Growing flash storage player Pure Storage is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its European research and development efforts this week, as press and analysts attend its facilities in Prague, the Czech Republic to gauge what’s coming next from the big channel player.
Pure opened its Prague R&D facility in 2020, which is spread across three buildings in the city’s newest business district. The facilities work in tandem with the company’s main R&D facility in Santa Clara, California, and a third facility in Bangalore, India.
The Prague operation works with the giant Foxconn electronics manufacturing facility in the Czech Republic, which has been producing storage kit for Pure Technology since 2016. Pure also uses the US Foxconn plant located in Texas.
The R&D operation in Prague has also been expanding to support other areas of the company’s business operations, including finance and customer support, among other areas, taking the number of staff employed there to around 600.
The company’s sales and channel partner support operations are spread across Europe, located in the cities where the main markets are, but when it comes to R&D, Prague plays a leading role in product development, with a number of lines actually having been fully engineered and supported from there.
Paul Melmon, head of the Prague R&D Centre, said: “The engineering skills here are on a par with anything you will get in Santa Clara and across Silicon Valley. We expect all three of our R&D locations to show strategic leadership, and that’s what Prague is delivering.
“We chose Prague for our European R&D because of the universities here, the number of graduates, job retention, the startup community, the airport, and the cost-of-living, as well as the government support available.”
He said half the 600 staff employed in Prague were Czechs, with the rest made up from 50 other nationalities, illustrating the attractiveness of the country’s capital city for tech workers.
Robert Lee, chief technical officer of Pure Technology was also at hand to offer his take of where flash storage was going for channel partners, covering AI, cloud, and enterprise sales.
On AI, he said: “The AI market is not a drag car race in one straight line, it’s an F1 race, where things like stabilisation, power and going around lots of corners come into play.” He obviously thought Pure was in a good position on the grid to take advantage of AI, and analyst house IDC currently places the supplier as number two in the all-flash enterprise storage market.
When it comes to cloud, most of the action in the all-flash storage market is potentially going to come in the hyperscaler market first, whether that’s companies using flash technology to sell storage services on-demand to enterprises, or others using the tech to simply store customer data to run their giant operations.
Pure recently said it had agreed a deal to sell its technology to a “number four hyperscaler”, but is still refusing to name that company. What it means by a number four hyperscaler is also unclear. If it’s one that sells public cloud services, that company would be one behind AWS, Microsoft and Google, putting perhaps Oracle in the frame. However, if it’s a hyperscaler using the tech to run its own workloads, a good bet would be Meta, using all-flash kit to store and manage its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp customer data.
Whoever it is, Lee rightly says it has implications for the disk storage market, with only a small number of main disk vendors remaining on the scene. “Around 1,000 exabytes of disk storage is being sold annually at the moment, and six or seven hyperscalers are buying about 70% of it,” said Lee. “With one now going all-flash, you can see what is going to happen to the disk market, if others follow.”
Lee claimed the enterprise market would eventually “complete the transition to all-flash”, whether that was through the cloud with on-demand services from hyperscalers and others, or hybrid services involving both public and private clouds. Whether that will happen in its entirety is arguable though, when considering growing data compliance demands. Companies may need a mix of storage platforms on-premise and in the cloud, to keep operations going, protect data, and address compliance rules.
However the market shapes up, all-flash storage in the channel will be a continuing phenomenon.
