Pure Storage: the Full Promise of Flash Storage

Buying storage is like watching car ads on television. Oh, a celebrity likes that model, that one has models telling us we call sports by the wrong names, and that one is so testosterone filled that my beard grew just by watching the commercial.

That’s exactly what buying storage is about. Say you want (nay, need) a new truck. You look at the main suppliers: Ford, Chevy/GMC, and Dodge. Then you check out “the new kids” on the block: Toyota and Nissan. You might even look at other options like the ultra-high International, or something so ugly it’s cool like an old Unimog.  The vendors will bring out stats upon stats with what they can do. “We have best in class towing”, “We have the best fuel mileage”, and “We are so cool that after riding in our truck you can wrestle bears.”

So now we come to buying storage. “We are the most sold” – great, but I only want one. “We do 1.2 million IOPS” – okay, that does sound cool. “We are the fastest per BTU” – Gee, that’s something to brag about.

Then every so often a disruptor shows up. Maybe the new trucks run on hydrogen or all-electric. The first disruptors are sweet and expensive. Then affordable versions arrive — that’s when it gets interesting.

In storage that disruptor is flash. The All-flash arrays have shown up in strength and are as awesome to have as you might imagine — assuming you spend your time thinking about storage.

At first the old crowd taunts the new trucks and tries to discredit them (all while secretly working on their own). That’s what happened in storage. Now that the big storage boys are all entering the all-flash array space they have stopped calling it a gimmick.

gimmick, noun — Anything you do better than we do.

Now that the market has become mainstream in acceptable, where do you go for a device? Right to the people who do it best at a price that isn’t premium — Pure Storage.

Why Pure Storage instead of Vendor X, Y, Z, and the traditional vendors that are making their appearances? Our investigation led us to Pure Storage as the best all-flash array: proven track record (who wants to use beta-worthy gear?), huge feature set, simplicity (the user guide is on a business card), awesome colors (people buy vehicles for less valid reasons), and performance in the real world.

Pure delivers this flash power at costs comparable to spinning disk. Flash (the super great new thing) at the cost of the traditional disk. I love my trucks, but if someone wants to upgrade my vehicle, who am I to argue?

Pure Storage handles the toughest workloads, such as Database and VDI boot/patch storms, like traditional storage handles file requests. We have customers that put their Pure Storage boxes to the test on heavy workloads all day, every day, and their bottlenecks are no longer storage. The bottlenecks are now how fast can they throw data at their storage.

Pure Storage handles the toughest workloads, such as Database and VDI boot/patch storms, like traditional storage handles file requests.

When Pure Storage built their array to handle Flash from the ground up they did more than just slap in flash disks. They looked at what is painful and obscure in storage and made it easy.

Remember when dealers would sap you for routine maintenance to make all the parts of your vehicles to keep working? With traditional storage your admins need the level of knowledge as those dealer’s mechanics. With Pure Storage all the sensors, parts to maintain, and software have built-in know how. Those trips to the dealer aren’t needed. Pure Storage does the hard work internally — picture your truck giving itself oil changes.

Pure Storage has brought the full promise of flash storage, and we can get the luxury model for the cost of your traditional storage. And as other’s have said, “It is built Pure tough.”

Note: No trucks were harmed in the authoring of this blog post.