Pure Storage profits from all-flash, as-a-service and cloud focus

Where did Pure Storage come from?

Pure Storage is a product of the flash storage era, formed in 2009 under the code name Os76 Inc in the Palo Alto offices of private equity firm Sutter Hill Ventures by John “Coz” Colgrave and former Yahoo! chief technology officer John Hayes.

The company went public in 2015, with venture capital injections following along the way. Core to the work of the company’s founders from early on was work to maximise capacity and endurance from the then emerging multi-level cell (MLC) flash media.

Core to the Pure story is that it initially used proprietary flash drives, but introduced its own DirectFlash Modules (DFM) by 2017. These work in tandem with the array-level operating system to allow them to go to much higher capacities than off-the-shelf solid state drives.

Pure Storage has expressed the view that such capacity increases will translate to lower per-GB prices for its flash than is possible with spinning disk, and lead to obsolescence of the latter by 2028.

How does Pure Storage rank against other storage players?

In 2023, IDC ranked Pure sixth in terms of market share, with 6.1%. That’s the same ranking as the second quarter of 2021, when IDC put Pure Storage last among the biggest six storage array makers at the time, with market share of 4.1%.

Despite the same ranking that marks an improvement because IDC now includes Huawei (second) and Lenovo (fourth) among external enterprise storage system suppliers. In other words, Pure has leapfrogged Hitachi Vantara and IBM of the previous big six storage array makers.

The big dog is still Dell, with 26.1% market share, with Huawei (9.7%), HPE (8.3%), Lenovo (7.7%) and NetApp (7%) behind them and above Pure. Below Pure in the rankings are Hitachi Vantara on 4.9% market share and IBM on 4.7%.

Pure Storage revenue was $440m in 2015, the first year it went public, and that figure had reached $2.76bn by 2023. Revenue in 2025 was $3.2bn.

It had only made a net profit during three quarters by the last time we surveyed the company in 2023, but has since achieved more stability of sorts, with a positive net income in five out of nine quarters.

What are Pure Storage’s key storage products?

Core to Pure’s flash storage hardware products are its DirectFlash Modules, for which capacity of 300TB was announced at its Accelerate event in Las Vegas in June, with shipping by the end of the year. DFMs are available in triple-level cell (TLC) for performance applications and quad-level cell (QLC) for capacity.

DFMs are designed to work in tandem with the array, so flash management functions – such as mapping data to physical media, garbage collection, wear levelling, etc – are built into system-wide operations. That’s unlike commodity solid state drives that do this at individual-drive level with dedicated media, such as DRAM, on the drive.

• FlashArray products aim at the highest performance workloads and use TLC flash on Pure DFM media.
• FlashArray//XL offer the highest capacities, up to 7.4PB effective in the 2025-launched R5 variant;
• FlashArray//X is aimed at mission-critical workloads up to 3.3PB effective capacity;
• FlashArray//C targets “business-critical” workloads – namely, those that are less performance-hungry – up to 8.9PB effective;
• FlashArray//E provides QLC capacity options with lower performance up to 6PB;
• FlashArray/ST – or FA//ST, as Pure execs like to call it – is aimed at deployments where extremely high-performance direct-attached storage would have been specified previously, such as in-memory databases, OLTP applications, log writing and sharded NoSQL databases. Remarkably, here Pure steps away from DFM-based media modules and uses high-performance commodity drives in the FlashArray//ST.
• FlashBlade is Pure’s fast file and object storage family, with rapid access to large-capacity storage and aimed at what have been seen as secondary storage use cases – backup, archive, analytics datastores – but which have evolved to require rapid input/output (I/O) for analysis, recovery and so on.
• FlashBlade//S is for the highest performance file and object workloads using TLC media, while FlashBlade//E provides capacity-focussed QLC media aimed at unstructured data use cases.

What markets and workloads does Pure Storage target?

Pure Storage can satisfy datacentre workloads that are the highest an enterprise might require. It also specialises in flash storage for workloads that would once have been deemed secondary, such as backups and less frequently used data.

Here, Pure makes the case that the fast access times of flash storage are needed because organisations may need to recover data quickly after a ransomware attack, or transfer and access data rapidly to satisfy AI training or inference needs.

How does the cloud fit Pure Storage strategy?

Pure Storage is oriented towards hybrid cloud operations and modern cloud-native applications. It has also thoroughly embraced the idea of a cloud model of operations.

That manifests in its pay-as-you-go models of purchasing (see below), but also in Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC), launched at Accelerate 2025, which allows for enterprise hybrid cloud visibility and management of storage resources.

EDC brings together:

• Purity storage OS, which is common to all the company’s arrays;
• Fusion, which allows discovery and management of storage resources;
• Pure1, which allows for fleet management in terms of performance and detailed management of resources, and;
• Evergreen, which is the company’s consumption purchasing offer that allows for as-a-service procurement.

Meanwhile, Pure Cloud Block Store, an enterprise-grade block storage service, is delivered natively in the public cloud, with access to the same protocols, snapshots and replication capabilities as Pure’s storage software.

What is the Pure Storage container strategy?

Pure bought Portworx for $370m in 2020, and it forms the core of its container strategy. Portworx centres on provision of persistent storage and data protection for containerised applications, and is a cloud-native data management platform that allows orchestration of Kubernetes and other container platforms across cloud and on-premise locations.

Portworx also provides data services such as databases, event handling and messaging platforms such as Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis and Zookeeper.

What consumption models of purchasing does Pure Storage offer?

Pure Storage offers consumption models of purchasing its Evergreen portfolio, which includes: 

• Evergreen Forever, which is buy-outright with lifetime upgrades;
• Evergreen Flex, where hardware is paid for and capacity is pay-as-you-go, and;
• Evergreen One, which is just pay-as-you-go.

Here, Pure aims to deliver a cloud-like experience with a unified as-a-service platform across on-premise, cloud and hosted environments with promised seamless upgrades and guarantees of zero planned downtime.