Why the Time is Now to Transform Your Business with Flash

Servers and networks get relentlessly

faster and cheaper with Moore’s Law, and

as a result, are now thousands of times

faster than the mechanical disk storage to

which they connect. From the perspective

of today’s processor, the fastest hard drive

appears slower than tape did twenty years

ago. As a result of this growing mismatch,

much of consumer technology has already

transitioned from disk to flash memory: flash

powers our smartphones and tablets, and

underlies high performance websites such as

Google, Facebook, and Apple.

Why then is business still shackled to

mechanical disk? Until recently, flash has

been substantially more expensive than

disk, and largely incompatible with existing

enterprise computing architectures. Pure

Storage was founded to overcome these

hurdles by delivering all flash storage that

preserves investment in applications and

infrastructure, and costs less than the

mechanical alternatives. Accomplishing

this required a holistic rethink of enterprise

storage, and yielded a product radically better

in every dimension: 10X faster, 10X more

power & space efficient, 10X simpler, and

more reliable, but who’s CapEx is comparable

to the disk alternatives, and who’s OpEx is

radically better.

3

All-Flash Arrays: The Evolution of Storage & Flash

5

Transitioning to the All-Flash Enterprise

6

Solving the Flash for All Economics

7

Flash for All Applications

8

The Business Beneits of Flash for All

9 Flash for All: It’s Time

10 From the Gartner Files: Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2013

15 About Pure Storage

Featuring research from

Flash for AllHow every business can improve eficiency, compete better, and

deliver compelling user experiences with lash

Scott Dietzen

CEO

2

Transitioning to an all-flash enterprise enables three important

business benefits:

1. Achieve business results that are not even imaginable with

disk. Legacy technologies introduce bottlenecks in the compute

architecture, but their real bottleneck is they constrain the

imagination of your business architects. They constrain what you

think is possible: how much data you can analyze, how fast you can

respond to a customer, how quickly you can launch a new service?

Moving to flash can speed your existing revenue-driving business

applications, but it will also unlock a whole new level of exploration

by your innovators into the art of the possible. What will your

business achieve with flash?

2. Deliver differentiated, compelling end-user experiences.

Computing and IT is fundamentally a tool in service to an ultimate

end-user, whether that end-user be a consumer using a mobile

device, a trader consuming real-time financial analysis, or a

doctor logging patient information into a VDI terminal. Computing

is about enabling people to feel, enjoy, and achieve. Whatever

your business, you compute to deliver compelling end-user

experiences, and flash is key to taking those experiences to the

next level.

3. Achieve new levels of efficiency in the storage factory. As

enterprise IT evolves to private cloud architectures, it is increasingly

clear that storage is a key platform service in the private

cloud. Moving to flash is a critical initiative to achieve more

efficient storage service delivery. Flash combines fundamental

improvements (10X less power, 10X less rack space, 10X less

power/cooling) with a new level of administrative simplicity that

allows for a dramatically less expensive storage factory.

Pure Storage has cracked the code on how to deliver an all-flash

storage platform that enables flash for all: flash for all applications,

flash for all customer types/sizes, and flash for all budgets. But the

real story is you: what you will achieve by going all flash. We hope

this paper will help set you down the path of discovering your all-flash

future.

Source: Pure Storage

Flash for All is published by Pure Storage. Editorial content supplied by Pure Storage is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part

of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2013 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s

endorsement of Pure Storage’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been

obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company,

and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research

is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding

Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website, http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/ombudsman/omb_guide2.jsp.

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:

The Results: The City of Davenport saw 6.5-to-1 data reduction as well as linked clones replication from 45 minutes down to two. Average write latency went from 20ms to 1ms, and read from 17ms to 0.5ms.

The Business Benefit: Because they decided to use virtual desktops instead of buying physical desktops, the FlashArray has already paid for itself – within their budget. And there’s still extra capacity to take on additional workloads.

“Anyone who is going to do a VMware View deployment should put their linked clones on a Pure Storage array. It’s essential.” Cory Smith, Network Administrator

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:

The Results: After deploying the Pure Storage FlashArray, ARcare has achieved 5-to-1 data reduction and has reduced their data footprint by 79%.

The Business Benefit: ARcare experienced immediate performance improvements across all applications after migrating to the Pure Storage FlashArray. Latency issues were eliminated with sub-millisecond response rates for virtual desktop users despite any additional network or application activity, including patching.

“I can’t stress the FlashArray at all; it can handle anything I throw at it.” Adam Ausburn, Network & Virtualization Administrator

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most vendors retrofitted 5-10% flash storage

into their architectures to attempt to speed-

up the disk arrays via caching & tiering

technologies.

While flash caching/tiering provided

some noticeable improvement, the hybrid

flash/disk array model also suffered

from increased complexity and inherently

variable performance: users simply didn’t

know whether a given storage IO would be

serviced at flash speed (<1 millisecond) or

disk speed (5-10 milliseconds). So ultimately

the storage industry realized that to make it to

the next plateau of performance, you simply

had to go “all flash,” and you really needed to

design an array from the ground-up for flash

memory, hence the birth of all-flash arrays.

In parallel, a similar evolution was happening

in the flash world. Flash entered enterprise

computing in the form of PCIe flash cards

and flash SSDs, both of which were good for

accelerating a single application in a single

server. While this was helpful for some point

Flash storage and disk storage have been

on different evolution paths, but they have

converged to create the ideal storage

platform for enterprise computing.

Disk storage has been the dominant storage

platform for the enterprise for the better

part of 50 years, but spinning disk has run

into a fundamental problem: it gets bigger

every year on a capacity basis, but it doesn’t

get any faster (limited by the fundamental

rotational physics), so it actually gets slower

every year on a performance-per-capacity

basis. As a result, the storage industry has

been desperately enhancing disk-based

storage arrays for the past decade to try

and keep up with the continuous compute

advances driven by Moore’s Law. In the

early 2000s the dominant strategy was

“more disk” – or wide striping, where more

and more disk spindles were thrown inside

arrays to improve performance. As this

became clearly inefficient and unworkable,

flash storage entered the scene as a method

for adding performance to disk arrays, so

All-Flash Arrays: The Evolution of Storage & Flash

applications, enterprises are fundamentally

built on consolidated, clustered, and resilient

application architectures leveraging shared

storage, and the server-by-server approach

to early flash had limited appeal. Flash

devices then grew into “Flash Appliances”

– slightly larger (1-20TB) flash devices that

could be networked and had additional

resiliency, enabling them to be shared by

small compute clusters. But these flash

appliances lacked the rich software layer

that was common in enterprise disk arrays:

complete resilience through RAID and

HA, snapshots, replication, encryption,

data reduction technologies, and deep

application integration. They were also

very expensive – often costing 5X the cost

of comparable enterprise disk arrays. And

so the next natural step in the evolution was

clear: marry the “all flash” performance,

space, and efficiency advantages of the

flash appliances with the enterprise-quality

features of the disk arrays to build a product

from the ground up that combines the best

of both worlds: the All-Flash Array.

4

The results are stunning: All-Flash Arrays

represent an order-of-magnitude gain in the

key dimensions that are used to evaluate

storage – performance, size/rack space,

power consumption, and management

simplicity. They help storage keep pace with

compute by moving from 10s of thousands of

IOPS of performance to 100s of thousands,

and reduce latency from 5-10ms to <1 ms.

They take the advantages of early flash

products, but deliver them in an array form-

factor that achieves the resiliency, scale, and

simplicity that allows enterprises to easily

adopt them in their existing infrastructure.

And the final, and perhaps most important

break-through has been price. By marrying

advances in consumer-grade MLC flash

memory with inline data reduction

technologies like deduplication and

compression, all-flash array vendors like

Pure Storage have been able to break the

price barrier, delivering all-flash arrays for

the same cost or even lower than legacy disk

architectures on a $/usable GB basis.

In the end the big winners in this transition

are enterprise storage customers and end

users. After living with incremental advances

in disk storage for decades that saw

compute improvements fundamentally out-

strip storage to the point where storage is the

bottleneck in most environments, customers

can now unlock a 10X improvement in the

storage architecture at constant or even

reduced spend without having to go through

a massive upheaval in their infrastructures.

Going through this transition will create

massive opportunities for improving their

operational efficiency, and accomplishing

things in business that simply weren’t

possible before.

Source: Pure Storage

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:

The Results: TripPak attained 6-to-1 data reduction of servers, Citrix XenDesktops, Oracle, and SQL Databases running on vSphere 5.0.

The Business Benefit: With the FlashArray in place, TripPak customers are experiencing lightning-fast response times from their high workload database queries. TripPak IT is using less power, less space, and increasing performance by 10X, while their environment has plenty of headroom to grow as they move more workloads over to the FlashArray.

“The FlashArray is a storage guy’s dream. We love the design!” David Abbott, Sr. Infrastructure Engineer

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:

The Results: Siemens saw 6.7-to-1 data reduction after implementing the FlashArray. They also saw 4X improvement per instance in VM provisioning time.

The Business Benefit: Prior to migrating to the Pure Storage FlashArray, Siemens was having issues with scalability. Now, as they grow, they can easily – and non-disruptively – scale their storage to meet the demands of their diverse set of engineering, QA, support, training, and customer demo needs.

“Even with 50 VMs running all day on one LUN, we’re not even pushing the storage.” Bryan Bond, Sr. Systems Administrator

5

Transitioning to the All-Flash Enterprise

Now that All-Flash Arrays have emerged as the evolution of storage,

most enterprises will move to a model where their core business

runs on flash within 5 years. For some of the most aggressive

this will mean that they will literally eliminate disk, as the leading

enterprises, consumer web companies are increasingly doing. For

others, that will mean that disk will still be used, but the large majority

of applications that power the business will run on an all-flash

architecture. In the end whether you actually remove every spinning

disk is beside the point: flash will power the apps that drive your

business.

In addition to the advent of the All-Flash Array, the other force

powering this change is the progression down the virtualization

journey that enterprises are taking towards private cloud

architectures. As organizations moved to virtualize their servers,

a common model was to implement “tiers of storage” – multiple

combinations of slow disk, fast disk, tape, and sometimes even flash

to deliver different service levels and storage costs for applications.

This model worked fine for early virtualization, where consolidation

was limited and where most deployments were application islands.

As virtualization pushes towards the true private cloud, deeper

infrastructure consolidation starts to happen – where large compute

farms share resources with 100s or 1,000s of heterogeneous

applications. Enabling this model requires a higher-performance

storage tier capable of mixing workloads and delivering predictable

service levels for all apps, but also fits an economic profile that makes

widespread deployment possible.

As such, we see the storage architecture of tomorrow being highly

streamlined, simplified, and consolidated into two main tiers: a

“performance tier” for business applications served by All-Flash

Arrays, and a “capacity tier” served by SATA disk, serving 2nd/3rd tier

applications, content farms, backups, and archiving. Virtualization

provides the perfect abstraction layer to enable movement of

workloads between these tiers based upon changing needs.

Source: Pure Storage

6

The technical reasons for moving to all-flash are clear, but there

has been one final (and perhaps more important) inhibitor to flash

memory adoption in the enterprise: simple economics. With flash

media historically 5-10X more expensive than disk, most enterprises

just couldn’t afford to move to all-flash broadly.

This is where some of the innovations that Pure Storage has

pioneered in the all-flash array space shine: put simply we make

all-flash storage affordable for everyone, and we make it affordable

enough to use broadly across your enterprise. By combining low-

cost consumer grade flash memory (which we make enterprise

resilient through our FlashArray architecture and Purity software) with

inline data reduction technologies (deduplication, compression, thin

provisioning), we are able to reduce the cost of 100% flash memory

to under the cost of spinning disk on a straight CapEx basis. Then, if

you are willing to consider the OpEx savings (maintenance, power,

cooling, data center rack space, and management cost), we

are able to reduce the cost even further to the point where most

deployments realize substantial savings, as shown below.

While these results are impressive and justify the all-flash storage

purchase on their own, for most customers the real advantage

comes in the up-stream impact to their business. What value do

you put on getting a competitive advantage in the marketplace?

On delivering better service for your customers? On generating

higher customer loyalty? On happier end users? On being able to

analyze substantially more data to make better-informed business

decisions? Downstream costs will help you justify the move to

flash, but the up-stream business benefits will be the real reward.

Source: Pure Storage

Solving the Flash for All Economics

7

7

The early days of flash deployments were

largely centered on accelerating point

database applications where storage IO

was the key bottleneck. Now that Pure

Storage has broken the price barrier for

flash, all-flash storage is suitable for a wide

range of enterprise applications.

Across the Pure Storage user base, we see

three main use cases where customers are

adopting flash. Because data types vary in

deduplication potential and compressibility,

data reduction rates vary slightly across

these use cases, ranging from 2-4X for

databases which are compression-driven,

up to greater than 10X for VDI which

achieves very high deduplication results.

Server Virtualization is a key driver of flash

adoption. As workloads consolidate and

virtualization ratios top 50+ VMs/server, the

IO stream down to storage becomes highly

random. Traditional disk architectures just

don’t handle random IO well, making disk

the key bottleneck in expanding server

virtualization. To make matters worse,

virtualization deployments often start with

the “easiest” VMs, so as customers expand

to virtualized Tier 1 applications, the IO

bottleneck gets worse. Flash is the answer

to keep on the path to enterprise-wide

virtualization.

Databases and Analytics are some of

the most obvious fits for flash. Storage

IO is often the key wait time in enabling

databases to process more transactions,

or analytic queries to complete faster. In

addition to processing more transactions

and analyzing more data at lower storage

cost, moving to flash storage often enables

massive consolidation at the application tier.

Since each database instance can now do

more work, enterprises can typically reduce

instances, leading to direct cost savings

in terms of both hardware and database

license savings.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is perhaps

the perfect use case for flash. It requires

a very high level of performance as disk

IO is directly in the end-user experience

path, it drives highly random IO due to the

high consolidation, and cost is at a very

high premium, since VDI ROI cases are

fragile at best. Leveraging all-flash storage

provides the absolute best end-user desktop

experience, and since VDI is one of the most

reducible workloads in the data center, the

FlashArray is able to drive the cost of all-flash

VDI to well under the cost of spinning disk.

Source: Pure Storage

Flash for All Applications

8

The Business Benefits of Flash for All

Achieving Business Results that Are Not Even Imaginable with Disk

We have to build our businesses and

compute infrastructures around the tools

we have in a given generation, and the

capabilities and limitations of these tools

define both what we achieve, but on a

more fundamental level, our expectation of

what is possible. Moving to flash will have

an immediate, quantifiable improvement

in your existing business infrastructure:

process more transactions, analyze more

data, answer questions faster: and be

more agile and responsive. But a whole lot

more is possible: results that weren’t even

imaginable when you limited your thinking

to disk.

What that hidden advantage is and

how it turns into revenue will vary widely

depending on your unique business and

industry, but imagine how you’d fare on the

playing field vs. your competition with an all-

flash architecture powering your business.

Imagine taking the storage bottleneck out

of the compute chain, accelerating each of

your core business applications dramatically.

Imagine the levels of analysis possible,

accessing larger data sets with more

complex queries, asking questions and

finding answers in your data that were stuck

inaccessible on disk.

Now imagine if the situation was reversed,

and you choose not to take the path of flash

when one of your key competitors does.

How will it change the dynamics of your

market, and which side of the playing field

do you want to occupy?

Deliver Differentiated, Compelling End-User Experiences for All

Most computing today is done in the

service of some ultimate end-user, typically

either an employee or a customer of your

company. While moving to flash has the

tangible business benefits we discussed

earlier, it also has a dramatic impact on the

experience of users, and happier employees

and end-users are directly connected

to profitable businesses. Now flash for

all enables you to deliver the all-flash

experience to all the end users you serve.

On the employee side, flash for all is about

unlocking the productivity and creativity of

your workforce, and delivering a computing

experience that results in delight vs.

frustration. This has hard-cost elements (less

calls to the help desk, less working around

IT), but the real benefits come in better

empowerment and employee engagement.

For most business, employees are the core,

and the relative cost of empowering your

employees with the absolute best computing

experiences possible pales in comparison

to both what you pay your employees, and

the productivity gain you’ll achieve from

these investments. Delivering anything less

than the all-flash user experience for your

employees just doesn’t make economic or

business sense.

And on the end-user customer side, study

after study has shown a direct link between

customer satisfaction and loyalty to business

profitability and growth. Flash for all

enables you to create new and differentiated

customer experiences. Think: search results

that appear before you finish typing, a world

of information accessible in the palm of

your hand, immersive gaming experiences,

and customer support that is always a step

ahead. How can you win the hearts, minds,

and loyalty of your customers with flash?

Achieve New Levels of Efficiency in the Storage Factory

If you dive into your organization and talk

to folks high and low about storage, you’ll

probably find a disturbing reality:

Your Storage Admins don’t really like

their current storage array. Why is that?

As storage has failed to keep up with the

compute infrastructure, Storage Admins are

often the people stuck in the middle between

increasing business demands, flat budgets,

calls about slow performance. Disk has

simply gotten way too complex over the years,

it is failing to meet the business demands,

and they are left to take the blame and solve

the problem, usually with more disk.

Your CIO doesn’t really like disk storage.

When the CIO looks at the current disk storage

platform and how it is contributing to his/

her objectives (adopting the private cloud,

greening the datacenter, achieving results for

the business), again disk finds itself on the

“red” side of the equation more often than

not. Disk is preventing server virtualization,

sapping too much power in the datacenter,

and holding back the business.

Flash provides an answer to both these

challenges, it is the building block of a

fundamentally more efficient storage

architecture: one that turns Storage Admins

into heroes and gives them time and sanity

back in their days, and one that helps CIOs

meet their annual objectives, helping IT

contribute to the business as opposed to

being a cost center. A transition to flash

has the opportunity to change the storage

equation from one that is a 360° liability to a

technology that enables.

Source: Pure Storage

9

Flash for All: It’s Time

Why Buy Disk?

If you are involved with the process of running, buying, or being an

end user of enterprise storage, we hope this short paper has given

you a window into the opportunity that Flash for All presents to your

business, and maybe you’ll think twice before blindly signing another

storage contract. You have the opportunity to buy storage that can

contribute to the efficiency of your organization, enable a competitive

advantage for your business, and give you the technology to deliver a

compelling all-flash experience for your users. We hope you consider

Pure Storage for your next storage purchase, but most of all we hope

you make the choice to try flash. Once you’ve experienced flash, you’ll

likely never go back.

We’re So Confident in Flash for All, It’s Guaranteed

We’re so confident in the Pure Storage FlashArray that all FlashArray

purchases come with the storage industry’s broadest guarantee:

the Love Your Storage Guarantee. If our storage doesn’t meet our

high promises and your high expectations, you can return it for a

full refund. Read more about the guarantee at purestorage.com/

guarantee.

Source: Pure Storage

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:

The Results: By switching their storage to the Pure Storage FlashArray, Riverview Hospital was able to achieve 8-to-1 data reduction with hundreds of persistent desktops. They increased virtualized SQL database IOPs by 2X, and reduced latency from 2-8ms down to 0.5ms.

The Business Benefit: Through the deployment of end-to-end flash-based storage, Riverview improved the productivity of its caregivers by minimizing delays in accessing patient data.

“Our most important clinical systems now run on Pure.” Jason Pearce, Enterprise Architect

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:

The Results: Yodle achieved a 5-to-1 data reduction of PostgreSQL DB despite entirely new DB at every restore. Through the Pure Storage FlashArray deployment, they were able to virtualize their database environment and add analytics processing to the same environment.

The Business Benefit: By replacing their server and adding a Pure Storage FlashArray, Yodle dropped their rebuild process from 24 to 3 hours for the development environment, and from 7 to one for the analytics rebuild – huge time-savings for their team.

“The biggest surprise was what a dramatic different we saw in build time.” John Merryman, CTO

10

Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2013

From the Gartner Files:

This research details five companies that

provide innovative storage capabilities and/

or contain the costs associated with storage

and its operational management. Gartner

also takes a look back at two vendors that

were profiled in a previous Cool Vendors

report.

Key Findings

• CTERA Networks offers unique, unified

cloud storage integration hardware

and software (including EFSS) within an

expanding partner ecosystem.

• Delphix can significantly help contain

the storage requirements and overall

cost and time associated with reducing

the typical five to 12 full copies of each

production database.

• Panzura addresses the difficult global

file-locking problem with its distributed

file system appliances supporting cloud

storage.

• Pure Storage enhances inexpensive

consumer PC SSDs through flash-

optimized, in-line data reduction and

management software, delivering a

simple, cost-effective, all-flash alternative

to HDD/SSD storage arrays.

• Scality offers software based scale-out

storage with heterogeneous API support

to tackle a variety of big data and cloud

workloads.

Recommendations

• Include CTERA Networks when

implementing an integrated private or

public cloud storage environment to

support branch offices and mobile users.

• Examine Delphix’s solution to deliver

improved database service levels and

capabilities, and as part of a prudent cost

containment and efficiency strategy.

• Evaluate Panzura to implement scalable,

secure global file access and storage

consolidation among multiple sites and to

back up and archive to the cloud.

• Consider Pure Storage when application

workloads demand a cost-effective,

all-flash system solution and can benefit

from in-line data reduction.

• Consider Scality when building scale-out

object storage architectures for cloud

storage and active archiving.

Analysis

This research does not constitute an

exhaustive list of vendors in any given

technology area, but rather is designed to

highlight interesting, new and innovative

vendors, products and services. Gartner

disclaims all warranties, express or implied,

with respect to this research, including any

warranties of merchantability or fitness for a

particular purpose.

What You Need to Know

IT managers often share common goals,

including a need to modernize their storage

infrastructures and improve quality of service

while simultaneously containing costs.

New storage components, solutions and

management tools can help stakeholders

build easier-to-manage, more efficient and

more available storage infrastructures. Many

organizations are evaluating technologies

that will drive efficiency, such as higher-

performing and highly automated storage,

cloud-based solutions, and/or management

products that allow for proactive problem

avoidance and increased resource utilization

and optimization.

This research details five emerging private

vendors that can assist organizations in

meeting their IT modernization and cost

containment initiatives.

CTERA Networks

Palo Alto, CA (www.ctera.com)

Analysis by Gene Ruth

Why Cool: CTERA Networks is a privately

held company that offers cloud storage

gateway and related infrastructure products

to connect datacenters and branch offices

to public or private storage clouds. The

offerings are suitable for small or midsize

businesses (SMB) and enterprise customers

as well as service providers (telcos,

management service providers [MSPs])

and integrators in enabling cloud storage

solutions.

The CTERA Networks offerings address

file sync and share, backup and primary

data delivery using on-premises hardware

optimized to transport data to a public or

private cloud environment. The company

uniquely offers a cost-efficient solution

to support remote and branch office

(ROBO) environments on a large scale.

The lightweight local footprint of a CTERA

Networks storage unit, the elimination

of additional backup software and the

resultant operational simplification make

CTERA Networks an attractive solution for

supporting extensive ROBO environments.

CTERA Networks is positioning itself to

address the quickly expanding cloud storage

integration market with a low-cost solution

and significant array of partnerships. The

partnership ecosystem continues to expand

with native integration of CTERA Networks’

capability into the CISCO Integrated Service

Routers Generation 2 (ISR), integration with

EMC’s Atmos, IBM’s General Parallel File

System (GPFS), Hitachi Data Systems’ Hitachi

Content Platform (HCP), Dell DX, OpenStack

Swift and many relationships with telcos and

MSPs in Europe and the U.S. The addition of

a file sync and share capability enhances

the value proposition and provides a unique

competitive advantage, which dovetails

nicely with the cloud storage paradigm and

11

11

file collaboration opportunities. Additionally,

CTERA Networks also provides cloud storage

orchestration and automation software to

enable service providers providers to deliver

multitenant public cloud storage services

similar to Amazon S3.

Challenges: CTERA Networks is a relatively

new company, founded in 2008 and

competing in an intensely active segment of

the market. Their presence is growing in the

U.S. with SMB customers (from a revenue

perspective) and in Europe with a number

of large telco and communication service

provider (CSP) partners. As a small but fast-

growing company, risk exists that CTERA

Networks may struggle to adequately deliver

in a timely manner to its diverse customer

set. In addition, the cloud storage and

enterprise file synchronization and sharing

(EFSS) markets are nascent and, thus,

customers should be cautious and expect

that many of the participating vendors will

be acquired or fail, with only a few vendors

remaining independent over the next five

years.

Who Should Care: CTERA Networks should

be of interest to any IT organization that is

looking for a cost-effective unified solution

to support a public or private cloud storage

environment with file sync and share

capability behind their own firewall or as a

branded service provider to support ROBO

environments and mobile users.

Delphix

Menlo Park, CA (www.delphix.com)

Analysis by Dave Russell

Why Cool: Delphix’s Agile Data Platform

is a software product that can significantly

speed up operations and the amount of

time it takes to test production databases,

run reporting and analytics and refresh data

from days to minutes, all while applying

compression and even avoiding the need

for deduplication (since no redundant blocks

are ever copied) to shrink the footprint

of required storage. Delphix’s database

virtualization solution can dramatically

reduce the number of physical copies of a

single database, thus significantly improving

capacity utilization by decreasing the

amount of storage and power consumed.

Perhaps of even greater interest is the

very fast availability (restore) and test and

development support that the solution can

provide.

Currently, Delphix supports Oracle

Databases (including those running

on Exadata) and Microsoft SQL Server

databases, with plans to add Postgres and

Sybase in 2013 and MySQL in 2014. The Agile

Data Platform makes a one-time full copy

of the application’s blocks of data onto any

storage device, applying compression that

typically yields a 2.7x space reduction. Then,

periodic log shipping and block change

tracking keeps the Delphix copy updated.

Pointer redirection allows for any point in

time (APIT) recovery and can utilize a single

copy to rapidly serve up space-efficient full

instances of database images for testing

or recovery in minutes versus hours. The

product installs as a virtual appliance

without any agents, sits out of band and

provides IP-based replication to another

Delphix instance if desired.

Delphix has been in business since 2008,

with over $45 million in funding. It has been

shipping product since 2011, with over 100

customers including Comcast, Facebook,

Proctor and Gamble and Informatica. The

company claims over 100 employees,

with engineers that previously worked on

the Oracle Sun ZFS filesystem, Oracle’s

Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Data Guard,

VMware’s replication solution and EMC’s

Avamar. Delphix has partnerships with

SAP and system integrator Deloitte, which

includes SAP selling the solution through its

5,000-plus person sales force.

Challenges: Any emerging vendor typically

raises some degree of concern for an IT

organization, and this will likely be very

much the case for a provider that typically

targets very large enterprises and has an

average transaction price of over $250,000.

Organizations will want to perform due

diligence to get comfortable with a solution

that connects with production applications.

Other challenges are that database

administrators will need to be comfortable

with the product having the credentials to

make periodic calls to the database and

the future concept of database vendor(s)

potentially adding virtualization and data

reduction capability natively in its product.

Who Should Care: While Delphix

predominantly targets the CIO or vice

president of infrastructure and application,

Gartner believes that directors of storage

and storage administrators that are

responsible for providing database capacity

and availability should examine Delphix’s

solution as a means of improving service

levels through reduced provisioning times

and as part of a prudent cost containment

and efficiency strategy.

Panzura

Campbell, CA (www.panzura.com)

Analysis by Pushan Rinnen

Why Cool: Founded in July 2008 in San

Jose, CA, with a total venture funding of $33

million, Panzura offers global distributed file

system appliances with multisite global file

locking and global deduplication, local file

pinning, and cloud storage integration. The

company has gained market traction since

product launch with over 100 customers by

the end of 2012, 50% of which are multi-

billion-dollar organizations.

The Panzura architecture is primarily

designed to build a private network

in conjunction with public clouds. The

Quicksilver Cloud Storage Controllers are

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a series of virtual and physical network-

attached storage (NAS) appliances that have

solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard drives

for local cache (up to 36TB raw today) to

store the most frequently accessed data,

while pushing the majority of infrequently

accessed data to the private or public cloud.

The file-locking mechanism embedded in

its global namespace solves the problem

of global cache coherency among multiple

sites and can scale better than Microsoft’s

DFS. Panzura’s primary use case is global

content access and cross-geo project

sharing by consolidating NAS devices and

local file servers. Because all sites see the

same file system and site controllers can be

added to the same network transparently,

the solution can speed up global workflow

process and make the distributed storage

infrastructure more efficient. The Panzura

solution is also used by customers to back

up and archive data to the cloud, because

Panzura supports high-throughput capability

for Symantec’s NetBackup and IBM’s Tivoli

Storage Manager, as well as archiving

tools such as Atempo Digital Archive and

Symantec Enterprise Vault.

The Panzura solution supports most major

cloud storage providers at the back end

such as Amazon, Nirvanix, Google, as well

as EMC’s Atmos-based cloud providers and

public clouds from Dell, HP and IBM. Most

of these partners also resell the Panzura

solution, which offers AES-256 encryption

for data at rest and TLS for data in flight

and, with its FIPS 140-2 government security

certification, has gained several large

federal government customers. Panzura’s

other customers include companies from the

media/entertainment, healthcare, financial

services and research and education fields.

Challenges: Panzura faces the challenge

of debunking the common perception that

cloud storage is only for small businesses

and small workloads. It also needs to

expand its ecosystem by adding more

support for on-premises applications.

When Panzura is used to support traditional

applications such as backup, it may have

compatibility issues, resulting in certain

application functions not working properly.

On the global file access front, Panzura lacks

the mobile device support, which is offered

by file sync and share services. The company

needs to expand its ecosystem by adding

more independent software vendor (ISV)

support in the backup and archiving arena.

Who Should Care: Panzura should appeal

to midsize to large organizations that want

to implement private or hybrid cloud storage

to consolidate multisite file storage, offer

more effective project and data sharing,

and provide backup and archiving to the

inexpensive public cloud.

Pure Storage

Mountain View, CA (www.purestorage.com)

Analysis by Joseph Unsworth and John

Monroe

Why Cool: Pure Storage was founded in

2009 on the premise of building an in-

line, flash-optimized deduplication and

compression software architecture around

relatively inexpensive PC SSDs to deliver a

cost-effective SSD appliance. Pure Storage

leverages the commodity multilevel cell

(MLC) SSD form factor in its arrays, today

sourcing SSDs from leading PC SSD supplier

Samsung; however, Pure’s innovation is

centered around their core competency in

software.

Pure Storage has over 30 patents from areas

such as deduplication, flash management

and resiliency, which are all critical elements

when solely relying on flash memory

technology for persistent storage in data

center environments. Pure Storage boasts

flash-specific software features with the

most interesting being in-line deduplication/

compression typically at a rate of 5-to-

1, high-availability with nondisruptive

upgrades, snapshots and replication that

represent minimal overhead on system

performance and latency. With system

price-points ranging around $10/GB for

usable capacity and Pure Storage’s strategy

of enhancing the most capable, cost-

effective PC grade SSD, they have distanced

themselves from the challenges of flash

hardware management, opting instead to

rely on their core competencies in software.

Pure Storage has raised $95 million in

aggregate, including its latest series-D

funding in 2012. This funding ensures

financial stability in the near-term and

the ability to scale in a dynamic, ultra-

competitive market that is still in its infancy.

Pure Storage has over 200 customer wins,

a testament to not only their software but

the simplicity with which it can be integrated

within existing storage architectures.

Challenges: Pure Storage’s greatest

challenge will be articulating its value

proposition clearly and effectively as a

startup in a landscape fraught with hype

and confusion disseminated by a crowd of

new and traditional storage array vendors.

Pure Storage does not have the fastest nor

largest capacity system (up to 40TB per

system) in the market, but it is the software

differentiation and optimization selling

points that will need to be reinforced along

with customer wins. This will be particularly

important since Pure Storage is relying only

on value-added resellers (VARs) and reseller

partnerships as a path to market.

Who Should Care: Data center professionals

who demand higher storage platform

performance supported by capable

data management software features.

The application workload demand and

complexity will dictate the need for such

solutions, especially in highly virtualized

environments such as virtual desktop

infrastructures (VDIs), front-end Web

indexing, online transaction processing

(OLTP) databases, data warehouses and

high-performance computing applications.

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Scality

San Francisco, CA (www.scality.com)

Analysis by Arun Chandrasekaran and Alan

Dayley

Why Cool: Scality is a venture-backed,

privately held company headquartered

in Silicon Valley and an R&D team in

France that offers scale-out, software-

based storage that can potentially deliver

massive scalability, high availability and

data protection at lower costs. While

Scality’s primary focus has been on the

object storage space, the vendor has an

aggressive road map for unified storage

with block and scale-out file system

capabilities targeting enterprise workloads

that need high performance.

Scality’’s RING Organic Storage topology

is based on a peer-to-peer architecture,

which means that there are no master

nodes and no single point of failure. Both

data and metadata is distributed across

the nodes in a shared-nothing model with

parallel infrastructure and operations (I/O)

paths. The architecture provides near-

linear performance aggregation, allowing

customers to achieve incremental capacity

and performance gains at a lower cost.

By packaging multiple storage nodes and

I/O daemons at a server level, and due to

its unified storage architecture, Scality is

able to potentially target more versatile and

performance-oriented workloads that are

beyond the purview of many object storage

vendors.

Scality offers simple software replication

and configurable erasure coding that can

significantly reduce storage overheads,

provide self-healing and improve data

rebuild times, which may improve costs,

availability and manageability on a PB scale.

Given the fragmented nature of APIs in the

object storage space, Scality has taken

a more neutral approach by supporting

APIs from Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift

and CDMI, apart from its proprietary API.

This heterogeneous API support will be a

critical need for customers planning hybrid

cloud storage implementations. Scality’s

integration work with Apache Hadoop and

OpenStack expands its addressable market

opportunity although it faces significant

competition from more-established vendors

in each of these initiatives.

Challenges: Scality is in direct competition

not only with other object storage vendors,

many of whom have been around for a

longer time, but also with large unified

storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp.

Hence, Scality faces huge barriers to entry

posed by the significant R&D, marketing

prowess and deep relationships that the

incumbent storage vendors possess.

Additionally, Scality has a distributed team

with R&D based in France and sales,

marketing and operations in the U.S.,

which has the potential to affect time to

market and possibly create cultural gaps.

While there has been a lot of buzz about

“software-defined storage” of late, Scality’s

software form factor is an inherently difficult

value proposition to sell in an industry

where storage is normally associated with

hardware, which needs a very different

distribution, support and sales model.

Who Should Care: IT leaders, technical

architects and application owners in

both enterprise and service provider

environments looking for scalable, self-

healing and cost-effective storage for cloud

and big data workloads should consider

Scality. Gartner expects the initial interest

to come from cloud service providers

evaluating software as a service (SaaS)

storage and storage as a service, and

enterprises looking for an active archive

solution.

Where Are They Now?

Nimble Storage

San Jose, CA (www.nimblestorage.com)

Analysis by Arun Chandrasekaran

Why Cool Then: Nimble Storage’s flagship

product is an innovative Internet Small

Computer System Interface (iSCSI) based

storage array that is optimized for flash.

Nimble’s architecture, known as Cache-

Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL),

achieves high write performance by turning

random I/O into sequential I/O. CASL does

this by compressing data into variable-size

blocks and combining them into full stripes

that are written to disks. It then uses SSDs

to cache active data to achieve high read

performance. CASL’s variable block sizes

enable the system to be tuned for different

applications, to support various compression

algorithms and to allow each block to store

additional metadata, such as checksums to

detect bit errors. The product line known as

the CS-Series is addressing the midmarket’s

need to modernize its storage infrastructure,

and its backup and disaster recovery

process.

The CS-Series offers in-line compression

(which applies to primary data and local

and replicated snapshots), thin provisioning,

highly efficient snapshots, flexible replication

and cloning tools, as well as data protection

policies and redundant array of independent

disks (RAID) 6.

Where Are They Now?: When Gartner

profiled Nimble Storage in early 2011, it had

less than $10 million in revenue and the

product was barely six months old. Nimble

has since expanded the product line with

new entry-level and high-end models,

and significantly grown the revenue and

customer footprint. Nimble Storage now

boasts an annual bookings run rate in their

latest fiscal year of more than $100 million

and more than 1,250 customers worldwide,

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making it one of the fastest-growing storage

startups. Employee count has increased

from less than 50 people in early 2011 to

close to 400 employees today. From starting

as a U.S.-centric company, Nimble Storage

has expanded its direct and indirect footprint

in EMEA and Asia/Pacific, with close to 15%

of annual revenue coming from outside the

U.S. Nimble Storage is planning for an initial

public offering (IPO) in late 2013 or early 2014

to raise more capital for business expansion.

Nimble has also forged close partnerships

with vendors such as Cisco, VMware,

Microsoft and CommVault to expand its

addressable use cases by tackling a variety

of workloads such as VDI, Exchange,

SharePoint and Oracle and Microsoft SQL

Server databases.

Despite this tremendous growth, Nimble

still faces significant challenges. Apart

from viability concerns that most startup

vendors encounter, Nimble’s product

line is still narrowly focused on a few use

cases and there is still work to be done in

bridging the channel and ISV partnership

gaps. Additionally, Nimble is focused only

on iSCSI protocol, when growth in NAS is

far outstripping the growth in storage area

networks (SANs).

Who Should Care: Midsize organizations

looking for flash-optimized storage for

workloads such as Oracle Database, SQL

Server database, SharePoint and VDI should

include Nimble Storage in their shortlist.

Nimble’s products offer the promise of

eliminating the complexity of managing

separate primary, backup and disaster

recovery processes and infrastructures while

delivering performance enhancements

based on a flash-optimized architecture.

StorSimple

Santa Clara, CA (www.storsimple.com)

Analysis by Arun Chandrasekaran and

Stanley Zaffos

Why Cool Then: StorSimple Cloud Storage

Controller is an IP storage gateway that

behaves as an iSCSI storage system that

uses public cloud storage as a storage tier.

Instead of destaging data from cache to

back-end storage, it destages data into the

cloud after it deduplicates and encrypts

the data. From a storage perspective, it is a

disaggregated system with everything but

back-end storage in the appliance. From a

network perspective, it is a WAN optimization

controller (WOC) supporting public or private

cloud-distributed storage.

Internally, the StorSimple Storage Controller

uses a weighted storage layout approach,

data is broken into “chunks” that are

analyzed and weighted based on frequency

of use. SSD capacity is split between a linear

store and a deduplicated store. Data in the

linear store is not deduplicated and holds

the hottest data. The deduplicated store, as

its name suggests, holds deduplicated but

unencrypted data and is used to expand

the usable capacity of the controller. When

working, set management algorithms

determine that data should be destaged to

the cloud, it is encrypted and then moved

from SSD and SAS layers to low-cost cloud

storage infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)

providers such as Amazon Web Services

(AWS) and Microsoft Windows Azure.

StorSimple provides block-level snapshots,

enabling recovery point objectives and

backups not generally associated with

a cloud IaaS infrastructure. Although

there were numerous startups that were

developing similar on-site/cloud hybrid

storage approaches, StorSimple was the

first developer to optimize for specific

applications with iSCSI access.

Where Are They Now?: Microsoft acquired

StorSimple for an undisclosed sum in

November 2012, validating StorSimple’s

innovative cloud-integrated storage

strategy. Microsoft’s underlying intention is

to make hybrid cloud storage a reality for

its enterprise and midmarket customers

through a combination of physical and virtual

on-premises appliances. The acquisition

gives Microsoft a significant advantage over

competitors such as Amazon Web Services,

AT&T and Rackspace in targeting Microsoft

workloads such as SharePoint and SQL

Server.

Since the acquisition, Microsoft has doubled

the engineering team at StorSimple and

significantly expanded its global reach

beyond North America, with the product now

being available in more than 25 countries.

The acquisition has also helped StorSimple

to rapidly expand its customer base due to

tight integration and joint go-to-market with

Windows Azure for enterprise workloads

such as SharePoint.

Although post acquisition, Microsoft had

indicated that it had no plan to change

the existing integration with other cloud

providers such as Amazon and Rackspace,

we recommend that customers should get

clear direction from Microsoft on its long-

term support plans and feature availability

for non-Microsoft clouds.

Who Should Care: VPs and directors of

IT, storage, and infrastructure of midsize

companies and enterprises planning a cost-

effective hybrid cloud storage environment

with iSCSI access for primary storage,

backup or archiving use cases should

consider StorSimple.

Source: Gartner Research, G00250240,

Dave Russell, Arun Chandrasekaran, Gene Ruth, Joseph

Unsworth, John Monroe, Pushan Rinnen, Alan Dayley,

Stanley Zaffos, 22 April 2013

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Pure Storage, Inc.

Twitter: @purestorage

650 Castro Street, Suite #400

Mountain View, CA 94041

T: 650-290-6088

F: 650-625-9667

Sales: sales@purestorage.com

Support: support@purestorage.com

Media: pr@purestorage.com

General: info@purestorage.com

About Pure Storage