Changing the way people build technology

Sunaina Rana
EMIRATES BUSINESS

Founded in 2009 by John ‘Coz’ Colgrove and John Hayes, Pure Storage is out to change the way people build technology. With headquarters in Mountain View, CA and offices across the US, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Australia, South America and Africa, Pure’s disruptive, software-driven storage technology combined with a customer-friendly business model has helped drive business and IT transformation for over 1,350 customers across the globe.
Witnessing the rapid transformation of technology, Emirates Business talks to Christian Putz,
Director, Emerging Markets, Europe, Middle East & Africa at Pure Storage, about the company’s evolution.

What is Pure Storage’s core competence?
Pure Storage is the leading provider of All-Flash storage solutions. We came to market and saw an opportunity to deliver storage that actually costs less to buy and is at least 10 times better in every dimension that businesses care about; it’s 10 times faster, it’s 10 times denser, it’s 10 times more power efficient, and it’s way more than 10 times reliable.
There are two key capabilities that set us apart from the competition —
Resiliency, Compatibility and Scalability: Today’s typical flash appliances come up short of the enterprise array feature set, delivering small footprints of flash, with minimal or no redundancy across the controller nodes or flash cards. Such flash designs leave high availability an exercise for the end user. The FlashArray is a fully redundant enterprise array in terms of its reliability, with controller software that self-heals from media failures. Moreover, the FlashArray supports standard array interconnects and scales from 10s to 100s of TBs.
Lower cost than Performance Disk: Virtually all of the flash solutions on the market today cost 5-10X more in terms of dollars per GB usable, than disk-based solutions. We accomplish this with best in class deduplication and compression. Deduplication and compression are powerful technologies popularised in the backup world to save space, but to date they have not been effective for primary storage because of performance. It turns out that deduplication and compression can actually improve the performance of an all-flash array: data dispersion helps flash take advantage of flash’s higher parallelism, and reducing the number of writes (the more difficult operation for flash) can extend the life of the flash. Pure Storage has built global, inline deduplication and compression right into the fabric of the Pure Storage FlashArray, resulting in 5-20X data reduction in even the most performance sensitive
applications

What are some of the emerging trends that you have witnessed in the sector?
First, Cloud computing is disrupting the storage business because most of the legacy storage is very expensive, very complicated and it doesn’t fit well in to cloud data centers.
Second, Flash storage is about to go mainstream in the enterprise. Outside of the datacentre, flash-based storage is enabling smartphones, MP3 players and consumer web applications like Google search and Facebook to be so quick. Also, many laptop computers are using flash (SSDs) storage. Our search engines and social networks deliver results and analyse problems before we’ve finished typing the search request — all thanks to flash. From our perspecitve, all-flash storage will reach mainstream adoption within the enterprise very soon.

Can you share about your presence and achievements in the region?
Pure Sotrage has established the Legal Entity in the region about a year ago and also opened an office in Dubai Internet City. The team is growing rapidly, as we scale to match the demand from customers in the Middle East, replacing aging Disk Based Architectures with our market leading AFA (All Flash Arrays). Pure Storage has secured business with both the largest National & Private Insurers in the UAE. We also now have a presence on ground in every country in the GCC.
What are the factors you are focussing on? How to you aim to achieve you goal?
Pure’s main focus for the next 12 months is to
continue to expand its product lines and presence
globally.
In terms of technology, focus will be on increasing array capacity and new software features to enhance performance and capability. We are also introducing a new entry level product called the //m10, designed for smaller workloads, and ideal for the mid-market.
In terms of geographical presence, Pure will expand its presence by continuing to select and empower the right partners in each
country to drive the message of innovation, reliability and efficiency which
is so important for
customers.