Pure irony: Flash firm gets taste of its own medicine

New flash start-up takes aim at Pure Storage

Aggressive flash firm Pure Storage is getting a taste of its own medicine as an even newer flash start-up takes aim at its kit in the form of a bullish blog.

All-flash player Kaminario is based in Massachusetts and was set up in 2010 – the year after rival US storage firm Pure Storage.

Kaminario claims to be "leading the flash revolution" and insists its kit is ahead of its time.

When Pure Storage burst onto the channel and launched its partner programme in 2013, it made a name for itself by igniting a fierce and public war of words with rival EMC. Pure regularly puts down the storage giant's kit and the duo is even locked in an ongoing legal battle.

But it appears Pure is now embroiled in another similar campaign – only this time, it is the target.

On Monday, Pure launched its FlashArray//m product, which it claims it the first all-flash array that "marries best-of-breed software innovation with 100 per cent flash-optimised hardware". It said the 'm' stands for mini size, mighty performance, modular scale, and meaningful simplicity.

But Kaminario claims otherwise, and said the product announcement is "basically a hardware refresh".

On a company blog, Kaminario's chief technology officer Shachar Fienblit said he is not impressed.

"I've been paying close attention to Pure Storage's announcement," he said. "There was significant marketing hype around this news, and I was curious what one of our biggest competitors had to show.

"The refresh contains a more up-to-date processor and networking technologies – a very natural progression. Write cache with memory speed is actually a standard in the industry. Kaminario has been using it for the last few years and Pure Storage made a good move to follow this direction.

"Pure Storage decided to take the easier path and refresh the hardware rather than tackle the core architecture challenge. They gained a nice 50 per cent performance improvement and density improvement utilising SSDs that are available in the market."

Pure also launched a new cloud-based management and support platform named Pure1 earlier this week, which left Fienblit equally underwhelmed.

"Pure1, the cloud and analytics support facility, was already presented back in September 2014 at Storage Field Day 6 [US tech event]," he said. "[It's] a good natural progression of Pure Storage's strategy, but they are nothing new, and they are not game changers in the value the company brings to the market."

This morning, IDC said smaller start-up firms in the storage space are driving the enterprise storage market. Established giants such as EMC and NetApp lost market share and sales slumped, while the "others" category made of the smaller players enjoyed the opposite fate.

Pure Storage "politely declined" to comment on Kaminario's claims.