Best-in-Class Storage for Modern Unstructured Data

This quarter, the breakneck growth of Pure FlashBlade® has proven that our unified fast file and object (UFFO) platform is best-in-class storage for modern unstructured data. Roughly four years since its launch, FlashBlade reported its best quarter yet. 

FlashBlade’s trailing historical performance is also bar none: FlashBlade has delivered consistent year-over-year growth each quarter since its introduction. (That’s 18 quarters if you’re counting.) To quantify it further, FlashBlade’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past two and a half years has been 79%.

This is a huge milestone.

When Pure Storage® set out to build FlashBlade in 2013, our goal was to tackle the data challenges of the next decade. As the first vendor to deliver an all-flash storage product for modern unstructured data, our vision—both then and now—was that big, fast, and simple unified storage would enable organizations to do unprecedented things with data they couldn’t do before. 

We knew we were on to something because, when we launched, some people thought we were crazy to build a from-scratch file and object stack. We were even criticized for being ahead of our time. Yet early customer adoption was solid, particularly with organizations doing very innovative things. One of our earliest adopters, an electric car company, improved its software build times to a point where the company ran out of servers long before FlashBlade hit its limits. The company now uses FlashBlade systems for a variety of use cases, from chip design and software development to AI and machine learning.

All this is testament to what our team has accomplished to date. And it validates that our UFFO approach, which we define as a single, unified platform that spans capacity-optimized and performance-optimized file and object workloads—will be the long-term winner in the modern unstructured data market. 

Importantly, our success to date is also a sign of what’s to come. We know that:

FlashBlade’s modern architecture has the innovation lead, with more to come. Companies need modern storage solutions to solve modern data challenges, so they can focus on driving more ambitious outcomes with their data, instead of worrying about whether they have the infrastructure to do so. 

Fast file storage is nothing new, but combining native fast file and fast object in the same system, architecturally speaking, is groundbreaking. And it’s something we view categorically as a new paradigm in modern storage. Our “secret sauce” is the software that leverages all of FlashBlade’s various components as a cohesive system and delivers scalable performance to applications without special configuration. As a result, you can do more with one Pure FlashBlade than you can with two, three, or even four legacy retrofitted products. Modern data requires multiprotocol and multidimensional access with architecture that can deliver performance regardless of the kind of data you have.  

We see strong growth continuing for FlashBlade. Twenty-five percent of companies in the Fortune 100 have chosen FlashBlade. And judging by market demand, we’re providing a differentiated offering. In fact, nearly half of FlashBlade customers in Q3 and year-to-date are new. Some of this decade’s biggest breakthroughs are possible because of FlashBlade’s underlying UFFO architecture—from rocket telemetry to autonomous vehicle design, cancer research, semiconductor design, deep learning, and cybersecurity and ransomware mitigation. (Hundreds of organizations have leveraged FlashBlade for data protection alone in the past six months.) Chances are, if the stakes are high, FlashBlade is nearby.

FlashBlade is a technology that does not exist anywhere else; it is the only one capable of addressing the type of needs we faced.Gabriel Barazer, Technical Director and Co-Founder, Oxeva

The future is fast file and object storage and FlashBlade is built for it. Scalable file and object data—which need both high capacity and (increasingly) high throughput—is trending. The once-popular trend of co-locating data and compute in a “data lake” has turned out to be an architectural dead end. As public- and private-cloud architectures have emerged over the last decade, object storage has become the preferred platform for hosting these enormous volumes of data. As the market further embraces this and other realities of modern data, UFFO storage will become the norm. FlashBlade pioneered this vision and has a multi-year innovation lead, making it well positioned to keep customers at the forefront. 

Pure gives us the credibility as we take on transformative AI initiatives for clients. It proves we understand what it takes to run high-risk, high-reward research projects successfully and cost-effectively.Alexei Gavriline, Co-founder and President, Crater Labs

FlashBlade’s at-scale moment is just over the horizon. As organizations increasingly run and consume Pure as-a-Service™, they also increasingly run and consume FlashBlade—which is great news for Pure. One of Pure’s most interesting wins of the quarter, a global leader in electronic design and computational software, selected FlashBlade through our Pure as-a-Service offering to accelerate its transition to a modern IT environment and to automate its data services. FlashBlade’s performance and ability to consolidate many workloads, combined with its consumption-based model, increases developer productivity and accelerates time to market. 

EDA customers like this are looking to deliver outcomes to their developers. By standardizing on FlashBlade through a Pure as-a-Service unified subscription, you can modernize your software development infrastructure, accelerate time to market, and achieve significant cost savings and flexibility.

FlashBlade is built to meet the mass transition of file and object to flash that we anticipate in the next two to three years. Paired with Pure’s increasing commitment to delivering innovation like FlashBlade as-a-service, it’s go time!