7 October, 2025

Part 5 of 5:  What do a 2003 Ford Focus, a 2015 BMW 3 Series, and Lewis Hamilton’s 2021 Mercedes-AMG F1 W12 E Performance have in common?

It’s pretty hard to think that these three cars have much at all in common, sure they all have four wheels, are petrol powered and need a driver, but it’s hard to imagine much else beyond those basic ‘car’ features.

So let’s switch to thinking about the engines in these cars then; the Ford Focus can produce around 99 hp, the BMW around 134 hp, while the W12 produces an astonishing  1050 horsepower!!

Now the F1 fans and petrol-heads amongst you may call me out on the hybrid engine in the AMG W12, but what do each of these cars have in common?

The engine size –  each of these cars are 1600 CC (1.6 L) petrol engines.

If we pause on that for a moment – the W12 produces around TEN times more power than the Ford Focus Zetec from an internal combustion engine that is physically the same ‘capacity’.  This isn’t just an ‘age’ thing either – the BMW is a 2015 model, and yet it still only produces an 8th of the power of the F1 masterpiece.

What drives the difference is of course the technology, precision engineering, focus on the use case (racing), the technical team, the R&D dollars and the relentless focus on improvement and innovation amongst many other things.

The analogy here helps in understanding why some storage vendors have vastly different and sometimes superior technology than others.  Until now, in parts 1-4 of this blog series, I’ve been fairly vendor agnostic in my discussions.  Now it’s time to talk Pure.

We call the guys that sell the Ford Focus type technology the ‘legacy’ storage vendors.  Nowadays, they are typically retrofitting old technology with a mix of disks and SSD’s.  This boosts a bit of life back into those old storage arrays, but they’re still fundamentally based on old technology that was built and designed for slow, heavy, power hungry and fault prone mechanical spinning disks.  The BMW’s are catching up – they’re using commodity all-flash SSD drives and have realized that accessing flash instead of depending upon the geometry associated with magnetic disk platters is as different as chalk and cheese.  Then there’s Pure – they’re like the AMG W12’s of the Storage Industry, delivering every ounce of performance and efficiency from a storage array while remaining unbeatable in terms of footprint, TCO and reliability.

Oh, and before anyone points out that the AMG W2 is unlikely to be a comfortable ride down the M5 and A30 to Cornwall, has no room for the kids, luggage, or the dog, and is pretty heavy on the juice and tyres.  I get it, but I’m sure you get my point 😉.

Link to the full explanation post on web.

https://www.purestorage.com/knowledge/what-is-data-reduction.html

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