Pure Storage FlashBlade//E Cost Versus HDDs

Pure Storage announced a new FlashBlade//E product for enterprise and data center applications, saying that this product offers costs competitive with hard disk drives (HDDs) with a lower operating cost. Let’s look at this product in more details. The FlashBlade//E will also be available with the company’s Evergreen//One Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) subscription, offering pay as you go on-premises storage.

Pure Storage was an early participant in the flash memory based storage systems business. The company was founded in 2009 by John Colgrove and John Hayes and operated in stealth mode until 2011 with the announcement of its first products. The company went public in 2015 with products using its own flash data center storage hardware using consumer-grade flash in the company’s DirectFlash modules. The company’s FlashBlade products are focused on unstructured data, the FlashArray//C using quad level cell (QLC) flash and its higher-end NVMe FlashArray//X.

At the beginning of March 2023 Pure Storage announced its FlashBlade//E that it says has an acquisition cost competitive with hard disk drives (HDDs) and has a lower operating cost than HDD based storage systems. Pure says that this product is offered at under $0.20/GB with three years of service and starts at 4PB and scales from there. Pure Storage builds their own DirectFlash flash storage modules, which are packaged in a box that provides connectivity, computational capability, cooling and hardware mounting for these storage modules. The system is shown below and the company says it will be available by April 2023.

Let’s take a look at HDD versus flash-based storage product prices. TrendForce spot prices for 3D TLC NAND yesterday were in the range of $0.07-$0.09/GB ($70-90/TB, which is down quite a bit from last year). A quick check on Amazon for conventional magnetic recording (CMR) 18-20 TB enterprise and data center HDD prices revealed prices from $0.013-$0.022/GB ($13-$22/TB, note that volume purchases of these HDDs would likely be cheaper). These are the size of HDDs commonly used in data centers today.

The difference in those spot prices for flash and the HDDs is 6.9-3.2X. The lower end of this range will give some idea of the minimum difference in price for the digital storage components. Another element in the total cost is the bill of materials for the rest of the storage system.

SSD prices for enterprise and data center applications have in recent history been 5-10X higher than for HDDs for enterprise and data centers. If it is available with the lower range of flash memory prices (3.2X higher) Pure Storage’s FlashBlade//E would be more compelling than past flash-based storage products to replace HDDs for some applications.

However, higher capacity HDDs are coming that should offer considerable decreases in the cost of HDD storage with wider availability this year for WDC’s 22TB CMR) and 26TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs and the introduction of Seagate’s 30+ TB HDDs using heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) this year. In volume, and assuming good yields and otherwise similar costs of manufacturing, a 30TB HDD would cost about 2/3 the price of a 20 TB HDD. Using the range of $0.013-$0.022/GB ($13-$22/TB) for current drives that would result in HDD prices of $0.0058-$0.015/GB ($5-$15/TB).

Flash prices are lower now because demand is down, but their prices vary depending upon supply and demand. If demand goes up, flash prices will rise as well. Thus, if HAMR drives are successfully introduced in volume this year, or if the market for flash memory recovers, the acquisition price for HDD storage compared to flash memory storage could again return to 5-10X differences. Time will tell…

However, SSDs can offer lower operating costs than HDDs, which Pure Storage is advertising for the FlashBlade//E product. The company says that the FlashBlade//E consumes up to 5X less energy than HDD-based systems that it would replace. The company says this advantage increases as the size of the storage system grows. The company also says that their flash-based storage has 10-20X the reliability of HDD storage systems.

Pure Storage is also offering its on-premises products for direct purchase or on a pay-as-you-go subscription model. This mimics the subscription models for services on popular public clouds, making the cost of the storage more of an opex rather than a capex expense.

Pure Storage is offering its FlashBlade//E digital storage array at an attractive price and with pay-as-you-go subscription options as well as direct purchase. The company says its products consume 5X less energy than HDD storage systems with 10-20X the reliability.