There’s no question that the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays is a watershed moment for the flash storage market. A great deal of innovation and hard work by went into creating this category, but of course it would have gone for naught if customers and partners hadn’t been prepared to bet on the technology early on.
With all of the free information flow on the Internet and social media one might think that Gartner matters less than it used to. Not in our view. Gartner has literally spoken to scores of our customers, and we get the impression they have done the same with our competitor’s. That anonymous aggregation and synthesis of customer feedback is still profoundly valuable to IT buyers, particularly when flash memory, hyper-converged and software-defined storage are fundamentally disrupting the industry landscape. Which is why the Solid State Array MQ indeed represents an inflection point. Said Gartner in the report, “SSAs have matured to levels competitive with general-purpose storage arrays in all but scale.” Most all of Pure’s success to date has been in replacing Tier 1 mechanical disk arrays with all flash. We expect this trend only to accelerate with industry projections showing the cost of flash dropping below that of “fast” 10K and 15K rpm spindles in a couple of years (and that’s without the flash-friendly deduplication and compression that Pure introduced to the market in 2011). In Pure’s view, with all flash radically faster, more space and power efficient, more reliable and lower cost, why buy Tier 1 disk? Yet performance disk remains a huge market—estimated at $15B/year. No wonder the competition is fierce. –
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