All SOE students and faculty (and staff) are encouraged to attend this talk. We'll have Pure Storage giveaways (shirts, etc.), and will also cover what it's like to work at a startup in Silicon Valley.

Abstract

The storage industry is currently in the midst of a flash revolution. Today's smartphones, cameras, and many laptops all use flash storage. However, the $30 billion a year enterprise storage market is still dominated by spinning disk. Flash has large advantages in speed and power consumption, but its disadvantages (price, limited overwrites, large erase block size) have prevented it from being a drop-in replacement for disk in a storage array. The question facing the industry is how to build a competitive hardware-software solution that turns flash into fast, reliable storage scaling to hundreds of terabytes and beyond.

In this talk, we first explain what an enterprise storage array is and how it's used. We then describe the design of the Pure FlashArray, an enterprise storage array built from the ground up from relatively inexpensive consumer flash storage. The array and its software, Purity, leverage to the advantages of flash while minimizing the downsides. Purity performs all writes to flash in multiples of the erase block size, and keeps data in a key-value store that persists approximate answers to further reduce writes at the cost of extra (cheap) reads. Purity also reduces the amount of data stored on flash through a range of techniques, including compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning. Purity relies upon RAID both for reliability and for performance consistency: by avoiding reads to devices that are being written, we ensure more efficient writes and eliminate long-latency reads. The net result is a flash array that delivers sustained read-write performance of over 100,000 4KB I/O requests per second while maintaining uniform sub-millisecond latency. With many customers seeing 4x or greater data reduction, the Pure FlashArray ends up being cheaper than disk as well.

The talk will conclude with a discussion of opportunities for working at Pure Storage. We released our first all-flash array in 2012, and we're just getting started. We're a well-funded startup still in the early stages, and there are plenty of exciting projects to work on as part of a highly-talented, energetic team. Join us and help reinvent the enterprise storage industry, a rare opportunity that only comes every 10-20 years.