Pure Storage just thrust itself into the enterprise flash storage race. Earlier this week, Pure Storage announced it had signed a strategic investment and technology development agreement with In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s VC arm. Flash-memory chips and storage is a hot trend right now. From the big boys on down, there are an increasing number of startups selling data-storage hardware that exploit flash technology at the enterprise level.

Winners

The total amount of the investment by In-Q-Tel wasn’t disclosed, but the amount is not particularly relevant. Having the CIA acknowledge your flash storage is the part of the investment that matters. Purge Storage builds enterprise storage systems entirely with flash storage. Flash storage is best known for being the kind used in USB drives, mobile devices and high-end laptops. Immediately this gives Pure a leg-up on competitors, because enterprises will undoubtedly see this is a “stamp of approval”.

Another clear winner with the news is enterprise-level flash storage. Even more of a winner?  The startups that deploy flash arrays and flash storage. There is no beating around the bush: government agencies have strict security and performance requirements for the hardware and software they run. This is In-Q-Tel’s first investment in a flash storage startup, and one that is sure to opens doors for other tech startups.

Why Flash for the CIA?

While Flash still costs more than harddrive storage, Flash has become an affordable technology that outperforms tape storage, and this has helped accelerate the distribution of software-led, hybrid storage solutions. What differentiates Flash from disk is that it has higher performance, lower latency and lower power requirements. As described by Stuart Miniman, Senior Analyst at The Wikibon Project:

Pure Storage fits in the “Flash-only arrays” category; the primary differentiation is that this new solution is designed for Tier 1, scalable, HA environments (such as VMware and databases) at a price point that competes with high performance disk or hybrid flash/disk arrays. Startups like Pure Storage have the opportunity to design architectures that don’t just use, but are optimized for flash technology (SSD supplier Samsung is one the company’s investors).

“Through the use of native in-line compression and deduplication, Pure Storage claims at least 5x data reduction, which helps alleviate some of the capacity limitations that are inherent to flash drives (when compared to disk). While vendor claims of high reduction rates are often inflated, Pure Storage has a “Purity Reduction Evaluator” (PRE) tool that customers can run to set proper expectations for the real data and says that beta customers have been seeing even better than expected data rates.

Pure Storage also has pedigree on its side, with a noteworthy executive team:

• Scott Dietzen, Pure’s CEO, is a former senior vice president at Yahoo
• John Colgrove, CTO, had a similar role developing technology for Veritas, a leader on storage software
• Michael Cornwell, who put Flash on the iPod and iPhone at Apple

What’s the final verdict?

Pure Storage and the other startups in the space will still need to compete against highly entrenched legacy vendors (i.e. IBM, HP, EMC), sales teams, and a storage industry that is known for being slow to adopt change (somewhat understandably because data loss or data unavailability can put a company out of business).

There is strong competition in the Flash, all-Flash and storage spaces for the enterprise sector as a whole. Flash-based technology is going to be a disruptive factor that will increasingly keep taking jobs from disks in data centers. Especially software-defined data centers (SDDC). That, along with the energy-efficiency and cost-savings benefits of flash, will be a marching beat of Flash and Flash-array storage startups for the foreseeable future.