Military strategy game? Nope, these 'battle cards' are an EMC sales tool

EMC has issued its sales troops with a set of anti-Pure Storage battle cards – and Pure has responded with a blog heaping praise on EMC. EMC's card of spoilers says: “Pure remains a constant threat as they are well capitalised and target our use cases in high performance databases, virtual servers and VDI.” Hopkinton’s claims …

[Don Jefe]

Either D&D changed a lot since the days of my youth, or the article has confused its games. Aren't 'battle cards' a Pokemon thing?

But quick fast vendor specific sales 'flash cards' for your sales team are normal. As are specific corporate strategies for overcoming your nemesis. You just aren't supposed to let them fall into the hands of others, or embarrassing stuff like this happens.

[Just_this_guy]

No dragons.

I feel cheated.

[Richard 26]

Re: No dragons.

Apparently, thermal cycling can actually increase the lifetime of flash memory. So it would make sense to include a Suitably Small Dragon in your storage array.

[StorageFan]

Re: No dragons.

Haha...apparently many did because they changed the title of the article

[smt789]

Not a Pure employee here.... We have tested Pure and really, really like. Uber freaking fast. As well their story on how they handle writes to SSDs is a totally different conversation than any of the other all flash players, including XMtremeIO.

Many of the EMC claims are misleading and appear to be marketing spin. If this is what they telling their field teams to lead with against Pure, they won't fair too well.

Full disclosure, I work for an integrator. Pure and EMC are both partners of ours.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>EMC claims are misleading and appear to be marketing spin.

You can take this completely out of context and it will still be true.

[M. B.]

Active/Passive

The Pure web site specifically mentions Active/Active on the newest controllers. I believe Active/Passive is referring to the older series.

[purestorage]

Re: Active/Passive

Hi, Matt at Pure here.

Our arrays are A/A from the front-end IO handling perspective (you can round-robin IO across all ports on all controllers, and all LUNs are available on all ports of all controllers), but from a back-end IO handling perspective they are A/P. This was a design choice, so that one controller is capable of handling the IO performance of the entire array, and enables us to perform non-disruptive upgrades without availability or performance loss. Scale-out arrays which leverage A/A controllers suffer a 1/N performance loss when a controller is lost (in a cluster of N controllers). For a 8-controller (4 Brick) deployment that might only be 1/8, but for a common single-brick deployment (2 controllers), that's a 1/2 performance loss.

We encourage rigorous HA testing as part of every PoC. Get 'em in, pull the cables, and see what happens to performance in all failure scenarios. Pull the complete power to the array and see how fast it comes up. There are real differences between the vendor products in HA.