All-flash enterprise storage startup ready (and funded) for battle

(PhysOrg.com) -- Pure Storage has announced it has raised $30 million in a new round of funding for its cost-cutting storage system that uses flash memory only. This is its C-round of funding, which brings its total backing to $55 million. The company has also announced that its Pure Storage FlashArray FA-300 series is available immediately for evaluation and should be generally available by the end of the year.

The company is set to sell its product, Pure Storage FlashArray, as an all-flash storage array promising to be ten times faster and ten times smaller than hard-disk-based systems.

Generally, analyst and investor communities have had little difficulty in recognizing the edge that a company like Pure Storage offers. It is generally accepted that flash memory will replace hard disk drives as the storage technology of choice by large enterprise users. Flash memory does not have the physical limitations of hard drives and they keep better pace with processors. While some newer technologies meet resistance by business customers reluctant to change, CIO ears are always open to changes that will bring cost-effective results and new efficiencies in their company's storage implementations. Big businesses cope with ever-increasing computing workloads, in server virtualization environments and cloud computing. The company's all-flash storage array is offered as a drop-in replacement for enterprise primary data disk drive arrays from suppliers such as EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp.

Pure Storage plans to tell its cost story to any enterprise customer who balks over the cost difference between hard drives as cheaper than enterprise-grade flash. Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen says that his company's arrays are more cost-effective than disk-based alternatives. He thinks customers could need up to 50 per cent fewer database servers to access their databases on an FA-300 box.

The company can keep costs low per gigabyte by reducing the data stored through its deduping process.

A beta tester of the FlashArray system is being promoted as testimony to the product's benefits and payback.

Matt Kesner, CIO at the law firm Fenwick & West in San Francisco, said his company has experienced "amazing results" in its data centers. "The FlashArray has reduced our data between 50% to 90% on a variety of workloads, ranging from VMware virtual machines to Microsoft Exchange and SQL, as well as reduced our physical storage footprint far beyond our expectations."

Another round of FlashArray beta testing is under way with 25 customers.

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