August seems to have been the month for a huge raft of storage-related announcements and I’m still getting to grips with the detail, after being away on holiday for the whole month.  As I start to pick out the news and make sense of how it fits into the storage landscape, I thought I’d start with a few straightforward ones to ease me back into things gently.

Pure Storage
Pure Storage FlashArrays were originally Fibre Channel only devices (see my review after TFD#8 last year).  In today’s unified world, that could be seen as somewhat limiting, so Pure have announced support for iSCSI and 10GbE in their latest hardware release.  Software enhancements have also been made to reduce snapshot overhead, support VAAI and manage FlashArray via a vCenter plugin.  Full details can be found in the press release.  The addition of VAAI support is an interesting one.  Previous demonstrations of the FlashArray have focused around high performing VMware environments, without the need to use VAAI primitives.  It will be interesting to discover whether the efficiency of the VAAI command structure translates to even more performance gains or whether this represents simply a compatibility tick in the box.

The Architect’s View
I’ve followed Pure Storage for some time after having presentations from them at a couple of Tech Field Days (TFD#8 and SFD#1).  I like the simplicity of the product and the openness of the team in discussing their technologies.  Marketing has been a clear strategy for the company, especially with their Apple-esque website design.  Adding iSCSI support must have been on the roadmap for some time and the words of the press release saying “enabling FlashArray to fit seamlessly into Ethernet-centric public and private cloud data centers” is a clear push against competition such as SolidFire.  However being focused on cloud environments is no bad thing.  With their latest round of funding, it’s clear there’s a lot of money around for flash products these days.

Related Posts

• Solid State Arrays: Pure Storage Inc
• Solid State Arrays: SolidFire
• Who Will Be The First Solid State Array Vendor To Be Acquired?
• Pure Storage fleshes out flash pitch (via GigaOm)
• Pure Storage makes all-flash storage iSCSI snappier (SearchStorage)
• Storage crumblies, newbies race to push out flashiest gear (The Register)

Disclaimer: Pure Storage has been a sponsor at two TechFieldDay events at which I have been an attendee.  My flights, accommodation and most meal costs were covered for me to attend these events.  However, I am not required to blog about any of the sponsors and none of my content is reviewed before publication.

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