Pure Storage has launched two new flash storage systems to its FA-400 Series product line aimed at data centers, along with a new release of its Purity operating system, Purity 4.0.

The vendor claims its new FlashArrays are ten times faster than traditional mechanical disk storage but have a tenth of the physical and carbon footprint.

The new systems, the FA-405 and FA-450, are aimed at the entry level and high capacity ends of the market respectively.

The new products will ship in June at a price of around $4 per gigabyte.

The vendor also announced an additional round of $200m venture funding will enable it to create a channel infrastructure of resellers and systems integrators to install and support the systems across Europe and the Africa.

The company has announced new support offices in Scandinavia, Italy and Spain. 

The new version of its Purity software now includes a disaster recovery feature, FlashRecover. This, it claimed, will offer replication, snapshot and policy management services.

Though flash storage is more expensive than mechanical storage, the case for using it data centers is improving, according to one analyst.

Its speed and economies of space and power consumption are becoming more attractive to enterprises that need scalability, simplicity and efficiency from their storage systems said Tim Stammers, senior analyst at 451 Research.

“It’s a value proposition that all-flash array solutions, such as the Pure Storage FlashArray, are well positioned to deliver – especially if they can offer lower cost of acquisition and reduce total cost of ownership,” Stammers said.

Pure Storage claimed the FlashArray range is scalable and upgradable.

The entry level FA-405 offers up to 40TB of usable space in a 1U controller form factor.

It is aimed at single-application starter deployments, such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) pilots or single database acceleration.

The vendor claimed it can be upgraded to the higher end FA-450 system without disruption, however.

The FlashArray 450 is intended as a replacement for racks of Tier 1 disk storage as companies seek to consolidate their data centres. It has a capacity of 250TB in a 2U controller footprint and is powered by two 2.7GHz 12-core Intel processors with a 512 GB RAM per controller. The FA-450 also introduces support for 16 Gb/s fibre channel connectivity.

Chris Asing, director of IT at end user ServiceNow, said flash storage had helped him consolidate a legacy environment by a fifth.