REPORT REPRINT Pure Storage s flash storage gets bigger, faster and easier to scale TIM STAMMERS 10 JUN 2015 Although the consumer mobile-services market often gets new innovations first, Sprint is aiming to bring its full arsenal of service bundling, device financing and cloud application expertise to deliver mobility as a service to its business customers. THIS REPORT, LICENSED EXCLUSIVELY TO PURE STORAGE, DEVELOPED AND AS PROVIDED BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC, SHALL BE OWNED IN ITS ENTIRETY BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC. THIS REPORT IS SOLELY INTENDED FOR USE BY THE RECIPIENT AND MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OR RE-POSTED, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, BY THE RECIPIENT, WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION FROM 451 RESEARCH. 2015 451 Research, LLC WWW.451RESEARCH.COM
It s been a little over a year since Pure Storage refreshed its all-flash storage systems, and the company recently unveiled more than just a typical hardware upgrade to the latest CPUs and flash drives. The company s new FlashArray//m series does not just boost performance and capacity via a much more extensive hardware rework, but also replaces separate controllers and drive shelves with a single chassis, which houses modular, easily changed components such as controllers and cache memory. This simplifies upgrades by eliminating forklift replacements of entire chassis. On another front, since late 2014, Pure s unusual Forever Flash sales program has included free hardware upgrades when customers renew their maintenance contracts, alongside guaranteed flat and fair pricing for those renewals. Pure describes this as making costs fully predictable, and it certainly contrasts with some vendors practice of hiking maintenance fees heavily at renewals, to push customers into replacing entire storage systems. Pure has renamed this program as Evergreen Storage, and has added a trade-in feature to increase its flexibility. The company has also launched an unusual SaaS model for the management of its devices. THE 451 TAKE A major reason for Pure s success has been the effort it has made to deliver well-executed storage systems, with simplicity of use and ownership in mind. The Evergreen program and the new hardware modularization follow the same path, and can only help increase Pure s sales. Although the new devices have twice the capacity and one-third greater IOPS performance than their predecessors, as twin-controller scale-up systems, they still offer smaller maximum capacities and lower IOPS than major rivals. For now, however, Pure is confident that its //m systems meet the needs of all but a tiny minority of customers, without what Pure says are the drawbacks of scale-out. Two questions remain: whether Pure will eventually need a scale-out system to fully address the high end of the market, and how much the Evergreen program will affect Pure s profit margins. CONTEXT AFAs still only account for a small part of the overall $25bn external storage systems market, but their sales are growing very quickly, unlike the overall flat to shrinking sales of disk-based arrays. 451 Research s latest forecast for the AFA market is for 36% CAGR from 2014-2019, taking total revenue from $1.7bn to $7.8bn. Pure Storage has been one of a handful of pioneers of all-flash external storage. The company launched its first product in 2011, and in 2014 claimed its revenue growth had made it possibly the fastest-growing hardware systems company in the history of IT. Although large organizations were not early buyers of its products, Pure says the situation has changed, and as a result it rejects descriptions of itself as a midrange AFA supplier. The company says SMB and midrange enterprise buyers now account for less than 30% of its revenue, and that it has multiple customers among the world s 10 largest banks, telcos and hyperscale Web businesses. During 2013 the company s larger deals ranged from about $1-2m, but late in 2014 the company said it was winning $4m and $5m contracts, and even some eight-figure deals. Named customers include Workday, LinkedIn, Samsung, Investec and Nielsen. The company has raised $470m in total funding, and has been expanding fast. Headcount is around 1,000, up from around 800 six months ago, with operations in around 30 countries. DIAL M FOR MODULAR Pure is not saying what //m stands for, but the new devices are certainly modular. Controllers, DRAM cache, IO boards and flash drives are housed in enclosures that can be hot-swapped in or out of the //m chassis. This allows much quicker hardware upgrades than in other storage systems, including Pure s previous systems, for which a controller upgrade required replacement of an entire chassis. It also parallels a trend in servers HP s Moonshot and Dell s recently launched PowerEdge FX2 servers also feature system modules that can be switched out of a chassis in seconds. Similarly to Pure, HP and Dell describe this new form of hardware packaging as boosting flexibility and efficiency.
The //m series comprises three models. To upgrade from one to another, six cables need to be disconnected from the back of the chassis before new controller, cache and IO modules can be swapped in. Once the cables are reconnected, the new modules become part of the system within seconds, according to Pure. The company says the six cables are far fewer than those used to link together multiple nodes in rival scale-out systems. Pure s AFAs were far from the first storage systems in which controller chassis could be upgraded or replaced while existing drive shelves remain in place. However, even before the modularization of the //m, Pure was claiming that its shared-nothing architecture and 50% controller loading made that process easier on its systems. DENSER, FASTER, BIGGER While Pure continues to use third-party flash drives, pairs of those drives are now housed in Pure-assembled 3.5- inch flash modules with 512GB-2TB of capacity each. This has boosted physical density as well as performance two SSDs now occupy a single slot. Rivals have already argued that, with this packaging, Pure has abandoning its use of commodity hardware. However, Pure says the drives are still low-cost commodity devices, with each module containing an interposer that presents two drives as a single device to the rest of system. Different capacity modules can be mixed in the same system. The top-end //m70 model packs 40TB-raw into 3U, and can be expanded with external shelves or drive enclosure to 136TB-raw in 11U. This gives a maximum density of 40TB-useable per U, after overheads and assuming a 5:1 data overall reduction ratio for de-dupe and compression, while ignoring other space-saving features such as thin provisioning, according to Pure. That makes the new boxes 2.6 times denser than their predecessors. The //m boxes are also 50% faster, handling up to 300,000 IOPS and 9GB/sec throughput. That IOPS number is noticeably smaller than for many rival AFAs, but low latency is more important than IOPS, and Pure claims the same sub-millisecond latency as its competitors. Also, Pure s IOPS cannot be directly compared with rivals because Pure quotes IOPS for an unusually large 32KB block size. Other vendors cite IOPS for 4KB or 8KB blocks. Those smaller block sizes are much less representative of real workloads, but they also happen to result in higher, more flattering IOPS numbers. On the other hand, rivals argue that Pure has deliberately chosen a 32KB block size in order to prevent comparisons. Alongside the new flash drive packaging, other reasons for the performance boost compared with Pure s previous FA-300 and 400 series devices are the use of Intel Haswell CPUs in the controllers and PCIe replacing InifiniBand links between the pairs of controller modules, and between the controllers and the DRAM modules. (Pure calls its DRAM write cache NV-RAM because it is power-protected by super-capacitors.) The flash drives are linked via 12Gbps SAS connections, but Pure says the //m is ready for a future switch to PCIe flash drives. Like others, Pure predicts that, in time, PCIe will replace SAS as the mainstream type of datacenter flash drive. The //m series entered beta in Q1 this year. It will enter directed availability in July, and full GA in Q3. SCALE UP, NOT OUT Unlike many of its major competitors, Pure s AFA is a scale-up system with a fixed number of two controllers. This might appear to be a weakness compared with scale-out systems, which can be increased in capacity while maintaining or protecting performance by adding nodes that include additional controllers as well as capacity. This might appear to be a weakness, but Pure insists it is a strength. Indeed, Pure says that when the company was founded, its first design was a scale-out system, but it quickly switched to scale-up because it says that it has advantages such as more efficient use of hardware and more efficient handling of controller failures or maintenance shutdowns. More importantly, perhaps, Pure says that it could modify the //m to be a scale-out system, but it is unlikely to do so because it says it can already meet the capacity and performance needs of 99.9% of customers. And as customer needs grow, the capacity and speed of Pure s system will also grow, courtesy of Moore s Law and increasing flash drive capacities, according to Pure. When extension shelves are added, the //m maximum useable capacity is around 0.5PB. That is about the size of the largest failure domain that the majority of customers are happy with for primary storage, according to Pure. The company says most high-end customers either use repeatable rack configurations of around 200-300TB of capacity or design around VM clusters needing around 500TB of capacity.
EVERGREEN STORAGE Around 18 months ago, Pure launched a program called Forever Flash. In late in 2014 it bolstered that program to provide a highly unusual combination of guaranteed flat and fair maintenance and support-renewal prices, with free controller upgrades every three years. In June the company began using the name Evergreen Storage for that program, and it has added a feature called Upgrade Flex Bundles. This new feature gives customers what Pure says is a full trade-in refund for controllers and other hardware if they decide to upgrade their systems before their next scheduled every-three-years maintenance renewal and free hardware upgrade. The aim is to free customers from the risk that they may have incorrectly sized their initial system purchases by allowing them to correct any mistakes with no direct financial penalties. SAAS-STYLE BOX MANAGEMENT Until now, customers have managed Pure s systems in the conventional way: using management software supplied by Pure and installed on servers in the same datacenter as the Pure storage systems, or through third-party software such as VMware vsphere or OpenStack (via a Pure-supplied vsphere plug-in or OpenStack Cinder driver). Pure1 has replaced that server-installed Pure software with software running in a Pure datacenter, accessed via a Web browser that can administer multiple Pure systems, in any location. This SaaS model frees customers from the need to install Pure management software in their own datacenters. For full administration, customers need a connection through their firewall. The Pure1 system is an extension of Pure s existing Cloud Assist monitoring, remote management and fault-prediction service that analyzes data from Pure s entire installed base. COMPETITION Pure faces competition from OEMs and fellow startup AFA suppliers. The biggest player in the AFA space is EMC, which earlier this year said it had reached a $1bn annual revenue run rate for its scale-out XtremIO AFA. That is far greater than the claims made by any other vendors, and represents almost half of the overall market. EMC recently increased the maximum size and IOPS of the scale-out XtremIO to 320TB raw, and 1.2 million IOPS (70% read, 8KB blocks, 0.5ms latency). Other notable OEM competition comes from HP and IBM. HP s flagship AFA is the 3PAR StoreServ 7450, which is based on the sophisticated and popular scale-out 3PAR disk array. In 2014 HP made the important move of adding in-line block-level de-duplication to the entire range of 3PAR StoreServ devices, including the 7450, as well as unusually sophisticated QoS controls. However, unlike Pure s AFAs, the 7450 does not offer data compression, which is needed to reduce the size and effective cost of all-flash storage of databases, which are a major application for all-flash storage. IBM s flagship all-flash storage is the FlashSystem series of devices. Recently, IBM boosted the capacity and performance of these systems, and late in 2014 it improved their performance when compressing data. However, the FlashSystem lacks a data de-dupe function. NetApp launched the first version of its purpose-designed FlashRay AFA into limited release in 2014. The device is functionally very limited at present, and NetApp s principal AFA offerings are all-flash versions of its E-series and FAS disk arrays, which do not offer advanced data-reduction features. Dell and HDS s AFA offerings currently comprise all-flash configurations of legacy disk arrays, which also lack cost-slashing de-dupe and compression functions. Violin Memory formerly led the all-flash market, and has been making moves to recover its position after the lack of table stakes software functions in its systems caused its sales to slow as competition developed. In 2014 Violin bought software from storage virtualization specialist FalconStor, which it used as a base to develop a comprehensive set of data services for its AFAs. Violin recently began shipping new hardware and another software update one that covers its last major functional gaps of block-level de-dupe and compression. Pure s highest-profile startup rival is SolidFire, which initially focused on sales to service providers, but says that since 2014 its sales to large enterprises have grown rapidly, and are set to become the larger part of its business. SolidFire s design goal was cloud-friendly scale-out flash storage. Its scale-out AFA features sophisticated QoS controls, and the company claims that 27% of its customers have put its systems under the control of the Open- Stack cloud management software. Another startup, Kaminario, offers AFAs that it says feature a highly resilient, scale-out architecture
SWOT ANALYSIS STRENGTHS Pure s devices are functionally mature and sophisticated, and the company has established a relatively sizeable and diverse customer base in only a short time on the market. WEAKNESSES Pure s current twin-controller architecture limits the maximum capacity and performance of its arrays. OPPORTUNITIES All AFA vendors are facing increasing demand as flash prices fall and storage performance problems increase. THREATS The biggest current challenge to Pure comes from EMC. Other OEMs may become more competitive if they can extend the data reduction features in their existing AFAs.