Pure Storage urges partners to mount flash challenge

Pure Storage is mounting a serious challenge to those vendors that are still servicing legacy storage disk arrays, with the launch of its latest flash product.

The vendor is claiming it has stolen a march on its competitors and as a result its channel will be in a stronger position following the release of its all-QLC flash storage array.

The product gives customers the option of putting more data on flash and should provoke some strategic decisions in those users that are still wedded to legacy hybrid disk options.

Up to this point, most customers have had to choose which data uses flash because of price constraints, but Pure is challenging that status quo and encouraging partners to pick up the pitch and talk to users.

“This announcement puts Pure partners way ahead of the competition. Previously, enterprises have been made to choose which tier one applications and workloads to put on all-flash, meaning customers can’t take full advantage of the speed and cost-effective performance of flash,” said Matthieu Brignone, vice-president of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) partners at Pure Storage.

“With the QLC enhancements to FlashArray//C, partners will be able to work with customers to enable faster test and development, faster backup and restore, and faster workload consolidation. This allows customers a renewed focus on being innovative. Partners can enable their customers to easily move to the all-flash datacentre and create long-term, mutually beneficial relationships,” he added.

Flash continues to gain traction in the market, but customers have been slow to shift their perceptions around cost. As a result, the penetration in areas of non-critical data and those verticals where speed is not necessarily the same factor it is in the financial services world have been slower to adopt the technology.

Scott Baker, vice-president of product marketing, FlashArray, at Pure Storage, said that users were looking for a more holistic platform that could handle all of their data and, as a result, “make the benefits of flash more accessible for a broader range of use cases at an economic advantage that is sure to make hybrid storage a thing of the past”.

Pure has been encouraging its channel to offer storage as a service to customers, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, to provide users with more flexible options. That approach helped the firm deliver a 12% increase in revenues in its recent first quarter numbers.

In May, the vendor talked about Pure as a service, which is available free for the first three months for new customers with a 12-month contract term of 50 TiB or more, or six months free with a 24-month term.

It also stepped up support for those struggling with installing flash products, by giving them the option to use video conferencing so customers can be guided through the installation process for themselves if they so choose.