Pure Storage FlashBlade: Five Years of Rapid Growth

by Juan Mulford March 29, 2021

written by Juan Mulford March 29, 2021

Pure Storage has marked its fifth anniversary of introducing FlashBlade, exhibiting a remarkable $1B in sales. FlashBlade, unveiled in March 2016, has a rapid growth and impact in the storage industry. According to the company, this platform is used by more than 25% of the Fortune 100. Pure Storage is considered a pioneer in delivering storage-as-a-service in the new multi-cloud IT approach.

Pure Storage FlashBlade Chassis

Pure Storage’s FlashBlade is a high-performance, cloud-optimized file and object storage platform capable of storing, managing, and meeting current application data’s needs. The system is scale-out storage for infrastructure that disaggregates compute, networking, and data storage. FlashBlade is designed to improve multidimensional performance, agility, and simplicity, getting the best public cloud efficiencies but in the data center. It helps to power the digital transformation. FlashBlade is architected to align with three foundational characteristics: performance, agility, and simplicity. Commonly considered part of the value proposition of public cloud. Today, organizations want the exact attributes of on-prem storage as they shift toward digital transformation and supporting the next generation of cloud-focused applications.

Pure Storage FlashBlade Key Benefits

Scalability: Start with seven blades and simply add blades to scale up to 150 blades. Each blade adds capacity and performance.
Performance: Up to 15GB/s bandwidth with 15 blades in a single chassis. Up to 24M NFS IOPS from a FlashBlade system with 150 blades.
Connectivity: Up to 16 100Gb/s Ethernet ports per FlashBlade system. 2x FlashBlade External Fabric Modules (XFM) to scale up to 150 blades.
Physical: 4U per chassis. Up to 2,900 watts per chassis (nominal at full configuration).

Pure Storage FlashBlade Rapid Growth and Customer Impact

Pure Storage continues to advance in the tremendous momentum of the FlashBlade platform. In the five years since the initial launch of FlashBlade, Pure has delivered a continuous commitment to innovation. The company has been focused on improving the enterprise maturity of the FlashBlade platform by providing critical capabilities to address digital transformation challenges. Only within two years of GA, FlashBlade reached a $250M run rate and more than tripled its customer count. Today, FlashBlade continues to grow and diversify its customer base, adding several new FlashBlade customers in FY21 and reaching nearly $1B in sales five years after GA.

The remarkable growth of FlashBlade has been powered by continuous innovation to solve their customer’s current needs and enable them to take advantage of the next wave of modern data and applications. FlashBlade was built with dense scale-out capacity and multidimensional performance in mind from day one. In 2020, FlashBlade defined a new storage category: Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO), which consolidates fast file and fast object capabilities on a single platform.

To tackle a diverse set of customer challenges, FlashBlade has brought uniquely differentiated partnerships to bear. Including NVIDIA AI-Ready Infrastructure (AIRI), FlashRecover, Powered by Cohesity, and AWS Outposts. Besides, the company keeps shining with Pure’s Evergreen with flexible consumption models and non-disruptive upgrades. Pure Storage lets FlashBlade customers adopt new features without disruption, downtime, or the requirement to re-buy capacity.

Based on the company and customer reviews, FlashBlade has been named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage for 2021. Furthermore, TrustRadius has recognized FlashBlade as the 2020 Top-Rated Award winner in the Object Storage category.

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