Pure is taking our continued Leader position as an opportunity to proudly reflect on the incredible year we’ve had, witnessing fast and broad customer adoption, innovative hardware and software releases, and growth and successes in our partner and alliance communities. Without a doubt, this recognition highlights the hard work that goes into everything we do.
Thank You
Most important, we want to express our heartfelt appreciation for our customers. We believe this recognition wouldn’t be possible without the amazing passion, feedback, and support that you provide to us every day. The community we’ve built together enables IT and data leaders from around the world to climb higher and innovate faster to solve real world problems. Thank you for your honesty, inspiration, and confidence in Pure Storage as one of your trusted partners on your journey.
Organizational transformations won’t happen without people like you building a culture based on a Modern Data Experience™. During this review period, you and your organizations have realized new use cases and broader benefits after adopting Pure FlashArray™ products.
- In an effort to create a true data culture, the San Francisco Giants signed Pure for its speed of access to data, speed of data management, and simplicity.
- The Institute of Public Administration in Saudi Arabia relies on Pure’s consistency of performance and low latency to eliminate obstacles in its clients’ nomination and admission processes.
- Hong Kong’s Kuehne+Nagel Limited recognizes that FlashArray has drastically streamlined its storage infrastructure and exceeded expectations for data availability.
As of 4 Dec. 2020, Pure Storage has an Evaluation & Contracting rating of 4.9 out of 5 in the Advanced Analytics Platforms market on Gartner Peer Insights.
As we marvel at all that has happened to get us where we are in the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Primary Storage Arrays, nothing is more amazing than seeing our customers succeed with Pure’s all-flash-array portfolio at scale. Together, we have an amazing opportunity to make every bit of your data available to you in the most useful way possible for you to take informed action.
It Starts with Performance and Capacity
Last year, we raised the bar on innovation when we introduced the FlashArray//C, a capacity-optimized all-flash array designed for future QLC NAND flash technology. This provided you with additional choices. Capacity-tolerant, performance-intensive applications can reside on FlashArray//X. FlashArray//C is designed specifically for operational workloads that are capacity intensive and performance sensitive (delivering 2ms–4ms consistent latency). Both arrays are backed by the Purity Operating Environment, meaning that both products share the same ease of use, feature set, and interoperability.
The Evergreen Storage™ program continues to provide a huge customer value and differentiate Pure in the market. (Read more in Evergreen Challenge: Does Your Storage Provide Peace of Mind?). In fact, earlier this year—in the same week that Intel released its Cascade Lake Xeon processors—we released the third revision of our FlashArray//X controllers with the same processor and other enhancements. This means that you can use your Evergreen subscription to non-disruptively adopt hardware enhancements and realize the full benefit of the latest technology without compromising your business requirements or re-buying gear.
Software Makes It Even Better
To complement our hardware innovation, we released a major version of Purity earlier this year. Version 6.0 makes several major feature enhancements available to you at no additional cost, including: unified block and file, continuous asynchronous replication across any distance, Pure Cloud Block Store™ for Azure (beta), Purity CloudSnap™ for Google Cloud Platform, and more.
Purity 6.0 truly unified our product offering and natively integrated SMB and NFS features to our existing block-protocol support. Natively integrating the mature, proven technology from our acquisition of Compuverde provided immediate and non-disruptive access to SMB and NFS support from a common pool of storage. People have raved about not having to preallocate capacity for block or file use. They also appreciate the consistency in file management and API set between file services on FlashArray and FlashBlade. And they’re already using the feature to consolidate disparate file servers, host user file shares, consolidate applications, and more.
To address the geographically separated disaster-recovery challenges that some organizations face, we designed a solution that continuously protects their business and simplifies the failover/failback process. We released Purity ActiveDR™ to provide business-resilience services across any distance without the cost and complexity of third-party software. Included at no additional cost, you can rely on Pure continuous-replication technology to protect applications with a near-zero recovery point objective, simple failover/failback, and non-disruptive testing.
Cloud-based Management Makes It Easier
We continued to enhance Pure1®, our application-aware cloud-based storage management platform, throughout the year. Pure1 is included with our storage arrays and Pure as-a-Service™ storage subscriptions and it’s accessible via a web browser or on Android and Apple iOS.
Improvements to the machine-learning models of Pure1 Meta were made to enhance the Workload Planner. Now it’s even easier to forecast load and capacity requirements and simulate the impacts that hardware changes will have on a FlashArray fleet. A new “click-to-quote” feature is available at the completion of the hardware simulation, allowing you to send the simulation results to Pure and to schedule a call with a sales representative.
We added a significant new feature to the Workload Planner for new application-deployment panning. It includes specific workloads—Epic, Clarity, Windows File Systems, SAP, Zerto, VDI, VSI, Oracle, Exchange, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, SAP HANA, MySQL, or custom workloads using Pure1 Meta—to aggregate anonymized application telemetry data from all over the world. This gives infrastructure teams access to workload-specific characteristics that they can customize to remove the guesswork from deploying new applications or migrating existing applications to a FlashArray environment.
To support our growing Pure-as-a-Service subscriptions, we also updated Pure1 to include a subscription viewer. This provides you with a single view of your storage subscriptions, including capacity and renewal status, support contract status, and expiration for each of your Pure Storage arrays—by name, model number, and version—with the added option to start the support renewal process.
For those of you also using VMware, we enhanced our Virtual Machine Analytics capabilities to report on capacity down to each partition used by a particular VM. It shows the capacity churn across datastores and VMs, allowing you to really see where your storage is being consumed. We also added the ability to classify VMs based on how they’re deployed: VMware vVols, NFS, and vSAN datastores.
As-a-Service Consumption Models Provide Better Choice
Pure as-a-Service continually delivers its pay-as-you-go model, allowing you to realize the benefits of Pure’s hardware and software in on-premises, colocation, or public-cloud deployments. This model improves the economic, operational, and customer experiences of the data center with benefits normally reserved for the cloud. We’ve continued to offer short-term contracts with minimum commitments to meet your unique financial needs, allowing you to preserve cash and reduce any risks normally attributed to technical debt.
What’s better than free? From 2019/2020, Pure as-a-Service began offering new customers either their first three or six months free, based on contract length, to provide cost relief during initial migration periods. Integrated with Pure1, we made enhancements to simplify your ability to view and manage your subscriptions.
Partnerships Backed by Seamless Integrations
VMware: In April 2020, VMware released vSphere v7, which included support for NVMe-oF. As a VMware Design Partner, we’re aligned on releasing integrations and support for vVols with Site Recovery Manager and support for VMware Cloud Foundation and Tanzu with the release of vSphere 7.
Cisco: As a Cisco Preferred Solution Provider, we released (August 2019) SmartConfig to automate day 1 deployment and configuration of FlashStack™ based on Cisco and Pure Storage best practices. In early 2020, Cisco released support for NVMe-oF, which allows for lower latency and higher data-center density with FlashArray//X. In March 2020, we were the first storage vendor to integrate with Cisco Intersight, enabling cloud-based management of FlashArray from within the Cisco UCS management interface.
Microsoft: Pure released integrations with Microsoft Windows Admin Center and SQL Server Management Studio Extension at Microsoft Ignite 2019 to simplify management of FlashArray from native Microsoft Windows and SQL Server management tools. We also introduced Pure Cloud Block Store™ for Azure (beta), our software-defined storage product for Azure cloud. This new product enables a consistent storage experience both on-premises and in Azure cloud for disaster recovery, Dev/Test, and production workloads.
SAP: Pure was recognized as a platinum level SAP Global Technology Alliance Partner this March. FlashArray was certified for SAP HANA, providing significant value to customers and service providers running mission-critical SAP workloads. FlashArray’s DirectMemory Cache, based on Intel Optane technology as a warm data management tier, enhances the SAP HANA integration by providing an up to 10% reduction in latency and throughput, as well as a substantial savings in SAP HANA licensing, by reducing the cluster size without impacting the speed of data access.
2021 Will Bring More
Despite the challenges we all faced in 2020, Pure has achieved tremendous success. We released more than 12 new features, expanded the FlashArray portfolio, and witnessed incredible customer and community growth. We owe our success and continued momentum to the millions of Puritans, tech rockstars, and FlashArray fans who continue with us on our journey. At 11 years and counting, we certainly couldn’t have done this without you.
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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays, By Analysts Santhosh Rao, Roger W. Cox, Joseph Unsworth, Jeff Vogel, Published 30, November 2020.
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