Pure Storage LIVE at Tech Field Day 8: Silicon Valley

Pure Storage discussed their vision and technology at Tech Field Day 8, advocating for the widespread adoption of all-flash storage in the enterprise. The company outlined how their purpose-built solution delivers significant improvements in performance, power consumption, and cost-efficiency over traditional spinning disks and hybrid storage systems. The presentation delved into the limitations of 15K RPM drives and the need to move beyond performance disks by eliminating legacy architectures and leveraging flash memory’s capabilities.

During the presentation, CEO Scott Dietzen explained that while CPU performance has dramatically increased over the past 15 years, disk I/O has lagged, creating a major bottleneck. Current storage systems spend unnecessarily on underperforming disk drives, especially for high-performance demands. Existing all-flash solutions suffer from limiting costs and poor scalability in enterprise environments. The Pure Storage team emphasized solving this with innovation on two fronts: making flash as reliable and available as disk, and reducing the total cost of ownership through aggressive data reduction, dynamic RAID schemes, and flash optimization.

Cofounders John Colgrove and John Hayes, along with flash technologist Michael Cornwell, detailed the architecture behind the Pure Storage solution, including advanced inline data deduplication and compression, RAID 3D for increased reliability, and an operating environment called Purity, which virtualizes flash while supporting real-time data integrity and performance. The system supports sub-millisecond latency and scales across enterprise workloads. The team also showcased a high-density VMware demo, consolidating 800 VMs with high deduplication ratios and exceptional performance, positioning Pure Storage as an enterprise-class contender with innovative software-driven flash storage.