Pure Storage, manufacturer of all-flash array (AFA) solid-state drives that base the technology of DirectFlash modules (DFM) announced to the website Blocks & Files that the company is planning to launch the company's first 300 TB NVMe SSD sometime between the years 2025 to 2026. This continues the trend that the storage marketplace sees with the adoption of larger solid-state drives replacing hard disk drives to maintain crucial areas, such as data centers.
Pure Storage sets a three-year goal to reach 300 TB SSDs, offering up to six times what the company's competition is expecting at the same time
Alex McMullan, Chief Technology Officer of Pure Storage, displayed the roadmap the company will take for DFMs and their expansion over the next three years.
The plan for us over the next couple of years is to take our hard drive competitive posture into a whole new space. Today we’re shipping 24 and 48TB drives. You can expect … a number of announcements from us at our Accelerate conference around larger and larger drive sizes with our stated ambition here to have 300TB drive capabilities, by or before 2026.
Reaching 300 TB in an SSD seems quite radical compared to other storage manufacturers. Toshiba's expected roadmap over the following three years sees the company increasing its storage drives' MAS-MAMR and HAMR technology to reach 40 TB of capacity.
Another prominent player in the storage marketplace, Seagate, intends to increase its HAMR technology to advance to 50 TB by 2025. The company will then expect to reach 100 TB by 2030.
For customers … this opens up a whole new suite of capabilities. So we admire the persistence of hard drive vendors, but I don’t realistically think that they have a plan or a strategic goal [that matches this].
All the chip fabs are shipping us somewhere between 112 and 160 layers. All the fab vendors have a plan and a path to get to 400-500 layers over the next five years. And the whole point of that will help us of course, on its own.
To place Pure Storage's plan to access 300 TB in its DFM into perspective, we need to look at what is comprised of the DFM technology. A Pure Storage DFM contains NAND chips combined with the company's proprietary FlashArray and FlashBlade OS called Purity. The operating system can offer flash controller functionality throughout the system instead of a single section. Currently, the FlashBlade//E has a capacity for 1.92 PBs. Once the company reaches 300TB SSD capacities, the same FlashBlade//E would be able to achieve 12 PB.
We will have to see if Pure Storage can reach the company's big goals in the current marketplace, especially with enterprise customers expected to pay high dollars for adapting to newer technology. Several companies remain cautious in the current global economic state that any company's desired goals come with high risks.
News Sources: Blocks & Files, IT Home
