Pure's Founding 15 Architectural Decisions

When Coz and team set out to build the first Pure storage system they had a mission to "fix everything that was wrong with data storage." That's a rather bold task if you ask me, and having cut my teeth early in my career deploying and supporting some of the storage systems of the day I can tell you there was plenty to fix. Managing multiple tiers of drive types, RAID decisions, planned maintenance, which compromises to make between features and performance. Then on top of it all once every 4 years or so I would get to start planning a major migration project to retire old hardware and move to the shiny new stuff.

I think back to those days and can't help but imaging what kind of projects I could have worked on with all that time wasted RMAing the weekly pile of failed HDDs. HDDs that by the way were typically just reset and sent right back out to me as referbs the next time I had a failure. But that's a different blog post.

So what are the 15 decisions? These are the foundational architectural principles that drove the early development of Pure's technology and they still remain relevent today. I believe we can draw a direct correlation back to our consistently high NPS score (a measure of customer satisfaction) to these decisions and the impact they have on your day to day life as a data platform admin.

When Ludes , andrew , and I sat down to brainstorm our offshoot of The Pure Report we pretty quickly realized this would be a great story to share. It's a story that takes a lot of time, not something that would typically get discussed in an EBC or FlashCrew user group presentation; and the podcasting format gave us the perfect opportunity to finally dig deep into these decisions and share those with the world.

We took each of the 15 decisions and did a deep dive episode by episode; unpacking what it meant for our product development and what it means for you in terms of outcomes and experience. We started 3 years ago and tied a bow on it with the final recap episide published at the end of 2024. For those of you who joined us on this journey, thank you. It's been tremendously rewarding; and for those of you just discovering The Pure Report now, I present to you in it's entirety: The 15 Decisions on The Pure Report Podcast.

1. Built in Simplicity
2. Most Efficient Architecture At Scale
3. Consumer Flash (MLC)
4. Data Reduction
5. Stateless Controllers
6. Front End Active/Active and Back End Active/Standby
7. Streamlined Code Paths
8. Immutable, Usable Snapshots
9. Realistic Efficiency Metrics
10. Adaptive Flexible RAID
11. Security & Encryption: All the Data, All the Time
12. Metadata: The Secret Sauce
13. Simple Install & Upgrade
14. Proactive, Predictive Support
15. Non-Disruptive Everything
16. Recap Episode