Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen

Pure Storage Inc., the all-flash array vendor, has just given the strongest hint yet that it’s about to change direction and start building hyper-converged systems as part of an assault on the commodity server hardware market.

In a blog post to celebrate the company’s fifth birthday, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen effectively stated his intent to take on hyper-converged system players like Maxta Inc., Nutanix Inc., SimpliVity Corp., and VMware/EMC Corp. According to Dietzen, Pure Storage has been working over the last five years to get its all-flash arrays to achieve parity with the Tier 1 disks that are commonly used to store production data. Pure Storage has added deduplication and in-line compression to achieve cost-per-gigabyte parity, as well as in-demand replication techniques like snapshotting and cloning to match those offered by disk.

Dietzen then offered this:

“The opportunity for Pure will be more about shaping the next-generation of cloud and web-scale data storage than just replacing legacy disk arrays. Our products will ultimately compete with commodity server hardware and help change the way systems software — such as databases and file systems — are designed and implemented.”

Those comments can easily be interpreted as meaning Pure Storage wants to create its own hyper-converged systems, but as to what that is exactly is anyone’s guess. Dietzen offers a broad definition of what hyper-convergence is, saying it includes implementations of virtual SAN and distributed analytics platforms like Hadoop.

Enterprise Tech suggests that Pure Storage might want to partner with an existing supplier like VMware, SimpliVity or possibly Nutanix to create a flash-only version of their stacks. Those company’s hyper-converged systems are all based on a combination of disk and flash storage, yet all three could easily be tweaked to fit with Pure Storage’s flash arrays.

The alternative is that Pure Storage goes it alone, and creates its own virtual SAN software.

“An opening salvo in the ramping debate between shared and hyper-converged storage can be found here, but we will have much more to say on this over the next 12 months,” Dietzen said.