En garde! Touché! Sorry for the cliché! Pure Storage flashes its blade

Can Pure Storage keep up its booming growth as FlashBlade, its Big Data flash box, becomes generally availabile?

FlashBlade is its second solid-state storage product line following the primary data-storing FlashArray. It's aimed at fast access to unstructured data for analytics and so forth, with Pure mentioning data-intensive areas like machine learning, genomics, life sciences, gaming, media and entertainment. It has a scale-out design.

This is scale-out and/or accelerated filer territory, with Dell EMC's all-flash DSSD array targeting the high-end performance area of this. We haven't, for example, heard of DSSD being used in media and entertainment, and suspect its $/TB cost might preclude that; it's only a suspicion, though.

We would position Toshiba's FlashMatrix and WDC SanDisk's InfiniFlash array below FlashBlade. The InfiniFlash all-flash box is sold through IBM, Tegile, CloudBytes, and Nexenta channels.

FlashBlade was announced in March 2016, and entered restricted or "Directed Availability" in July. Now it can be sold broadly by Pure Storage channel partners worldwide, and Pure has supplied customer comments extolling its shiny new box:

• Professor Anthony D Joseph, a core faculty member of UC Berkeley's Center for Computational Biology (CCB), said that with FlashBlade "our findings positively impact public health faster than ever before. If a doctor knows exactly which treatment to prescribe a patient based on that patient's genetic makeup, that patient is going to recover sooner. It's that simple."
• In the F1 Grands Prix area Matt Harris, head of IT for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, said: "FlashBlade provides the high-performance infrastructure required to run realtime analytics platforms that help give us that championship edge."
• Xerex Bueno, CTO of SaaS provider CUProdigy, said: "With FlashBlade we believe that the density and amount of customer information we can get per tile in our data centre is the best possible."

All good stuff, of course; that's marketing. Now let's see how Pure's channel does with it in the next few quarters. We might suppose it will do better than the FlashMatrix and InfiniFlash ones. ®