User:ZacBond/pure-storage-draft-jan-2023

Products
Pure Storage develops flash-based storage for data centers using consumer-grade solid state drives. Flash storage is faster than traditional disk storage, but more expensive. Pure Storage develops proprietary de-duplication and compression software to improve the amount of data that can be stored on each drive. It also develops its own flash storage hardware. Pure Storage develops and markets the FlashArray family of flash storage QLC and NVMe arrays, the FlashBlade family for unstructured data, and the Portworx family for Kubernetes, as well as the Evergreen family of Storage-as-a-Service subscriptions. Some of its products use an operating system called Purity. Most of Pure's revenues come from IT resellers that market its products to data center operators.

Product history
The first commercial Pure Storage product was the FlashArray 300 series. It was one of the first all-flash storage arrays for large data centers. It used generic consumer-grade, multi-level cell (MLC) solid-state drives from Samsung, but Pure Storage's proprietary controllers and software. The second generation product was announced in 2012. It added encryption, redundancies, and the ability to replace components like flash drives or RAM modules. In 2014, Pure Storage added two third-generation products to the 400 series. It also announced FlashStack, a converged infrastructure partnership with Cisco, in order to integrate Pure Storage's flash storage devices with Cisco's blade servers.

In 2015, Pure Storage introduced a flash memory appliance built on Pure Storage's own proprietary hardware. The new hardware also used 3D-NAND and had other improvements. In 2017, Pure Storage added artificial intelligence software that configures the storage-array. An expansion add-on appliance was introduced in 2017. The intended uses of Pure Storage expanded as the product developed over time. It was initially intended primarily for server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and database programs. By 2017, 30 percent of Pure Storage's revenue came from software as a service providers and other cloud customers. FlashBlade, introduced in 2016, was intended for rapid restore, unstructured data, and analytics. In 2018, Pure Storage and Nvidia jointly developed and marketed AIRI, an appliance specifically for running artificial intelligence workloads.

Pure Storage started selling storage as-a-service in 2017. It introduced Evergreen Storage Service (at times known as Pure as-a-service) in 2018. Pure Storage's first Portworx database-as-a-service product was released in 2021, a year after it acquired Portworx the company. Pure Storage released FlashBlade//S, which uses a modular architecture, in June 2022.