What's behind the curtain at Pure Accelerate? - Dell ...
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What’s behind the curtain at Pure Accelerate?
By Jodey Hogeland | May 2021
Pure’s Accelerate conference, scheduled for this week, promises to “Create Business Breakthroughs,” but
have the last ten years demonstrated that they are moving you forward? Let’s take a closer look at questions
Pure is hoping you don’t ask during Accelerate.
1. Will FlashArray //X ever be able to scale-out?
Pure could be forgiven for having no scale-out option given they released their first product in 2012, but
after all this time, there hasn’t been any change in their basic architecture.
How can Pure insist they “simplify” your datacenter when it requires
multiple, separate islands of capacity and performance?
They’ll tell you Pure1 can help you view multiple arrays, but does it enable you to seamlessly move data
between them? You can use ActiveCluster to move data manually, but how many arrays can be linked
together? What are the limits in what you can move manually and how do you juggle workloads
between separate arrays? When workload dynamics change, does Pure make it easy to rapidly adapt?
Contrast that with PowerStore, which burst onto the scene in May 2020 with enterprise scale-out
capabilities from the start. You can mix and match arrays in a cluster of up to four appliances, with
seamless data mobility between them. You don’t have to upgrade PowerStore controllers to support the
system’s total capacity, so you could put the PowerStore 9000T to work for your most demanding
applications and, as your needs
change, seamlessly move data to
another model without disruption.
The intelligent PowerStore
Manager proactively notifies you
when capacity is running low so
you can perform a few clicks, fix
the issue, and get back to your
day. Don’t take my word for it –
this short demo shows just how
PowerStore makes your life easier.
2. What happened to Purity Run?
Purity Run was introduced in 2017, with Pure claiming they were “Opening FlashArray to run your VMs &
Containers.” They even shipped it with a Linux VM and Docker on the FlashArray so developers could
experiment. A video of an //M20 running a classic video surfaced on YouTube but, customers weren’t
interested in an enterprise system running a game from the early ’90s. It never ran applications
important to an organization’s business, and they dropped the Linux VM shortly afterward. Only a few
storage-specific facilities use it now. What happened to it? They touted the ability to “consolidate a few
servers in a remote location,” but that hasn’t proven to be true with the significant limits Run has.
Perhaps the controller resources for FlashArray just aren’t equipped to deliver on this promise? We’d
love to know more, but Pure doesn’t publish any hardware specs and prevents the public from knowing
what makes up the system. From their perspective, the less you know, the better.
PowerStore’s AppsON delivers unprecedented enterprise-grade flexibility. PowerStore X has a full-
featured VMware hypervisor and storage in a single, active/active, highly-available 2U appliance that
provides the best of converged and traditional three-tier
architectures in a single, compact unit. PowerStore X can directly
run your applications using leading virtualization technology while
simultaneously supporting external servers in the data center. Of
course, Pure now claims there aren’t many use cases for such a
configuration. Still, they acknowledge that “some workloads are
best deployed at the edge, where data is captured.” PowerStore
AppsON is a revolutionary storage feature perfect for those
applications, while Purity Run keeps you at a standstill. Read into
the details here, and you’ll discover it isn’t even remotely
comparable.
3. Where is the innovation?
Pure suggests that they are “shaping the future,” but what have they done for FlashArray customers
lately?
• To get the product out the door quickly, Pure chose a 1990s architecture where a single
controller does most of the work. That’s understandable, but the FlashArray is still that way
more than eight years later! The only “innovation” is putting bigger processors into the system.
The result is an architecture built on non-disruptive upgrades that have
kept customers in a perpetual cycle of 3-year maintenance renewals
• When commodity flash drives didn’t behave the way they should, Pure built their own NVMe
based SSD, the DirectFlash Module, and the Purity operating system manages the flash globally,
even down to the individual NAND die. There is no tiering, so the system can’t effectively
incorporate newer technologies like SCM, except as an additional cache layer.
• Rather than improving the maximum performance of their high-end array, or at least delivering
scale-out, Pure invested in another custom DirectFlash Module using QLC NAND for the bigger
and slower FlashArray //C. Perhaps the FlashArray controller couldn’t keep up with larger TLC
media? Why did they create the //C as a completely separate system? Couldn’t they fold the
QLC into the FlashArray//X and, maybe, transparently tier data to the appropriate technology?
• Pure has talked about the unreliability of QLC. Maybe to have enough extra capacity for QLC
failures, they need huge capacities? Why is the starting capacity for the //C 247 TB? How does
that serve the needs of normal, unified, small-and-medium businesses?
Pure asserts that FlashBlade has an architecture that better supports modern applications, but what’s
modern about an architecture that has limited scale and massive functional gaps?
• It’s ironic that FlashBlade’s “modern” architecture scales to just one-seventh the capacity of
PowerScale and requires significant up-front investment with minimum deployments of 7
blades. When is FlashBlade going to deliver modern scalability with more node choices for
granular scaling and small beginner clusters that can grow just in time with the significant
demands of your unstructured data? And when is FlashBlade’s architecture going to dynamically
match media $/GB to the lifecycle of your data?
• It’s important to note that modern architectures need modern software functions like data
management, file/object duality, configurable redundancy, one-button failover & failback, two-
button root-cause analysis, and much more. When is FlashBlade going to deliver modern
software functionality?
• Modern architectures also need to be broadly accessible with the most current protocols. When
is FlashBlade going to support SMB3, the modern version of SMB file sharing protocol for
Microsoft Windows client and server applications? SMB3 is fundamental to a multitude of
applications being used to generate, analyze, synthesize and visualize data. Supporting SMB
doesn’t mean it’s the most current version of the protocol.
Dell Technologies’ innovation engine invested over $20B in R&D 1 over the past five fiscal years, over
twice as much as the revenue of Pure’s entire company over the same timeframe 2, to introduce
capabilities that directly impact your business. Dell’s enterprise-wide investment means we have the
end-to-end expertise to understand customers’ real challenges and give them exactly what they need to
accomplish their diverse goals. PowerStore customers are already reaping the benefits through a non-
disruptive upgrade to
PowerStoreOS 2.0, including
up to a 25% performance
boost 3 and AppsON scale-out
capabilities. A brand new,
cost-effective entry model
introduces enterprise
capabilities to organizations of
any size. Under the hood,
PowerStore’s Dynamic
Resiliency Engine eliminates the headaches of RAID management 4 while reducing ongoing costs by
letting you start with as few as six drives and scale your capacity with as little as a single drive.
1
Dell Technologies’ cumulative R&D investment includes EMC amounts prior to the merger transaction date on September 7, 2016
2
Based on Dell analysis using publicly available information, May 2021
3
Based on Dell internal test of PowerStore 5000 running typical 70/30 random read/write mix, 8K block size on PowerStoreOS 2.0 vs. 1.0, March
2021. Actual performance will vary.
4
Up to 98% less management effort than traditional RAID: Based on Dell analysis of staff time required to deploy and maintain a high availability array
with Dell’s Dynamic Resiliency Engine (DRE) vs. traditional RAID, March 2021.
4. What is the future of Pure’s portfolio?
Pure discovered that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t how customers consume technology and
championed the introduction of new products like //C and FlashBlade to broaden their appeal.
Pure would have you believe the exponential growth of the HCI category
isn’t relevant and that multi-controller scale-out systems aren’t
necessary. Would they change their tune if they had them on offer?
Lost in the marketing is the reality that the Evergreen “never migrate” model doesn’t work across the
product lines (such as starting with //C and upgrading to //X).
Dell Technologies has long held the belief that a one-stop-shop for all your infrastructure needs,
including servers, storage, networking, and data protection, simplifies your opportunity to thrive. Our
engineers design solutions using our broad portfolio through a consultative approach to your challenges
with an array of products that are best suited for your specific needs. No other provider can say they
hold the #1 position in External Enterprise Storage Systems 5, NAS4, Hyperconverged systems4, Purpose-
Built Backup Appliances4, and x86 servers4. Our commitment is to stop at nothing to help your enterprise
thrive and transform in our digital world. We offer a partnership for your entire technology journey with
a portfolio to back it up. Can Pure say the same when they are consulting with you?
I’d love to talk more about how PowerStore stacks up against FlashArray, but it’s challenging to find third-
party quantitative performance benchmarks like ours online. Still, fulfilling modern enterprise storage
requirements aligns PowerStore’s value to organizations of every size. PowerStore is driving innovation
through several foundational design decisions:
An all-new, container-based architecture engineered from the ground up for SCM, end-to-end
NVMe, and next-generation technologies, leveraging our decades of delivering world-class products
Flexible scale-out and scale-up configurations using active/active controllers and seamless data
mobility to deliver maximum performance and flexibility in the most demanding environments
5
Based on Dell analysis using published available data, April 2021 Designed for six nines availability using Dell’s Dynamic Resilience Engine, now with dual parity
protection for the most critical deployments
AppsON, an industry-first capability, enables groundbreaking new deployment models unmatched
by any competitive array.
If you want to know how to tap into your data and propel your business into the future, reach out to your
local Dell or partner representative, and let’s chat about how PowerStore and our portfolio can get you
there.
Jodey is a Global Technology Evangelist within the corporate
storage business unit of Dell Technologies and is responsible
for promoting and evangelizing the Dell Technologies
enterprise storage portfolio with a specific focus on Dell EMC
PowerStore. Jodey is also a well-known Executive Briefing
Center presenter, industry competitive analyst, customer-
focused discussion leader, and technical conference speaker
with 25 years of technical experience. In his current role as a
global evangelist, Jodey works across the spectrum of
users/customers and partners to discuss IT strategies and
directions. He also works directly with product management
and engineering to advocate and align product strategy and
technology roadmaps to user requirements.You can also read
