Welcome to our 12th monthly episode where we return to discussing all-flash storage arrays, this time with Vaughn Stewart, Chief Technical Evangelist for Pure Storage. This our third all-flash storage array vendor that the GreyBeards have talked with since the start of the podcast, not counting server side flash and scale-out/hybrid storage systems.
Vaughn has had a long and illustrious carreer in the storage business most recently prior to joining Pure, at NetApp in product strategy and marketing. Pure Storage seems to have disrupted the normal economics of Flash storage and as a result have seen success in the marketplace.
This month’s episode comes in at a little over 48 minutes long. 
In this podcast we discuss how Pure Storage is changing the economics of Flash storage, primarily through 5 forms of data reduction, some of which are unique to Pure Storage. Their storage solution is block storage, targeting tier 1 applications needing higher IOPS and with the consistent low response time of Flash at the economics of high performing disk storage.
Vaughn provides a good rational as to why we haven’t seen any Pure Storage SPC-1/SPC-2 benchmarks, mainly because SPC will not audit storage that uses data reduction. Sometime in the podcast we have a good discussion on scale-out vs. scale-up solutions for block storage.
I would have to say that Vaughn is one of the more articulate storage geeks the GreyBeards have come across. We seem to take off on a number of tangents, not the least of which is all the innovation going on in storage these days, where Cisco may go, and where it will all end up, but we try hard to bring it back to product technology. Listen to podcast to learn more.
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Vaughn Stewart, Chief Evangelist, Pure Storage
Vaughn Stewart is the Chief Technical Evangelist at Pure Storage, where he shares his perspective on the emergence and capabilities of a flash-powered economy. Prior to joining the ‘flash revolution’ he spent 13 years in technical and marketing leadership roles at NetApp where he led the virtualization and cloud strategy and was awarded a US patent. Vaughn strives to simplify the technically complex and advocates to think outside of the box.
You can find his thoughts on the role of storage with cloud computing and big data online and in print. He publishes his blog, ‘The Pure Storage Guy’, has authored a number of books including his latest is “Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere & Cloud Computing” and is a frequent guest on various online mediums.