Reflecting on 15 Years of Pure Storage

Pure Storage turns 15 years old this month. It may sound cliché, but time has really flown by. Fifteen years is practically an eternity in the IT industry. Not many startups survive, let alone make it past an IPO before getting acquired and assimilated into a larger company. How did Pure Storage manage to not just make it this long but also thrive? 

Simply put, we were in it for the long haul from the beginning and have been dedicated to shepherding as much long-overdue improvement in the enterprise storage industry as we can. Our commitment was to be, “missionaries, not mercenaries,” in our efforts.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

This quote by computer scientist Alan Kay in the 1960s has always been a bedrock principle of the technology industry and has been reflected over the last 50+ years in these examples:

• Moore’s Law of perpetual integrated circuit progress
• Bob Metcalfe’s introduction of Ethernet led to its ubiquity today
• The explosion of mobile devices led to widespread adoption of consumer-grade NAND flash

The mission of Pure Storage since the beginning has been to follow the same arc. Innovative thinking is in our DNA. The enterprise storage market was long overdue for some evolution, so we set out to change it, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

2009: A Perfect Storm Forms

The IT world is always in a continual state of change, but 2009 was particularly turbulent:

• VMware with operating system virtualization had become the de facto standard for most organizations. This enabled better workload consolidation and density but had a massive impact on enterprise storage performance in trying to keep up. A quantum leap was needed.
• Cloud computing had gained traction, adding turmoil to data placement and management.
• Storage area networks had grown exponentially in large organizations and were even being adopted across small and medium-sized enterprises. 

This industry turbulence drove the need for better performance and flexibility, but legacy storage companies hadn’t improved their existing products to match the demand. They opted to continue selling solutions that had been designed 25 to 35 years earlier, expecting their customers to simply compromise with their associated platform shortcomings. The founders of Pure Storage realized an evolution was needed and began working on a solution in stealth mode to invent the future.

To Invent the Future, You Have to Reevaluate Everything

If you decided to redesign the car, would it even be a car? And, would you take the easy hill or the hard hill to do it? Our founders faced a similar challenge and opted for the hard hill. In 2009, enterprise storage had already been around for quite a while, and many of its concepts and components had been carried along through the generations and never reevaluated by other vendors to determine if a better approach was needed. For Pure Storage, we always take the hard hill and build the tech right the first time.

• Bigger capacity, faster, and cheaper. These three variables were the enterprise storage industry’s sole guidance in 2009. And, while the initial Pure Storage designs aligned with them, our cornerstone was laid with an extra dimension: flexibility. Our storage solution needed to be able to allow for its resources to be malleable and not require disruptive system changes to implement existing and emerging features like compression and deduplication. Additionally, flexibility for us also meant not having customers incur additional costs for these features—everything was built to be included in one acquisition price.
• Flash storage at the price of disk. The industry’s first-generation solid-state drive (SSD) architectures were built with enterprise-class single-level cell (eSLC) NAND memory that allowed them to treat flash like disk and push the resiliency and wear down into the SSD itself, but this made them expensive and carried less usable capacity. Our design took the hard hill in that it paired the “off-the-shelf” consumer-grade flash memory with intelligent software (the Purity operating environment) to manage flash more effectively, or the way it was meant to be leveraged, providing better cost economics as well as resiliency. Over time, we evolved our design to also eliminate autonomous intelligence in the drives, making them stateless and more modular. These elements are the foundation of our DirectFlash® Modules.
• DirectFlash Modules (DFMs). Pure Storage began in a year when legacy storage vendors were beginning to implement SSDs in their solutions, but they did it the same way they were leveraging hard drives. These SSDs were traditional 2.5” and 3.5” form factor designs and leveraged individual flash translate controllers on each drive to distribute data bits to the flash cells. We saw two challenges in that approach: The SSD media’s physical sizes were dated because they were designed for spinning platters, and the translate controllers on each drive were inefficient at scale. We optimized our storage media’s physical dimensions for flash media and eliminated the need for discrete flash controllers on each one by enabling Purity to directly manage the data bit distribution. This more holistic approach resulted in better density, reliability, and consistent performance that outperformed traditional SSDs. Finally, because we manufacture our DFMs, their mean time between failure numbers are superior to enterprise-grade SSDs. 
• Software, software, software. Legacy enterprise storage solutions in 2009 were largely hardware-centric, with manageability and useability as afterthoughts. The Purity operating environment design was different. First, it was built with an API-first standard to maximize integration and automation possibilities with other data center services. Second, many rudimentary functions within the array were designed to be automatically handled and managed to make things easier for the storage administrator. Elements like selecting drives for RAID groups, LUN masking and zoning, and controller volume assignments were automated to simplify the admin experience. Finally, we opted for a unique approach for data resilience to avoid the rigidity that comes with regular RAID parity stripes. This negated concerns about failed media rebuild times. 

Our original vision has prevailed and repeatedly proven to be a disruptive agent for change in the enterprise storage industry.

Our Storied Timelines

Our innovations and evolution have been so vast over the last 15 years that we need three separate timelines to capture it all:

Figure 1: Pure Storage® hardware evolution timeline.

Figure 2: Pure Storage FlashArray™ software feature evolution timeline.

Figure 3: Pure Storage FlashBlade® software feature evolution timeline.

We’re #2. Why? Because the Customer Is #1

Our core motivation has always been customer obsession—innovating new products and solutions to help solve their problems and make their lives easier. We have held ourselves to a stringent list of technical principles that support fundamental beliefs we have in the enterprise storage industry:

• Always be innovating. Our drive for improvement has never stopped. We continually innovate our platform to both our customers’ and our own guidance. This might be abnormal for many other publicly traded technology companies. Because innovation is a risk, many choose to eschew it to keep their stock prices stable. Pure Storage is different. We’re always assessing any additional value we can provide with our platform and adding new services when warranted. We embrace the risk because it will benefit our customers. And, if the first iteration of something doesn’t meet our standards, we regroup on the concept and try a different approach.
• Enterprise storage should be an investment. The business role of the data center has shifted over the last several years from being considered a sunk cost to becoming a business asset. Because of this, our platform is designed to provide maximum technical value while being the least disruptive element in the data center. Modern enterprise storage management has evolved to being handled by overburdened tech generalists, so we’re dedicated to providing industry-leading support. We also offer flexibility in how our platform is procured and refreshed with our Evergreen® subscription portfolio. 
• Trust isn’t something we take lightly. We know we’re in a saturated market that has been dominated for years by a few 800-pound tech gorillas who maintain their customers through inertia. And, for many people, purchasing from these vendors may be considered a safer choice. We know we’re disruptive and moving an industry needle long overdue for a shift. We are also fully aware our customers aren’t just buying our storage platform, they’re ultimately putting trust in us when it comes to one of their most valuable business assets. Trust in our hardware design, software capabilities, vision and execution, non-disruptive upgrades, and simplicity. We never take that for granted and back all of it up with our industry-leading NPS score and repeated accolades from Gartner and IDC, among others.

It’s Prime Time for Pure Storage

Pure Storage is just getting started. Our first 15 years of success are only the beginning of our contributions to where we see the storage market evolving. And, our vision is accelerating through our partnerships with NVIDIA, Cisco, Microsoft, and other industry leaders. Our prediction for the next 15 years: We’ll surpass anything we imagined when we started in 2009.

Pure Storage is built to last. Our customers praise us, our competitors worry about us, and now, the business world knows about us.

Charles Giancarlo, CEO of Pure Storage, rings the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

Expect more growth and greatness over the next 15 years.

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