There’s no doubt that the hottest part of the storage market today is in the area of all-flash arrays. All-flash arrays provide 100% solid state storage with no rotational hard disk drives. Solid-state flash storage is more expensive than traditional hard disks but it also offers tremendous performance improvements. At this past VMworld 2015 I met with Vaughn Stewart Chief Evangelist for Pure Storage to talk about their all-flask offerings. Vaughn demoed Pure Storage’s all-flash hardware and explained that Pure Storage offers three different product lines that are targeted toward the mid-market and enterprise: the //m20, //m50, and the //m70. The //m20 supports up to 120 TB of data and 150,000 IOPs. The //m50 support up to 250 TB and 220,000 IOPS. And the top-of-the-line //m70 supports up to 400 TB and 300,000 IOPS. He explained that the units use a 3U chassis, they are fully redundant and that the devices are actually created with double the internal capacity to provide fully redundant operations. Vaughn pointed out that IOPs are not really the best way to gauge flash storage performance. Latency is actually a better measurement and that's the key factor that makes all-flash arrays faster than traditional storage.
Vaughn pointed out that Pure Storage is a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays and they provide several features that aren’t in the competing products. Some of the advantages over the other all-flash players that Vaughn cited included:
-
The highest compression rate in the industry
-
Flat maintenance fees which include free controller upgrades
-
Non-disruptive upgrades
-
Upgrades with 100% credit
-
No-site software installation -- the software is cloud based
