Pure Storage Inc. is taking a crack at the top tier of the storage market with the launch of its latest FlashArray system, FlashArray//XL.

Announced today, the new system is designed to run mission-critical enterprise applications such as containerized and cloud-native applications, plus massive databases. Pure Storage promised it delivers higher performance, more density and greater resilience to its FlashArray family.

FlashArray//XL is aimed at customers that need greater scale. The company said that as the pace of business increases, application demand can surge unexpectedly in a matter of minutes. Also, businesses today require new apps to be deployed in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months. These realities meant enterprises had to scale their top-tier applications with legacy storage technology, Pure Storage said, leading to lots of management complexity, high power demands and rising costs.

With Pure Storage FlashArray//XL, that’s no longer the case. The company said FlashArray//XL delivers an almost 80% improvement in input/output operations per second over its earlier FlashArray//X family of appliances. It offers up to 5.78 petabytes of effective capacity, with latency as low as 150 microseconds, and up to 36 gigabytes per second of throughput. Pure Storage also claims an “industry-leading” 5:1 data reduction average, 10:1 total efficiency and 99.9999% availability.

Steve McDowell, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE that FlashArray//XL allows Pure Storage to play in the highest tier of the storage market, where only Dell Technologies Inc. and a handful of small providers participate. Previously, he said the company was always locked out of deals requiring an array with so much horsepower and capacity.

Not only that, but McDowell believes the FlashArray//XL is quite competitive versus other arrays of its kind, since it’s based on Intel Corp.’s latest Ice Lake Xeon chips. “That delivers PCIe 4.0, which enables faster host connectivity than Pure’s competitors can currently match,” he said.

The system is combined with Pure Fusion, a new, self-service autonomous storage environment that’s based on a cloud operating model. It means FlashArray//XL can deliver “cloud-like experiences” for storage teams that need to adapt and operate with more flexibility, the company promised.

McDowell said the launch of FlashArray//XL is a positive move by Pure Storage and that it competes well against what rivals such as Dell and NetApp Inc. currently offer. “This will expand Pure’s addressable market, and it will make Pure a much bigger thorn in the side of legacy storage vendors,” he added.

Image: Pure Storage