back to article Storage upstart boasts of not losing a single customer...

At a press briefing in startup Pure Storage's Mountain View HQ, CEO Scott Dietzen said: "We have yet to lose a customer engagement against any other flash vendor, including Violin Memory." The company is not actually selling product yet but is engaged in an extended beta trial. Pure Storage is developing a sharable all-flash …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Making up names for things that don't exist

    Data centre MLC??? Cheaper than E-MLC?

    Really?

    Interesting that Samsung does not make anything but E-MLC

    http://www.samsung.com/us/business/oem-solutions/pdfs/PSG_1H_2012.pdf

    there is not even an entry in the part selector for any such thing (see pages 13 & 15)

    perhaps Pure should post up a link to a hires photo of one of their "modules" so we can see the part code on the flash packages of the Samsung SSD in their "module" which uses this mythical "data centre MLC" they keep talking about, or they should stop claiming to use something that no flash manufacturer produces.

    1. Robert Heffernan
      Trollface

      Re: Making up names for things that don't exist

      Did you READ the article at all??

      "He revealed that Pure uses data centre MLC, which is less expensive than enterprise MLC. It is Samsung consumer-grade flash with jointly developed Samsung and Pure firmware to make it more reliable and deliver a consistently low latency from it. This flash comes with a 5-year warranty."

      It said it right there in the same paragraph, after the sentence talking about the DC-MLC, it is just regular consumer MLC with custom firmware tuning the access to flash in a way better aligned with the usage case in a data center environment.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Making up names for things that don't exist

        I read the article, and so did you, but apparently you don't see the meaning of words as being important.

        I'll repeat, there is no such thing as "data centre MLC", supposed "custom firmware" doesn't make the chip a different chip. It is still a consumer grade MLC flash part no matter what their supposed "custom firmware" does. And I say supposed, because Pure claimed once before to a blogger event last year that they had custom firmware developed with Samsung, which when pressed they had to admit they didn't really have anything but standard firmware.

        So Pure used up their credibility over this made up "data centre MLC" and with their "custom firmware", perhaps I might believe if there was a public statement from Samsung with details. But based on the last time Pure claimed to have custom firmware I don't believe this is anything more than marketing trying to make it look like they actually are anything more than off the shelf SSDs in an off the shelf SAS shelf attached to an off the shelf server and given how many of the features we now learn aren't actually in the product it seems like there is very little in their vaunted software layer.

        I remain thoroughly unimpressed.

  2. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    Hmmm

    So is it flash in a pan, or conventional vapourware?

  3. Alex Pavone
    WTF?

    I believe he has a good point

    I believe he has a point. I watched this technical session when it first came out.

    Go to Pure Storage Blog http://www.purestorage.com/blog/page/5/

    or right to the video http://youtu.be/2S40crLCN4o

    It is a very good technical session. In there they speak at length about Samsung SSD and a presenter is challenged about "exactly what special stuff" is done with Samsung. The reporter (not sure who he was) press 3 times and finally got the response "these are standard Samsung Enterprise SSD's that you could buy off the shelf." All of their value was done in the layer above the SSD's - which brings up the point - what can you really do to an SSD through a standard SAS interface???

    I'm sure there is some value there - but as caught above, hard to distill the marketing from the engineering benefit.

    And I also searched for "data center MLC" and came up dry.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I haven't killed a single person doing open heart surgery...

    ...haven't operated on anyone either.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I haven't killed a single person doing open heart surgery...

      I only kill cardiac surgeons on their day off.

  5. Dan 10
    Happy

    I used to work for a startup...

    ...and this is about right for the "pedal-like-mad and hope the money rolls in" crowd. We had good times.

    Tony/AJ, is that you?!

    1. Chris Mellor 1

      Re: I used to work for a startup...

      Datacentre MLC is effectively just marketing, it seems to me, as it equals consumer SSD plus special firmware. What this means in terms of IOPS, MB/sec, endurance or data integrity we just don't know. Maybe we'll get to see when the arrays are GA'd.

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