At its recent Accelerate event in New York, Pure Storage announced a comprehensive platform refresh, introducing six major product updates that span high-performance storage arrays, AI acceleration capabilities, cloud-native services, and advanced storage modules.

The new FlashArray//XL190 R5 and FlashArray//ST R5 deliver significant performance improvements for mission-critical workloads, while the 300TB DirectFlash Modules double storage density.

Finally, Pure introduces AI-focused capabilities with its new Pure Key-Value Accelerator (KVA) for inference acceleration and its FlashBlade//S R2.

Technical Details

Pure Storage announced six major platform updates spanning hardware performance, storage density, AI acceleration, and cloud integration capabilities. Let’s look at each.

FlashArray//XL 190 R5

FlashArray//XL 190 R5 is the company’s flagship hardware upgrade, featuring Intel Emerald Rapids processors with increased core counts, expanded DRAM capacity, and PCIe Gen 5 support.

Pure tells us that this configuration delivers 930% more IOPS per rack unit, 310% more IOPS per watt, and 460% more TB per rack unit compared to “competitive systems.”

Compared to the previous XL170 R5, the XL190 offers 25% more capacity, a 50% decrease in latency, and a 100% performance increase.

The array is designed for ultra-low latency, read-intensive workloads, including OLTP databases and large-scale analytics.

FlashArray//ST R5

The new FlashArray model targets extreme performance applications with over 18 million IOPS and 200GB/s throughput while maintaining sub-100 microsecond latency.

This system utilizes commercial PCIe 5 SSDs (including offerings such as Kioxia’s CD9P-V drives) rather than Pure’s proprietary DirectFlash Modules, offering up to 400TB of usable capacity in a 5RU form factor.

FlashBlade//S R2

The FlashBlade//R2 provides what Pure says is up to 35% faster performance and 20%-25% better performance than competitive solutions for RAG, training, inference, and simulation tasks.

300TB DirectFlash Modules

Pure is one of only two storage vendors making its own flash modules (IBM is the other).

This update sees Pure doubling the storage density of its previous 150TB modules while maintaining the same 2.5-inch form factor.

These QLC-based modules provide what Pure says is 8-15 times more storage density than legacy systems and generate three times less e-waste than competitive offerings due to longer lifecycle characteristics.

The modules maintain consistent power consumption regardless of capacity, addressing data center efficiency requirements.

Pure Key-Value Accelerator (KVA) i

Pure KVA is a new offering that integrates with NVIDIA Dynamo to accelerate AI inference workloads. The system can tier LLM key-value cache data from GPU HBM to CPU DRAM, then to direct-attached SSDs and external storage arrays.

Pure Storage claims up to 20x faster response times for inference while reducing time to first token and improving inter-token latency, targeting RAG, conversational AI, reasoning agents, and high-frequency inference applications.

Competitive Outlook & Advice to IT Buyers

Pure Storage faces intensifying competition from both traditional storage vendors and cloud-native solutions. The company’s hardware performance improvements help maintain competitive parity, but several factors could challenge its market position.

Traditional competitors, such as NetApp, Dell, and HPE, are developing similar unified data management platforms, which may potentially commoditize Pure Storage’s architectural advantages.

Let’s go deeper.

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Analysis

Pure Storage delivers a strong set of updates that deliver significant evolutionary improvements across six major product categories, addressing performance, density, AI acceleration, and cloud integration requirements.

The updates offer several operational advantages for IT practitioners. Non-disruptive upgrades through Pure’s Evergreen architecture eliminate the typical migration complexity associated with storage refreshes.

Customers can upgrade existing FlashArray systems to R5 hardware without data movement or application downtime, reducing implementation risk and operational overhead.

Performance improvements in the FlashArray//XL190 R5 enable infrastructure consolidation for organizations running multiple arrays to support high-IOPS applications.

Pure Storage’s comprehensive platform refresh recognizes that enterprise infrastructure must evolve beyond traditional storage boundaries to support AI-driven transformation.While the individual elements require careful evaluation, the breadth and technical depth of the announcements continue Pure Storage’s momentum in addressing the fundamental storage challenges that constrain enterprise AI initiatives.

The new extreme performance capabilities, AI-optimized acceleration technologies, and cloud-native integrations keep Pure Storage well-positioned to meet the needs of enterprises scaling their infrastructure to meet the new demands of AI workloads.