When Pure Storage launched in 2009, the enterprise flash market was still at its infancy and the vendor ecosystem consisted almost exclusively of startups. Today, five years and several high-profile IPOs later, disk has become the weak link in data-intensive virtualized applications and incumbent vendors are scrambling to redefine their product strategies around solid-state storage in order to catch up with the drastically changed requirements of enterprise customers.

Pure Storage’s vision, on the other hand, has remained the same as the rest of the market adapted to this new reality. The firm understood from the very beginning that the “key hurdles to flash adoption in the enterprise were cost and compatibility with existing enterprise applications and workloads,” according to CEO Scott Dietzen

Pure, which raised $246 million to date, develops all-flash arrays that can be plugged into existing environments without bringing in a team of consultants and a forklift to handle the implementation. Speaking on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE last year, Dietzen said that this simplified approach removes traditional barriers to entry and makes it easier for organizations to realize returns on their flash investments (see his entire segment below).

“The customers we work with don’t want to rewrite their applications, they don’t want to change their configurations, they want a flash substitute that can be slotted in in place of a disk array and yet offer all the advantages of flash: the performance, the power, the space efficiency and the dramatic simplicity advantages over disk,” Dietzen said. Pure is offering these benefits in an integrated system called FlashArray that catapulted it to the forefront of the solid-state revolution.

The firm revealed on Tuesday that it has seen a 700 percent year-over-year sales increase in 2013, with sequential growth exceeding 50 percent in all four quarters. Pure also claims to have grown its customer base by 650 in that period, passing the 1,000 units sold mark and landing multiple petabyte-plus deals. Meanwhile, bookings from existing customers climbed 45 percent.

The growing demand for high-performance storage is boding well for the entire ecosystem, with DataDirect Networks also recording massive gains in 2013, adding 122 new customers and more than 100 resellers worldwide. Pure is growing even faster, having made 200 new partners last year while opening offices in nine countries and several U.S. cities.

According to Deitzen, the secret sauce behind his firm’s success is software. “We crafted this recipe where we use off-the-shelf MLC [consumer-grade] flash and very fast data reduction, global in-line deduplication and compression that works at sub-millisecond speeds and shrinks the data we store so we can get the price point of all-flash down to where it is competitive with disk,” he explained. “That remains a unique differentiator for us in the marketplace.”

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