Compuverde has been around for a decade, and their mature technology will be integrated into Pure’s FlashArray offering, so that it can offer fully unified protocols, data services, and unified cloud management.

Pure Storage has announced the acquisition of Compuverde, a Swedish-based developer of file software solutions for enterprises and cloud providers. The deal, which is expected to close this month, is designed to expand Pure Storage’s file storage capabilities, and thus, their use cases around unified data services. The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

“Pure has had file capabilities across the board, primarily around FlashBlade,” said Prakash Darji, General Manager, FlashArray, at Pure Storage. “However, we have been seeing a lot more use cases around shared NFS and SMB, and running VMware on NFS, rather than scale-out storage, While Compuverde’s technology is fairly broad, we see it as really fitting a specific use case.”

Pure has focused on scale-out storage in the past.

“Pure’s first product lines were mainly Tier 1 mission critical environments, around things like traditional Oracle SQL databases,” Darji said. “We introduced FlashBlade as we evolved, which covered both file and object storage, but our scale-out still focused mainly on mission-critical use cases and things like high-performance computing. In 2019, we expanded our use cases with Object Engine for performance backup, and people used it as an accelerant in rapid restore use cases. One thing we continued not to serve, however, was general purpose mid-range use cases around file sharing and virtual machines over NFS. That’s the capability we are addressing with this – unified protocols, unified data services and unified cloud management.”

Compuverde brings an enterprise-grade file protocol stack to make possible what Darji said was a redefinition of unified storage. He emphasized that they are not a startup, as they have been in business since 2008 and have a proven technology.

“They’ve been around for quite some time,” he said. “Their technology has been validated by some fairly large environments over time, and has a lot of maturity. That provides a good foundation for unified data services.”

Pure’s all-flash FlashArray will be the vehicle for this.

“The integration will largely be with FlashArray product lines,” Darji stated. “Compuverde has a unified protocol across NFS and SMB, and will allow FlashArray to handle both fully from a single platform. This will expand the use cases on how people want to deploy it.”

Darji emphasized that this unified data services approach fits nicely with Pure’s traditional approach to storage.

“As a company, we have always emphasized the importance of making things simple to consume,” he stressed. “The question we faced was how to get a single management interface with no disruptive upgrades, which is always-on, and we determined that this was the best way to do it.”

Pure Storage has a 100 per cent go-to-market model, but with quite a select, focused channel, rather than a larger collection of partners. Darji said that Compuverde’s business model has been similar.

“Their Go-to-Market has been very much through partners and OEMs,” he said. “They have a select channel as well, focusing on a number of larger MSP partners. That and their technology partners have been their primary route to market.  The two channels do not have much overlap.” While Compuverde is strong in their EMEA base, they aren’t limited to that and have some global partnerships.

The Compuverde technology will be integrated into FlashArray, but Darji indicated that this isn’t something that should be expected in the very near term.

“We will continue with their existing partnerships, and the product road map is being built out as we speak,” he said. “The details are to be determined, but an integration should be expected in the next 12 months or so. We could layer it in to bring it to market quicker, but if we did that, it wouldn’t give a deeply unified experience.”