Pure Storage thinks things are slotting into place for its predicted imminent demise of enterprise spinning disk.
In December 2024, it announced an unnamed hyperscaler had inked an agreement to take Pure’s DirectFlash Modules (DFMs) as components for storage infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Pure Storage now counts Nand flash makers Micron and Kioxia as supply chain partners.
The Micron partnership was announced earlier this month, with Pure making plans to take quantities of Micron’s gen 9 QLC NAND memory.
Last month, Pure and Kioxia announced the latter would supply QLC flash for DFM modules to supply to hyperscaler customers.
Here, Pure Storage is setting itself up as a provider of hyperscaler systems or components in a ground-breaking move for an enterprise storage array maker.
The wider significance is that because hyperscalers are such huge buyers of hard drives, a switch to all-flash would make a big dent in spinning disk manufacturing volumes, and that could spell the hard disk drive’s (HDD’s) death knell.
Selling to hyperscalers: The nails in HDD’s coffin?
In June 2024, Pure announced it had been working to adapt its DFM technology to the needs of hyperscaler environments. DFMs are not ordinary SSDs, like those sold by the big drive makers. Because Pure controls DFM design and manufacture, and because they also design and build controller systems, data management functionality can be distributed across drive and array systems.
According to Pure, that brings efficiencies in use of cache and data placement that in part can make for better longevity in QLC-based flash.
It also means less energy used, more rapid input/output (I/O) and savings on space that allow for more Nand to be installed. That amounts to a claimed capacity multiplier of around 2.5x compared with what’s possible from commodity SSD-equipped arrays. For hyperscalers that buy massive quantities of drive capacity, these advantages are significant.
Pure Storage said one hyperscaler has sung the praises of its DFMs after deploying a proof-of-concept.
For Pure Storage, the challenge will be scale in the supply chain. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, GCP and Meta buy about 43% of global server production. And they only buy white box hardware that they customise themselves. That market is one hitherto effectively barred to enterprise storage makers because their products are not specialised to it.
So, according to their strategy, Pure Storage will sell their DFMs as components that will work with the hyperscalers’ own storage. Officially, it’s not known which hyperscaler Pure has struck a deal with, but it is known that GCP and Meta, at least, have driven the adoption of the software data placement technique, flexible data placement.
SSDs with 10x more capacity than HDD
Until now, hyperscalers have preferred to use spinning disk HDDs to drive their storage services largely because they have been cheaper. But they are also slower. And, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), the need for more rapid access to colder data has arisen – such as in backups and data lakes – and so the big hosting companies have started to look at SSD.
However, so far, SSD had lacked the capacity to be profitably deployed. Now, the latest generations of QLC flash from Micron and Kioxia allow Pure to make DFMs that provide 150TB, which will soon reach 300TB, the equivalent of 10 HDDs.
Kioxia’s latest generation of Nand flash, unveiled late last year, uses charge trap (CT) cells to create smaller SSDs with higher density and while using less energy. Meanwhile, Kioxia also released test results that showed writes with flexible data placement (using NoSQL database RocksDB) that gave read speed 1.8x faster and Nand cell lifespan increased by 3x.
Micron is already a supplier to Pure Storage of Nand in its DFMs. It hasn’t shared much detail about its next generation of SSD, but what is known is that its Nand circuits will give 19% more capacity than the current one.
In December 2024, Pure Storage announced quarterly revenue of $831m, 9% up year-on-year. That puts it behind Dell, which generated revenue of $4bn in the past quarter (up 4% year-on-year); also behind NetApp, which took $1.66bn in the same period (up 6% year-on-year), and almost certainly behind HPE, which doesn’t disclose the share taken by storage in its quarterly revenue of $8.5bn.
Is it the beginning of the end for HDD?
Will Pure’s partnership to supply its high-capacity flash modules to a hyperscaler customer be the first set of nails in the coffin of spinning disk hard drives?
Pure Storage chief technology officer Rob Lee said last week at a press event in Prague that the company’s first hyperscaler design win will be “transformative”, and that a switch to flash by the hyperscalers could lead to collapse in the HDD market.
The deal he’s talking about was announced in December, and will see Pure supply its DFM SSD modules – which will offer up to 300TB capacity by 2026 – to an unnamed hyperscaler.
“We won’t be supplying arrays,” said Lee. “They want the benefits of direct flash but don’t need the other data services. We’re co-engineering with the hyperscaler to integrate with their custom system.
“They were all ready to build something like DFM, but then thought, ‘Why build it ourselves? Let’s just integrate [Pure’s flash modules]’.”
He said the move on the part of the hyperscalers is driven by data growth and the needs of AI, in particular the requirement to access large and relatively dormant stores of data.
Lee added that there is something like 100,000 exabytes of HDD produced quarterly, with hyperscalers taking “60% or 70%”. That, in turn, would take such a chunk out of the volume of HDD manufacturing as to make it much less viable.
