PureStorage

ubern00b · 1 Jul 2014 at 14:07

http://www.purestorage.com/

Anyone seen or heard of these guys? I just came back from a sales pitch/technology introduction and WOW. Basically, it's a pure flash SAN. With that comes all the benefits you would expect in terms of I/O, IOPS as well as all the drawbacks you would expect, like cost.

They have done some awesome things to reduce the TCO such as in-line de-dupe and compression before the data hits the SSD which obviously lowers writes and increases the life of flash media as well as obviously giving you more bang for your buck as 6TB RAW storage becomse 12-24TB+ depending on what you store on it.

Anyway this was the first time I had heard of them and I am very impressed. Needless to say we are investing in an array and I am keen to get my grubby little mitts on it

ubern00b · 1 Jul 2014 at 22:31

I don't have sales figures as I was purely there as a technical resource. I had not heard of Nimble until now but a quick Google reveals they spurt much of the same stuff as PureStorage. I cannot tell you in-depth what the differences are, if any as Pure is the only company I have attended a sit down with.

Both seem to say they are the first with everything, who is telling the truth I don't know.

As for the MLC concern, the way Pure described it is that they are selling their propriety software (Known as Purity, which sits on top of a hardened Ubuntu installation) and that sits on top of consumer grade hardware. Their controllers are Dell servers, their disks are Samsung MLC and they have two SLC disks per disk chassis which were branded Zeus when I had a play and unplugged them from the array. These are NVRAM modules which are responsible for ensuring data is written and verified to the array before being cleared. Due to this, it doesn't matter if a drive fails as when it is replaced it just rebuilds data from the others,, but instead of taking a day to rebuild a large array, it takes 10mins. They challenged us to break their array, we unplugged 6 drives including 2 of the NVRAM drives, pulled the power on one of the controllers and various other things. The array just kept running. I was impressed but then I haven't been around loads of SAN's, only really an EVA and P4800.

Oh, and in the 36 months the company has been shipping units they have had 5 drive failures in total. Another figure I was impressed with. Only because we have had 5+ drive failures on our P4800's in a year.

They also have a "let us put a system in your data centre and if it doesn't perform to your liking, send it back" policy. So far no one has sent one back.

ubern00b · 2 Jul 2014 at 09:11

Caged said:
people are just trying to cash out while they can.

"Cashing out" in the traditional sense doesn't make sense for Pure as they are a brand new company. They have no previous IP to protect or make money from. They started from the ground up with a pure flash "no disk" ethos.

Unless in the future they go down the road of selling their Purity software and allowing you to put it on any hardware you feel like, that is an avenue I guess that would gain popularity but then they would just open themselves up to a world of pain in terms of hardware support.

ubern00b · 2 Jul 2014 at 13:29

Well for anyone who cares, got some pricing on the kit. The Pure 11TB offering came in at £178K. Similar IBM offering was slightly more at £185K and HP/3PAR was £330K

I have contacted Nimble to discuss what they can offer. The more vendors the better!

ubern00b · 2 Jul 2014 at 15:05

richard smith said:
Why do you need pure flash? Unless you have crazy IO requirements, it's just willy waving.

We have an archaic database application that we "have to keep alive no matter what" and the only thing we can do is throw tin at it. We have tried to put together a proposal to develop a new platform but it was denied. The funny thing is the cost of the tin is probably going to cost as much as the development of a new system but what the board decide is out of our control.

ubern00b · 7 Jul 2014 at 20:41

You are thinking with how disk works, not how flash works. I don't have all of the answers but I saw it in action, I saw performance graphs over time under load and there is no IO hit. Don't you think if there was it would be a major flaw in their business model and anyone using the array would see right through it? The fact is probably that the array is capable of 300K IOps but they get a 50K IOps hit by inline dedupe/compression so they quote 250K IOps for this reason. This is speculation but that is how I see it working anyway.

As for proactive monitoring that is exactly what they do. Their array talks back to headquarters and they monitor all sorts of metrics and will tune your array based on the performance data to get the most out of it as well as detecting failures ahead of time.