Tech Disruptors Pure Storage on Flash, Cloud and AI Trends
Apr 18, 2023
Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage, a leader in flash and enterprise storage strategy. He discusses why enterprises favor agility and hybrid clouds over all-in cloud moves. He explains Pure’s FlashBlade advances, engagement with hyperscalers like Meta, and economics of flash versus nearline disk. He outlines cloud categorizations, Portworx for portability, and subscription consumption trends.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Addressable Market Expands As Disk Moves To Flash
- Pure expects large addressable market as disk workloads migrate to flash; enterprise storage TAM around $48–50B today.
- Rob Lee highlights share-capture in flash‑penetrated areas and growth into nearline disk replacement driving incremental opportunity.
LLM Workloads Make Storage A Central Constraint
- Large AI model training needs huge datasets and repeated GPU access, making storage cost and access patterns decisive for architecture choices.
- Lee argues many large AI customers avoid public cloud due to access and pricing models that penalize heavy data egress and API usage.
Compare System Level Costs Not Just Media Price
- Evaluate total system economics, not just media cost when comparing flash versus disk.
- Pure claims FlashBlade E matches day‑one acquisition cost and wins on space, energy, reliability and ops, narrowing the flash/disk gap.