Cloud Storage Start-Up Claims Flash Array Breakthrough
August 23, 2011
Two-year-old Pure Storage, the latest flash start-up, shook off its cloak of invisibility Tuesday and showed off a reportedly oversubscribed $30 million C round for its all-flash enterprise array technology. That makes $55 million altogether.
The new money was put in by Samsung, the largest flash maker, as well as Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and angel investors…
The infusion is meant to accelerate engineering, operations and go-to-market activities for the start-up’s shiny new flagship product, the Pure Storage FlashArray FA-300 Series, the first all-flash enterprise storage array.
It’s supposed to be 10x faster and offer 10x more space and power efficiency than disk-centric arrays at a lower per-gigabyte price, including, Pure says, performance disks, flash retrofits and flash/disk hybrids.
The company says the widgetry is designed to keep up with the performance of the modern data center, which has shot passed the capabilities of traditional disk storage.
Pure uses deduplication to keep down the cost of flash, reportedly delivering up to 20x inline data reduction. It brags that it is the industry’s first inline deduplication and compression to deliver consistent sub-millisecond latency.
Early adopter Matt Kesner, the CIO of Fenwick & West, a law firm, said, "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."
The company says the FlashArray is plug-compatible with existing virtualization, database and cloud-oriented infrastructures. It also claims the reliability of a true enterprise array.
CEO Scott Dietzen, who used to be CTO of Zimbra, expects the array to be "profoundly transformative."
Performance disk storage is calculated to be worth $20 billion a year.
Pure Storage is pointed at high-performance workloads, including server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics) and cloud computing. It promises active/active high availability including clustered controllers that share storage without doubling cost and enterprise-class 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 to take advantage of solid state flash memory, but the real trick is in the barrier-breaking economics.
Purity implements RAID-3D, a new form of RAID 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.
The thing is also supposed to install in 10 minutes.
The company’s got evaluation arrays. It says, "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." It’s got a tool that potential customers can use to determine their own data reduction ratio on its web site.