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Pure Storage, a developer of storage arrays based on Flash memory technology instead of hard drives, on Wednesday said its new arrays are generally available and priced competitively with traditional hard drive-based arrays.
The release of Pure Storage's arrays comes after trials by customers of over 100 of its beta units, said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of products for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.
Kixmoeller classified the arrays now being released for sale to the channel as the second-generation product, as they employ a new version of the company's Purity operating system as well as features not found in the trial units, some of which have been running for over a year.
[Related: EMC Acquires XtremIO, Becomes First Top-Tier Vendor With All-Flash Array]
Kixmoeller said the Pure Storage FlashArray 300 series with 2.0 is a full-fledged array. "It's not a Flash-based appliance, which is expensive and cannot scale," he said. "And it is not a Flash cache or Flash storage tier, which feature unpredictable performance and are complex and expensive to use."
Pure Storage in August came out of stealth mode with funding of $55 million, including a stake held by Samsung, one of the world's largest providers of Flash memory chips.
The release of its Pure Storage FlashArray 2.0 comes a week after EMC said it acquired all-Flash array developer XtremIO. That acquisition, which makes EMC the first top-tier storage vendor to offer an all-Flash array, has generated much buzz in the storage industry about the future of Flash arrays in the enterprise.
The storage industry is moving to adopt Flash, but for the time being, most established storage vendors are starting by adding Flash to existing arrays, which is not an optimized solution, Kixmoeller said.
"EMC has come to that realization," he said. "It's no surprise. EMC has done more with Flash than any other vendor has done. I won't be surprised to see the others follow."
The Pure Storage FlashArray 2.0 is intended to operate like standard disk-based arrays, Kixmoeller said. "At Pure Storage, we wanted to best of both worlds," he said. "We wanted something like a disk array in how it works, but based on Flash technology for the performance."
While the Pure Storage FlashArray 2.0 offers ten times the performance of a disk array while being smaller and easier to install, it is priced similar to a disk array, Kixmoeller said.
Next: Pricing Flash Arrays The Same As Disk Arrays
