Pure Storage Inc. capped off a solid year today as it delivered fourth-quarter results that beat Wall Street’s expectations.

The company also updated its main line of FlashArray//X storage appliances today.

The company, which sells a range of flash memory-based data storage hardware and software products, reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 23 cents per share on revenue of $492 million, up 17% from the same period one year ago.

That was just ahead of Wall Street’s forecast of a 22-cent profit on revenue of $488.65 million. Pure Storage also reported full-year revenue of $1.9 billion, up 21% from the year prior.

The company’s strong growth would have been impressive in any case. But the fact that it did so in a year that was disrupted by both unusual pricing pressure from a global NAND memory chip oversupply and global economic factors such as the China-U.S. trade war and the coronavirus makes it all the more so, said Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Steve McDowell.

“Pure’s performance stands in stark contrast to its closest competitors in the enterprise storage market for the same periods, which have delivered relatively flat to negative growth, and are predicting the same for the coming year,” the analyst said.

Pure Storage Chief Executive Officer Charles Giancarlo (pictured) said in a statement that one of the reasons for the company’s growth was its strong product portfolio, which today received a major boost with an update to the company’s flagship NVMe FlashArray//X family of appliances.

The third-generation FlashArray//X, based on Intel Corp.’s latest Xeon Scalable processors, can drive performance gains of up to 25% versus the company’s older hardware, the company said. And for database workloads such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA, the performance gains rise to 50% over its previous-generation hardware.

Pure Storage said the FlashArray//X is being made available via its Evergreen Storage consumption model, which enables customers to upgrade and expand their storage as needed, without any disruption to their data center operations.

“Pure’s bread-and-butter remains its FlashArray product line,” McDowell said. “Pure has indicated that the QLC-based FlashArray//C is its fastest growing product in the company’s history. Along with earnings today, Pure announced its third generation FlashArray//X, delivering one of the industry’s first portfolio-wide NVMe-only offering. That pace of innovation resonates with IT buyers.”

For the first quarter, Pure Storage said it’s expecting revenue of about $365 million, lower than Wall Street’s projection of $381 million.

The company’s stock was down 2% in after-hours trading.

Photo: SiliconANGLE