Latest Flash Storage Entrant Gunning for the Very High End
The latest entrant into the high-end flash storage arena, Pure Storage, came out of stealth mode at the VMware conference gunning for the highest of high ends, the high-availability (HA) market of mainly currency traders and other financial companies, Wikibon CTO David Floyer writes in a new alert titled “Pure Storage Aspires to Tier 1 Storage.” This company builds active-active clustered controllers over InfiniBand attached to Samsung SSDs.
While not perfect – the form-factor constraints are awkward – the combination of flash and InfiniBand give it the performance to meet the millisecond access time needs of this market where seconds can cost money. However the market is slow to trust new entrants until they have proven that they can also deliver on the very high guaranteed availability needs of these true Tier 1 users. These are very large-scale, high-value applications that need consistent performance and extreme survivability.
Today the market trusts just three large players – EMC, IBM, and Hitachi. HP/3PAR is knocking on that door but has not been in let in yet. It can take years to build a good enough reputation to earn membership in that exclusive club. Actually, in an earlier article on the future of flash storage, Floyer speculated that that the HA market may become the last bastion of high-performance disks after everyone else has replaced them with flash.
The question now is will the attraction of much higher response rates help Pure Storage crack this market earlier than expected – or will it be bought by one of the incumbents (or HP) and given a leg up.
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
