Storage upstart boasts of not losing a single customer...

At a press briefing in startup Pure Storage's Mountain View HQ, CEO Scott Dietzen said: "We have yet to lose a customer engagement against any other flash vendor, including Violin Memory."

The company is not actually selling product yet but is engaged in an extended beta trial.

Pure Storage is developing a sharable all-flash storage array with up to two InfiniBand clustered nodes and Fibre Channel connectivity to host servers. There are two models: the FA-310 (to 11TB raw) and FA-320 (to 22TB) and the company has shipped more than 35 systems in its US beta trial.

He revealed that Pure uses data centre MLC, which is less expensive than enterprise MLC. It is Samsung consumer-grade flash with jointly developed Samsung and Pure firmware to make it more reliable and deliver a consistently low latency from it. This flash comes with a 5-year warranty.

Pure will launch into Europe in the second half of this year, setting up a support operation and establishing some channel partners. The company is working with SAP, regarding its HANA in-memory database appliance. It is presenting at SAP's Cloud Conference in a couple of weeks.

The first generation product will have active-active high-availability functionality added this quarter and we expect general availability of these FA-300 products by the mid-year point.

Dietzen said Pure will add GbitE connectivity and iSCSI connectivity in the next version of the product. It has no plans to add Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol support, although it could obviously be done if Pure's market needed it.

VAAI's Block Copy support will also be added, completing the VAAI support in the current gen-1 product. The gen-2 Pure array will also receive snapshots and replication functionality. The company will not directly support replication to other supplier's storage arrays, with announcement of third-party deals expected in this area in the next few months. VMware and storage vMotion were mentioned as away of moving data from a Pure array to another array.

Co-founder and chief technical officer John Colgrove said that Pure's architecture is a scale-up and scale-out one, so that more than two clustered nodes can be supported in the future. El Reg gets the idea that Pure Storage's progress is being watched carefully by EMC, NexGen Storage and Violin Memory. The company's executives have an air of confidence and contentment about their progress and are looking forward to shipping product and joining the storage flash array party. ®