Flash uptake pushes Pure Storage's growth up 700 percent

The growth of the enterprise flash drive market has been exponential over the last year, which has been driven by the market's uptake of 100 percent virtualised datacentres, according to Pure Storage.

The all-flash storage firm announced that it achieved a 700 percent year-over-year growth in 2013 and grew its customer base year over year by 650 percent.

Pure Storage VP of products Matt Kixmoeller said that while the adoption of flash has been relatively new in the enterprise sector compared to consumer technology, due to cost and resiliency, the implementation rate has been rather aggressive.

"Virtualisation and flash go hand in hand, and Australia is one of the most aggressive countries to quickly adopt virtualisation," he said.

"So for all the reason they adopted virtualisation, we believe flash adoption will adopt very quickly in the Australian market because as businesses move to being 100 percent virtualised datacentres, they need the power of flash to virtualise the final tier of applications."

Kixmoeller said that much like when virtualisation appeared to be "daunting" for many businesses, the adoption of it "happened way faster than what we expected"; now, similar attitude patterns are being seen with flash as businesses start to realise the advantages of it, and begin to broaden their deployment of it quickly.

While there are cost savings when making the leap to flash, Kixmoeller said that many businesses are using it to gain a competitive advantage.

"They use flash to get something done faster than their competitors, whether that is analysing data faster or providing an end user with a better experience," he said. "It boils down to computing faster to drive a revenue advantage for the customer."

To service the increasing demand for enterprise flash, Pure Storage recently announced its new enterprise storage business model, called Forever Flash.

As a result of this growth, Pure Storage also announced the appointment of industry veteran Michael Alp as vice president of Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ). Alp will facilitate the continued progression of Pure Storage in the region where offices exists in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

Michael Cornwell, who established Pure's operations across APJ, will assume a more strategic role focusing on technology leadership and market development in the region as the newly appointed chief technology officer for APJ.

"Pure is very committed in being a global company, and we care about the local markets, as well as the needs of our global customers," Kixmoeller said. "We're at a point where we have direct operations in four main countries in Asia-Pacific — Australia, Japan, Korea, and Singapore — and our plan this year is to continue that expansion in China and continue to expand in other countries."