Company

Pure Storage Breaks the Cost Barrier to Mainstream Flash Adoption in the Data Center with the First All-Flash Enterprise Array

All-Flash Array is 10x Faster, 10x More Power and Space Efficient, and Less Expensive than Traditional Disk-Centric Arrays

Mountain View, CA – August 23, 2011 — Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, today 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.

"Solid state technologies are destined to replace disk, and that can only happen with a economic-led storage revolution. Pure Storage is totally changing the way storage will be done by cracking the economic code for widespread adoption of flash as a part of the mainstream enterprise data center. It's only a matter of time before disk, as we currently know it, will stop being a significant part of the data center," said Steve Duplessie, senior analyst and founder of Enterprise Strategy Group. "For years companies have been cobbling together solutions that solve their problems some of the time to try and conserve budget, but that's really a short-term fix. And they have been running mechanical disks even though they are slower, inherently less reliable and generally a nightmare to manage simply because the cost of the superior alternative has just been too high—until now."

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?"

Pricing and availability

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. To determine your own data reduction ratio, an estimate tool can be downloaded from the Pure Storage website. For more information, please contact Pure Storage Sales.

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:

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
Amber Winans
Bhava Communications
purestorage@bhavacom.com
510-984-1526