will be generally available in the fall.

New Funding Will Also Expand Market Reach

Separately, Pure Storage revealed last week that it has raised a $40 million Series D funding round, bringing its total funding to $95 million. The company will apply the new capital to expanding its US-based operations and extending its global footprint into Europe and the Asia Pacific region.

“Following our red hot market reception earlier this year, we have focused on bringing the benefits of flash to more enterprises that are not getting their money’s worth from mechanical storage,” said Scott Dietzen, CEO of Pure Storage. “We are therefore thrilled to be delivering the next generation of FlashArray, so soon after our GA release. With our Series D funding and our accelerating pace of innovation, we are now primed for international expansion.”

Test Drive the Next Generation FlashArray at VMworld 2012 – Booth #1929

Pure Storage will be exhibiting at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, August 26 – 30. Stop by booth #1929 for hands on demonstrations of FlashArray’s latest features, including:

• Hyper-consolidation: 1000 VMs running in 8U of flash from a single server, connected via both Fibre Channel and iSCSI
• ZeroSnap Snapshots: Breaking the land speed record for snapshots: 1000 snaps in a minute
• VMware vCenter Web Client Plugin: Fully-managed block storage within the vSphere environment

For more information about VMworld 2012, visit http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/.

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, enables the broad deployment of flash in the data center. When compared to traditional disk-centric arrays, Pure Storage all-flash enterprise arrays are 10x faster and 10x more space and power efficient at a price point that is less than performance disk per gigabyte stored. The Pure Storage FlashArray is ideal for high performance workloads, including server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics) and cloud computing. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.

Connect with Pure Storage:

Watch the video: You Know You Want Flash, Right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lhKQrweaFw
Read the blog: http://www.purestorage.com/blog
Follow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PureStorage
Visit on Facebook: www.facebook.com/PureStorage

_{The Pure Storage and “P” logo marks, Purity Operating Environment, and RAID-3D are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.}

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Media Contact
Hope Nicora
Bhava Communications
purestorage@bhavacom.com
510-984-1527