Pure Storage Boosts File Capabilities With Compuverde Acquisition

All-flash storage vendor Pure Storage announced on Tuesday that it is acquiring Compuverde, a small Swedish firm, in order to boost its file capabilities, give enterprise clients advanced file offerings as well as help customers create “true hybrid architectures,” and leverage data on premises or in the cloud.

“As part of trying to help customers be able to achieve a full unified array we looked at Compuverde as an acquisition for enabling us to get a true, proven enterprise file protocol stack which would enable flash array which is our block-based solution to redefine the unified space,” Chadd Kenney, VP of Products and Solutions, Pure Storage told CRN. “This allows us to take a very comprehensive focus into the file protocols giving a very mature stack. It allows us to expand the use cases into general purpose file shares, VMware, and mission critical databases over file protocols.”

The deal also means the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor – already an established presence in block storage -- is increasing its stake in the file data arena.

The deal is expected to close this month. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Compuverde is a 20-person startup based in a small town in Sweden about three hours from Copenhagen. The three founders, are “rock solid engineers” who came out of Ericsson, Arthur Johnson, VP of corporate development at Pure Storage, told CRN. Pure Storage said Compuverde will bring a “robust ecosystem of technology partnerships” to the deal, while the company's software solution is already deployed in telecom, financial services, and media industries.

Kenney said the Compuverde purchase will expand the features of its latency optimized scale up solution, FlashArray//X, adding in unified capabilities of NFS, CIFS/SMB, and incorporates the file share VMware over NFS, and the Oracle, SAP, Microsoft solutions that come with over file based use cases. This means FlashArray//X will be able to serve all storage protocols from one storage platform.

Those new capabilities combined with the company’s Flash Blade offering will “solve all use cases.”

“Pinning these two use cases together, Flash Array and Flash Blade, allows us to be able to solve all use cases in the enterprise.” Pairing these two together gives you a full wide breadth of solutions for our customers. So we’re very excited to bring this to market, along side a continued expansion of our protocol offering.”

In February, Pure Storage said it was boosting the performance of its FlashArray//X line by replacing its traditional iSCSI connectivity with its new DirectFlash Fabric technology.

With DirectFlash Fabric, Pure Storage became the first to implement NVMe-oF RoCE, or NVMe over Fabric with RDMM over converged Ethernet. Pure Storage is also set on adding all-flash storage performance to customers' data protection environments with the introduction of ObjectEngine, which it termed the industry’s first data protection platform purpose-built for flash and cloud.

FlashArray//X, which was introduced about two years ago, was one of the first mainstream enterprise flash storage arrays to feature high-performance, high-density NVMe technology.

Pure Storage stock rose a little more than 1 percent on Tuesday to close at $22.79.