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Flash man: Headcount at my company is UP not DOWN

Also Pure Storage just aren't as good

Nimbus Data CEO Tom Isakovich disagreed with parts of our story about his firm's HALO software upgrade.

"Your article today is factually incorrect," he wrote, before bringing up perceived weaknesses in the flash array from rival Pure Storage. Pure's CEO Scott Dietzen, contacted for comment, naturally took issue with much of that - of which more below.

First of all, Nimbus is not suffering a staff drain, said Isakovich, angered by our mentioning that specific staffers had moved to Pure. He went on:

  1. Nimbus Data’s company headcount has doubled in the last 12 months, not shrunk as you have claimed. [We didn't - we reported on people leaving the firm. We're quite happy to believe that they were swiftly replaced and more personnel hired on top. - Ed]
  2. Nimbus Data’s partner event in London last month had more than 30 enthusiastic partners in attendance, standing-room-only, all which subsequently signed with Nimbus Data as their flash vendor of choice. [We said nothing at all about this.]
  3. As of today, Nimbus Data has a team of six in the UK alone, a doubling of the organization over just the past 90 days. [Or this.]
  4. As of today, Nimbus Data has over 40 partners and three distributors in the UK alone, all of which aligned with Nimbus Data in a mere six months [or this].

He added: "Meanwhile your recent article on Pure Storage contains numerous errors, which I encourage you to research and confirm for yourself." He claimed:

  1. Pure does not support NAS (NFS/CIFS). In fact, search their website for NFS and no entries appear.
  2. Pure does not support replication. Again refer to their website.
  3. Pure has absolutely no way to scale-out the controllers.
  4. Pure can barely even scale capacity (just 11 TB to be precise – two 5.5 TB shelves). Again, see their website.
  5. Pure has a single-point-of-failure: the Infiniband card that links both controllers; just one card, with active components.

Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen took issue with this list and responded, saying:

Rather than rebut each individual product-related comment, I will say that the reason you won't find mention of NAS on our website is because that's not a segment of the market we've elected to pursue at this time.

We are currently focused on the block storage opportunity, and are confident we have the most compelling all-flash offering in this space. As far as our scalability goes, we are currently shipping well larger systems than 11TB to customers around the world, systems that accommodate 100-plus TB of user data. So that comment is incorrect, as is the last comment about a single point of failure due to the Infiniband card.

In general, Dietzen said:

"We can say we're thrilled to have attracted the world class team that we have, and thrilled that our business is growing so explosively."

Dietzen offers this advice to customers thinking about all-flash storage:

"No doubt the marketing noise within all-flash storage will continue to increase in the months and years ahead. Given this froth, customers and partners should do their own hands on due diligence before they buy. We launched our "Love Your Storage" money-back guarantee to encourage precisely this sort of scrutiny of our flash array product, and we invite head-to-head comparisons with the alternative choices." ®

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