Pure Storage Ushers in New Era of Unstructured Storage with FlashBlade//E
Starts 4PB and under $0.20/GB including 3 years of service.
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 2, 2023 at 2:01 pmPure Storage, Inc. announced FlashBlade//E, a scale-out unstructured data repository built to handle exponential data growth with energy efficiency. At an acquisition cost competitive with disk and much lower operational costs, the introduction of FlashBlade//E means that customers no longer need to settle for disk for bulk data.
News Highlights:
FlashBlade//E provides a better way to manage unstructured data growth efficiently, reliably, and sustainably with a best-in-class user experience and economics that enable customers to eliminate the last remnants of disk in their data center.
- Economical at scale: FlashBlade//E is offered at under $0.20 per GB including three years of service. The platform starts at 4PB and scales from there with reliable performance.
- Energy efficiency: It consumes up to 5x less power than the disk-based systems it will replace. The larger the system the greater the efficiency, helping organizations achieve their increasingly critical sustainability goals.
- Simplicity, reliability, and a non-disruptive future: The product is built to flex and grow on demand with 10-20x more reliability than HDD-based systems and evolving without disruption or forklift upgrades. With cloud-like simplicity, flexibility and predictable performance, it remains simple to manage at any scale.
FlashBlade//E will be available by the end of April 2023. In addition to traditional purchase, customers will have the option to deploy the system through the new Efficiency service tier of Pure Storage Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) subscription, providing pay-as-you-go economics and a cloud experience with the control of on-premises deployment.
Industry Significance:
For global organizations, unstructured data capacity is expected to grow by 10x before 2030. For large-capacity, price-sensitive workloads that use current disk-based storage solutions, this growth is unsustainable.
Disk-based systems are a burden on many enterprises’ IT teams and budgets as they are challenging to manage, require massive amounts of power, take up large amounts of space and their components fail too often, causing disruption and risking valuable data. Ultimately, this diminishes the ability to derive business value from data. While modern file and object storage solutions are capable of addressing many of these challenges, they haven’t been a viable option for large unstructured data repositories that are price-sensitive – until now.
“With FlashBlade//E, we’re realizing our founder’s original vision of the all-flash data center. For workloads where flash was once price-prohibitive, we are thrilled to provide customers the major benefits Pure delivers at a TCO lower than disk,” said Amy Fowler, VP and GM, FlashBlade, Pure.
“As our customers’ unstructured data growth continues to accelerate, there is demand for more sustainable and scalable storage solutions for everyday workloads. We are excited to be able to meet this need with FlashBlade//E, providing the simplicity and power savings Pure is known for at an acquisition cost lower than disk-based solutions,” said Brian Bartell, practice manager for primary storage, World Wide Technology, Inc.
“While the benefits of flash for high-powered workloads have been largely acknowledged, disk’s price point has limited broader perception of its use. Nevertheless, the need for a modern platform to accommodate the rise in unstructured data at scale is evident. FlashBlade//E’s promise of a more cost-effective, energy-efficient and easier-to-manage approach to everyday workloads makes a compelling case for leaving disk behind,” said Scott Sinclair, practice director, Enterprise Strategy Group.
Learn More:
FlashBlade//E Product Page
Blog Post: Introducing FlashBlade//E
FlashBlade//E Data Sheet
Analyst Recognition:
Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage
Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems & Object Storage
Leader in the 2022 Coldago Map for Object Storage
Leader in the 2022 Coldago Map for File Storage (Enterprise File Storage and High Performance File Storage)
Comments
Surfing on 4FQ23 and full FY23 results approaching $2.8 billion, exactly in the range mentioned a quarter ago, Pure Storage introduced a new product named FlashBlade//E, in fact a new member of its unstructured file and object storage FlashBlade family.
FlashBlade//S is dedicated to various use cases even secondary storage oriented ones but its deployment model is very wide, probably too wide at a certain cost. As the data center started to evolve toward the full flash direction, full flash secondary is a reality but should be considered at the right cost. A few other benefits arrive with this such footprint, energy consumption, TCO and instant access. The company has already started to offer this kind of offering with FlashRecover//S, coupled with Cohesity DataProtect software, but it is based on FlashBlade//S. We wonder if this offering will be dropped in favor of the E iteration as it appeared now a bit obsolete.
Fully aligned with Purity operating environment already available with FlashBlade//S, the E model is dedicated to secondary tier we should say the capacity tier, where data are copied, replicated and accumulated from primary storage entities.
The company shakes the industry with acompelling price at 20 cents/GB, not including data reduction, so $200/TB for an enterprise-class solution including 3 years of service and non-disruptive upgrades. Again the team applies here the recipe of his success with the FlashArray line and the first FBs.
The green dimension is even more important as secondary storage is larger in capacity than primary entities and should last longer. The energy consumption, a key argument for Pure, is again delivered with approximately 1W/TB. We anticipate some new flash modules to increase density and we understand that the coming Pure Storage Accelerate conference in June would be the perfect place to unveil such news.
Today FB//E starts at 4PB and evolves with 2PB increments and multiple storage chassis (EX) can be connected to the same central compute + storage chassis (EC). In other words, each chassis brings 40x48TB flash modules. For the basic configuration at 4PB, the cost is around $800,000.
A few questions arise. What about file/object tiering or mobility between the 2 models of FlashBlade? What about a global namespace between them? For the tiering or mobility need, 3 approaches could be considered: first, it could be done at the application level but it requires some changes in the app itself, or with partners such Komprise but again it is solved with external software but offered transparency but gives the ability to connect other storage units or at the end from Pure itself but nothing is ready yet. This need could give some ideas to the AFA company for acquisition as the last financial result shows more than half billion dollar of cash. Implicitly, the data mobility dimension should include a global namespace capability. And we could include the need to span the cloud in addition to on-prem entities.
From a market point of view, already positioned as a leader in recent 2022 Coldago Map for file and object storage, this announcement shakes established positions with classic data protection de-dupe appliance, secondary filers or NAS, Pure object storage, some other unified file and object solutions, S3 to tape and Pure tape of course.
The FB//E appears to be a key U3 - Universal, Unified and Ubiquitous - storage solution and it will be interesting to see how the competition will react.
Subscribe to our free daily newsletter
