… Adding FlashBlade 5x Bigger and Faster

Pure Storage, Inc. announced a series of updates to its FlashBlade product line which allow customers to further unlock the value of data with five-fold improvements in both capacity and performance.

FlashBlade customers will be able to manage up to 75 blades as a single system. The company also announced a fast, all-flash S3 object store to unlock additional use cases in rich media, healthcare and advanced analytics. Additionally, the company introduced a 17TB blade to complement existing 8TB and 52TB configurations.

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 Since its introduction in March 2016, FlashBlade has helped organizations across a range of use-cases, including automotive, machine learning, oil and gas, professional sports, healthcare, SaaS, and predictive analytics. Driven by the expansion and analysis of mission-critical data, the firm has pushed to meet ever-evolving customer needs with feature updates for the FlashBlade system that help solidify company as a complete data platform for the cloud era.

“Modern computing frameworks have given rise to increasingly complex, high-performance analytics and valuable data,” said Par Botes, VP, FlashBlade, Pure. “With FlashBlade, our mission is to make big data into fast data with an all-flash platform that is big, fast, and simple to deploy – and one that provides value across all industries and segments. Today, we continue to deliver on that promise with brand new innovations that organizations and existing customers need to gain next-level insights from their data.“

Scale out: 8PB across 75 blades
With the latest Purity software for FlashBlade, customers will be able to scale from seven to 75 blades for a total maximum effective capacity of 8PB and raw capacity of 4PB. With a proprietary networking module that allows up to five chassis to be managed as one cohesive system, organizations can deploy larger-scale, performance systems that process more data at higher speeds.

“FlashBlade was built with dense capacity and high performance in mind from day one, but until now, the largest single system available was just short of 800TB raw. Now, we have the option to increase capacity as much as five-fold to create one system that communicates and integrates seamlessly,” said Jim Dolan, global manager, HPC, ION Geophysical Corporation. “What’s truly eye-opening is the potential for performance gains across a scaled system – we don’t just expect FlashBlade to get five times bigger, but five times faster, too. In data-intensive, performance-driven industries like oil and gas, there is an increased demand for ever-improving imaging processes. FlashBlade at greater scale will enable shorter delivery time, increased resource productivity and add direct business value.“

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Just Right: 17TB Blade at affordable price point
To complement existing 8 and 52TB configurations, the company has announced the availability of a 17TB blade. This newly-available blade fits into the modular design of FlashBlade with plug-and-play ease for both hardware and software, and offers a more attractive $/GB option for sall-to-medium-sized deployments.

“At a time when many vendors have felt the crunch of supply chain shortages in the NAND and SSD industries, Pure Storage has engineered modularity into the FlashBlade system which allows us to bring new innovations to market at attractive price points,” said Botes. “The new 17TB blade will provide improved simplicity of management, increased performance and real flexibility to customers with mid-range capacity needs.“

Accelerated Insights: Object storage becomes fast storage
Historically, object storage has been big and slow. Today, there is an increasing need for high-performance object storage. As S3 and other public cloud object storage protocols continue to drive the growth of object storage both on-premises and in the cloud, the opportunity for a different, more modern object store has arisen – fast, all-flash, with an increased emphasis on performance.

A massive shift to scalable object platforms is underway for applications that have historically used file systems. As organizations tap into next-generation applications and workloads, like deep learning and rich media, they require performance from their infrastructure. Companies that rely on the responsiveness of their websites and applications, like SaaS providers, rely on big, fast infrastructure to drive ever-better customer service levels. Meanwhile, data-intensive emerging analytics technologies have begun to leverage high-performance, large-scale object stores on the backend.

“Customers require a storage solution that supports a data intensive analytics infrastructure, so they can take advantage of data and discover insights in real time,” said Rick Gordon, president, AE Business Solutions. “As evidenced by our customers, FlashBlade is a natural fit for their ever-expanding needs and this new update opens the potential of FlashBlade to large-scale, performance-intensive organizations. FlashBlade helps us offer the most complete data platform.“

Additional features and updates for FlashBlade include:

• SMB v2.1 protocol interface, which allows data to be shared between SMB, NFS and HTTP clients;

• HTTP protocol interface, which allows data to be shared between SMB, NFS and HTTP clients;

• Support for IPv6 addresses for data and management, which enables the highest levels of data center scalability;

• Network Lock Manager (NLM), which unlocks additional use cases in EDA and genomics;

Additionally, the company announced beta availability of snapshots, with expected availability release in summer 2017.

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