Pure Storage Foretells The End Of Disk

Pure Storage made the bold claim that there will be no new hard disks sold after 2028 this week at its annual Accelerate conference this week in Las Vegas, NV.

To help hasten its demise, Pure announced the FlashArray//E, a file and block protocol array that provides capacity storage starting at 1 PB. It joins the FlashBlade//E file and object storage array as what Pure is calling the Pure//E family of products.

The FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C line both get an upgrade with the R4 version. Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs give at least a 40% performance boost per watt to these product lines. PCIe Gen 4 support provides more bandwidth, as does DDR5 memory. The DirectCompress accelerator introduced earlier this year in the FlashArray//XL will now come as standard in the R4 versions of the FlashArray //X90, //X70, //C90, //C70. For a detailed writeup of all the hardware changes, this excellent piece from my friend Brian Beeler over at StorageReview has you covered.

During the conference, Pure's messaging was focused on replacing HDDs with flash. While some analysts were critical of this approach, I've made my peace with it.

The Pure//E family is brand new, with the FlashBlade//E only announced earlier this year. This capacity tier is where the economics start to work for customers that would previously have only considered HDD-based arrays to get the capacity they need at a price they're happy with. Pure wants to get their attention and have them consider, many for the first time, that flash is a viable option for these workloads. It's a large part of the overall storage market, so a campaign focused on replacing competitor HDD arrays with Pure's flash makes both short-term financial sense and supports a longer-term strategy.

Pure now believes it has products that can support all customer workloads. It also provides multiple ways to start a broader conversation with customers with multiple use-cases. This is particularly important for the enterprise segment that Pure wants to target more consciously.

For some customers, "sweeping the floor" is possible now. For others, a simple "replace your HDD with flash" is an easy message to grasp and accept. Pure can then build on that success with a broader and more complex story about its full range of products and how they work together. We saw elements of that this week with talk of a "cloud operating model". Pure1 and Fusion will play important roles in that story.

But that more complex story is difficult to do at the same time as introducing the new FlashArray//E and speaking of the paired FlashArray/FlashBlade //E lines as a family. It's a departure from the FlashArray vs. FLashBlade groupings that Pure has used thus far. Trying to talk about too many things at once complicates the story both for Pure and for customers. Success is harder to achieve.

A clear, focused message that aligns with the new product launch and the foreshadowing of future DFM capacities is fine. Success with this simple, and more tactical, story sets the stage for a more strategic story later. I have every reason to believe that we will see that more strategic message arrive by next year.

And it will need to arrive. A tactical product discussion isn't what enterprise CIOs want to talk about. Replacing HDDs with flash is the start of a conversation, not the end. I'll be looking for a more holistic story about the Pure experience that encompasses all its product lines, including Pure1 and Fusion. A story that moves away from discussions about individual arrays or products to fleet management.

PivotNine believes the discussion needs to move to one about options and operations. I'll be sharing some more of our thinking on this topic shortly.

Pure Storage is a PivotNine client. I attended Accelerate as a guest of Pure Storage.