From Pure Storage, Petabyte-Scale Flash Storage for Cloud IT

Pure Storage, Inc. introduced petabyte-scale storage for mission-critical cloud IT, anchored by the release of the next-generation of FlashArray//m all-flash storage array, which delivers performance with the simplicity and agility of public cloud.

The FlashArray//m offers customers petabyte-scale capacity with a measured 99.9999% availability and always-on QoS – virtually eliminating storage downtime and application performance risk. For more information on this announcements, the firm has launched ‘Outside the Box’ – an ongoing informational web series for the technical community – which debuts today.

FlashArray//m10

With this release of the FlashArray//m, the company is equipping customers with Smart Storage, storage that is purpose-built to be efficient and evergreen – and capable of delivering the simplicity, automation, resiliency, and customer friendly business model which are all essential for cloud IT.

“Storage underlies everything we do in today’s digital economy, an economy that is increasingly powered by cloud IT,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP, product, Pure. “Pure Storage has built the smart storage platform to deliver cloud IT – whether it be public cloud, SaaS, private cloud, or a mix of all three. Efficient all-flash storage, now at petabyte-scale, is the agile foundation of tomorrow’s clouds.“

“Pure Storage makes strides in technology innovation year after year,” said Kevin Prahm, VP, sales and operations, ACS (Applied Computer Solutions). “The additional capacity of FlashArray//m and availability means more choices for our customers and confidence that their mission critical applications will always be up and running with Pure.“

“Pure Storage helps free up our IT staff to focus on strategy and value-added projects that improve the business, process and performance,” said Shawn O’Brien, director, architecture and infrastructure, Room & Board, Inc. “By delivering on simplicity and engineering for future technologies, Pure delivers simplicity and ease-of-management while keeping our infrastructure modern, online and scalable.“

Petabyte-scale FlashArray//m
This fifth generation of FlashArray product, scales up to 512TB of raw flash, which translates to approximately 1.5PB of effective capacity – all in 7U of rack space. This scale and density enables customers to consolidate racks of legacy disk storage down to 7U or less.

Leveraging firm’s Evergreen architecture, the existing FlashArray customers of every generation can upgrade to the FlashArray//m, allowing customers to take advantage of rapid technology advances in both compute and flash. Its offers four different controller options to meet a variety of performance and capacity needs:

• //m10 (introduced earlier in 2016) – up to 25TB effective usable capacity (5-10TB raw storage) and up to 100,000 32K IO/s),

• //m20 – up to 250TBs effective usable capacity (5-80TB raw storage) and up to 200,000 32K IO/s,

• //m50 – up to 500TB effective usable capacity (20- 76TB raw storage) and up to 270,000 32K IO/s,

• //m70 – up to 1.5PB effective usable capacity (42- 512TB raw storage) and up to 370,000 32K IO/s.

Across these controller options, the FlashArray//m delivers a 20 to 30% performance boost and a 100 – 276% capacity boost over the previous generation. Object scale has also been improved by 10X, enhancing overall system scalability and enabling large-scale Copy Data Management with up to 50,000 space-efficient snapshots on the system.

Six nines of availability, redefined
In its first year of shipment, the FlashArray//m has achieved 99.9999% availability across the installed base, which equates to 31.5s of downtime on average per year, demonstrating the FlashArray//m can deliver the level of resiliency needed for mission-critical enterprise applications and always-on clouds.

The company is also redefining the way availability is measured and reported to align directly with customer expectations and experience o availability. FlashArray//m’s measure 99.9999 availability is inclusive of upgrades and maintenance, across both hardware and software, and without requiring a second array configured with replication.

Key to delivering this level of availability is the resiliency architected into the FlashArray//m, and also Pure1 Global Insight, company’s cloud-based predictive analytics platform. Since its introduction almost a year ago, Pure1 Global Insight has helped to automatically identify and resolve thousands of issues, and prevented over 170 Severity 1 issues to date. Pure1 Global Insight is an ingredient for delivering an always-on experience to firm’s customers, as the install base continues to grow.

Always-on QoS
As customers consolidate dozens or even hundreds of applications, concerns about ‘noisy neighbors’ – applications that starve the performance of other applications on an array – can emerge. Typical QoS implementations to prevent noisy neighbors are complex, requiring per-volume min, max, and burst IO/s to be set and then constantly adjusted as application needs evolve. Improper QoS configuration can cause more harm than good.

The FlashArray//m’s Always-On QoS feature requires zero configuration, so all customers can benefit without the complexity of legacy QoS implementations. Any application can burst up to the maximum utilization of the FlashArray//m, as long as it is not impacting other applications. If the application becomes a ‘noisy neighbor’ and begins to impact other applications, Always-On QoS will throttle the problem application down to ensure all other applications get their fair share of array performance. Architected with a sophisticated IO credit system under the covers, Always-On QoS is simple and autonomous, making it ideal for most use cases, and builds the foundation for future policy-driven QoS extensions.

NPIV support for host-transparent upgrades
Network Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) support on the FlashArray//m makes the non-disruptive software upgrade experience more robust and invisible to the host and server and virtualization admin teams. With NPIV, IO intended for ports on a FlashArray//m controller that have been temporarily restarted during the software upgrade process is transparently directed to the other FlashArray//m controller, without any dependency on host multipathing software. NPIV removes the risk of downtime due to misconfigured host multipathing software – a common worry for large enterprise environments – and makes storage software upgrades transparent to server administrators by eliminating IO error alerts that would otherwise be generated at the application host layer.

Availability:

• The new versions of FlashArray//m are available to order, with //m20, //m50, and //m70 configurations shipping.

• Upgrade Flex bundles enable existing FA-400 Series and FlashArray//m customers to upgrade and receive trade-in credit for existing controllers.

• The Purity Operating Environment, version 4.8, which contains the features mentioned above is shipping.

• Always-On QoS is available in an Early Access Program for select customers with availability for production workloads planned for 4Q16.