Disruption! Disk is dead! Flash forever!
When Pure Storage first came into the public eye they were loud, they were bold and everyone took notice. Whether you liked their marketing campaigns or their even louder marketing team, Pure marked the beginning of the flash revolution. They weren’t the first to do flash, they were just the first to convince us that all flash was right for our datacenter. If IOPs and low latency mattered, Pure was the vendor you needed.
With a recent IPO and new hardware platform (flasharray//m) there has been a lot going on with Pure Storage. While the announcement of their latest product was over 6 months ago (June 2015), my expectations for Pure are always high. The Tech Field Day delegates at Storage Field Day 8 got a chance to listen to what Pure Storage has been doing, their focus, and hopefully what was still to come. This time around, however, I was left a little disappointed.
When a company who touts disruption as loud as Pure, you expect big things. Believe me, it’s not that what they’ve built isn’t impressive. A brand new, 3U dual-controller array built to eliminate single points of failure, maximize performance and display their orange logo as bright and loud as their messaging has always been is impressive. But that’s old news. This announcement feels like it was forever ago and we’re curious where Pure goes from here. What’s next for Pure?
Sadly, we don’t know. Roadmap and futures were off limits for this newly-public company. The feeling I get is that Pure is focusing on refinement, whether in their products or just in their messaging. Customers want visibility into their arrays. They want non-disruptive upgrades. They want health monitoring and alerting. They want that enterprise feeling companies like NetApp and EMC provide. Pure Storage’s focus right now is the enterprise and everything that Pure1 provides.
Pure1 is SaaS-based management and support of your Pure Storage arrays. Gone are the days of setting up management servers in each of your datacenters to manage and collect metrics of all your arrays. Pure1 allows you to login to a web interface and view statistics and alerts on all your arrays from a single portal. That’s one less server you’re forced to manage, update, and maintain to hold on to your historical data. Pure Storage arrays phone home all the important metrics (every 30 seconds) that matter so you have that single interface. New features can be delivered faster to all its customers with the collected data without the need to perform an update to your software.
Pure1 is being leveraged to open tickets on your behalf. Pure Storage said that roughly 70% of customer tickets are opened proactively by Pure1. Pure has worked at eliminating the “noise” of these alerts as well, focusing on root cause alerts as opposed to just all the alerts that may come from a cable or drive being pulled. These proactive tickets include bug fixes for issues that may come up in your environment based on your current configuration. I can recall a few times in my career where I’ve ran into a software bug on my storage array that the vendor was aware of, but never informed me I was susceptible to. This is the kind of information all customers want, but not all vendors provide.
Pure Storage has taken a non-disruptive everything approach to its software releases as well. While legacy vendors have left me reluctant to upgrade my arrays in the past, Pure Storage touted 91% customer adoption of its software within 8 months of release. Pure’s customers are trusting in its development, enough to even perform upgrades in the middle of the day while still serving production workloads. That is confidence and shows the capabilities of these arrays and Pure’s engineers. Non-disruptive no matter the operation.
Is the marketing machine that was Pure Storage dead? My hope and feeling is no. Pure is finding out who they are as $PSTG. This is a period of refinement and maturity for the 6-year-old company. We’ll have to wait and see what they’ll do next and I’m sure we’ll all take notice.
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Watch all the videos from Pure Storage at Storage Field Day 8 here.
Disclaimer: During Storage Field Day 8, my expenses (flight, hotel, etc) were paid for by Tech Field Day. I am under no obligation to write about any of the presented content nor am I compensated by any of the presenting companies for such writing.
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