VDURA pledges 50% undercut on rival all-flash storage

VDURA has launched a Flash Relief Programme that promises to undercut pricing from all-flash high performance file system rivals by 50% on comparable configurations.

The company said the offer applies to configurations from Vast Data and Weka, along with other all-flash alternatives. VDURA said it will respond with a competing proposal within 24 hours once a submission includes performance and capacity requirements along with configuration details.

Flash price spike

VDURA linked the programme to sharp increases in solid state drive prices over recent quarters. The company cited a 257% rise in 30TB SSD pricing between Q2 2025 and Q1 2026, from $3,062 to $10,950. It contrasted that with a 35% rise in hard disk drive pricing over the same period.

VDURA also pointed to industry commentary at CES 2026, where it said Vast Data described the situation as the "worst storage rut in 40+ years" with a 200 exabyte deficit, 52-week lead times, and price increases exceeding 50%.

In its announcement, VDURA said customers and resellers have reported stalled deals and requotes that run two to three times higher than original pricing. It argued that suppliers tied to all-flash architectures face allocation constraints when SSD supply tightens.

Mixed fleet pitch

VDURA positioned its approach around a mixed fleet of SSDs and HDDs. The company said its HYDRA product supports a combination of media types inside a parallel file system design.

VDURA provided an example cost comparison for a 25PB deployment that it said delivers 1,000 GB/s of performance. It put an all-flash architecture at $8.50 million in Q2 2025 and $24.54 million in Q1 2026. It compared that with a mixed-fleet configuration that uses 20% SSD and 80% HDD. It put that at $6.56 million in Q1 2026.

The company said HYDRA supports native mixed-fleet SSD and HDD configurations and "true linear scaling". It also said the flash to HDD ratio can change over time through online dynamic cluster expansion.

"This flash crisis is exactly what 'flash-only' vendors have already acknowledged as a severe rut where they are forcing hard decisions on customers," said Ken Claffey, CEO, VDURA.

VDURA also framed the programme as a direct challenge to all-flash competitors on total cost and supply chain risk.

"Several years ago, we had the foresight to pioneer the only modern high performance data storage infrastructure that isn't chained to a single storage commodity. By intelligently utilizing all types of storage media in a true mixed-fleet architecture, we overcame the end-to-end performance bottlenecks and operational complexity that plague legacy tiered systems. Today's market volatility is now proving us right: our customers and partners are uniquely positioned to achieve high-performance, GPU-saturating infrastructure at dramatically lower cost and with far greater supply chain resiliency than rigid all-flash alternatives can deliver. That's why our new Flash Relief Programme challenges any all-flash config: submit yours, and we'll beat the price by 50% while matching or exceeding your specs - proving mixed-fleet isn't just smarter, it's immediately accessible relief," said Claffey.

Offer details

VDURA specifies that valid configurations must define performance requirements - specifically throughput, IOPS, and latency. Submissions must also detail capacity requirements, including raw, usable, and effective capacity, alongside comprehensive configuration data.

Under the program, VDURA claims its proposal will "match or exceed" all performance and capacity specifications while undercutting total costs by 50%.

Product claims

The company set out a list of technical claims for its approach. It said its system exceeds NVIDIA and AMD GPU guidelines for storage performance. It said flash nodes provide up to 60 GB/s reads and 40 GB/s writes throughput per node.

VDURA described HYDRA as software-defined storage that can run across a multi-vendor ecosystem. It said this avoids reliance on proprietary hardware found in some hybrid architectures. It also highlighted file level network erasure coding with inline data reduction, a unified namespace, online software upgrades, and linear scalability without performance degradation.

Pricing tool

Separately, VDURA said it released a free interactive tool called the Storage Economics & Flash Volatility Index. The company described it as a quarterly tracker for flash pricing that models cost scenarios across different storage architectures. VDURA said the tool visualises trade-offs between performance, capacity, and cost at different SSD percentages using market data.

VDURA said it plans to continue updating the tool on a quarterly basis alongside its programme for comparative proposals against all-flash configurations.