Against the backdrop of a top competitor securing $33 million in fresh funding, Pure Storage Inc. is marking a milestone of its own over on the product front.

The company today introduced a new system called the FlashArray//X that can provide twice as much bandwidth as its previous generation hardware while reducing latency by up to half. What facilitates these improvements is the platform’s use of NVMe, a high-speed protocol for moving data between solid-state memory and the other components of a storage environment.

The FlashArray//X comes in a 3U chassis that can accommodate up to 20 of Pure Storage’s proprietary NVMe flash modules. They’re currently available in 2.2-terabyte and 9.1-terabyte models, with an 18.3-terabyte edition set to launch when the array starts shipping later this year. Added up, this gives the system a maximum raw capacity of 366 terabytes, which can be used hold as much as 1.1 petabytes of data thanks to built-in compression algorithms.

Furthermore, Pure claims that the storage limit increases to a massive 15 petabytes per deployment when multiple arrays are used together. The individual flash modules under the hood are all managed by the company’s storage operating system, which handles I/O scheduling and other low-level tasks centrally rather than relegating them to the drives as competing systems do.

Sandeep Singh, Pure’s director of product marketing, wrote that this approach is “dramatically” more efficient in a blog post published today. The executive explained that the FlashArray//X management software helps reduce the wear on flash modules, which increases their longevity and reduces the amount of hardware that companies need to buy over time.

Pure plans to sell the system alongside its existing FlashArray//X to accommodate customers that aren’t yet ready to embrace NVMe. It’s a necessary step given that the technology has only started appearing on chief information officers’ agenda in the past few quarters. However, the company can be expected to gradually shift more resources towards the new platform as adoption starts picking up and more rivals join the fray.

Pure is already facing a considerable amount of competition from several startups that have jumped on the NVMe bandwagon early. One of the fastest rising players is E8 Storage Inc., which closed a $12 million funding round led by Accel last year to capitalize on its headstart.

Image: Pure Storage