Pure//Accelerate: Pure Storage Delivers All-Flash Solutions for Every Storage Need

At Pure//Accelerate 2023, Pure Storage, Inc. achieved its goal of becoming the 1st technology provider that can satisfy the entirety of a customer’s storage needs with all-flash.

Only the company can do this because of its differentiation in native flash management, its Purity architecture, its Evergreen subscription, and its cloud operating model.

“We are now delivering the industry’s most consistent, modern, and reliable portfolio that can address all enterprises’ storage needs. As we enter a new age of Al, the superior economics, and operational and environmental efficiencies of Pure’s product portfolio over both hard disk and SSD-based, all-flash competitive offerings will be more critical to our customers than ever,” said Charles Giancarlo, chairman and CEO.

For it’s more than 11,500 global customers that span industries and workload-type, the firm has proven that it can:

improve reliability by a factor of 10 over competitors;
offer 2 to 5x more power and space efficiency compared to all-flash and 10x more efficiency than disk;
require 5 to 10x less manual labor to operate than legacy storage;
result in at least 50% lower TCO compared to competitive offerings of both flash and HDD;
enable customers to eliminate the cumbersome challenges associated with HDDs from their environment.

Company is able to deliver these outcomes to meet every storage need because of several unique and sustainable differentiators:

DirectFlash technology uniquely leverages software written directly to raw flash, while other competitors use more expensive, less efficient, and shorter-lived SSDs.
Firm‘s highly consolidated product line consists of a common OS, the Purity operating environment, one management system, Pure1, and operates on both a scale-up and a scale-out platform, while competitors require many disparate software and hardware platforms to cover the same breadth of use cases.
Evergreen model and services, which guarantee that deployed products never become obsolete, adapt to changing needs, and can be upgraded non disruptively.
Cloud Operating Model enables customers to operate their storage the way that cloud customers operate theirs: highly automated, orchestrated, and available as a service.

Announced at Pure//Accelerate:

Expansion of Pure Storage’s disk replacement-focused Pure//E family of products with the all-new FlashArray//E delivers on the company‘s promise to relieve customers from the constraints of disk. The entire Pure//E family is the first all-flash storage system that can meet the needs of the secondary storage market at prices competitive to 7200rpm HDDs systems – with a fraction of the power, space and operational costs.

Introduction of the next-gen FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C deliver the largest ever performance, efficiency, and security advancements to customers. New FlashArray models deliver up to 40% higher performance, 30% more inline compression to stretch storage capacity than previous models, and new ransomware protection capabilities delivered entirely via non-disruptive upgrade.
Ransomware SLA guarantee for Evergreen//One and enhanced AIOs capabilities deliver advanced data resilience and enable organizations to benefit from a data protection strategy.

Go-to storage partner for Al
As excitement over generative Al prompts a new wave of Al initiatives, the innovations announced will further the company’s leadership as the go-to storage partner for Al projects. The firm supports Al projects such as autonomous vehicle development companies and Meta Al’s Research Super Cluster (Al RSC), largest Al supercomputer in the world. With the company, customers can start their Al journey at any scale and grow as needs evolve.

The firm anticipated the coming demand for Al years ago, with the introduction of FlashBlade and its AIRI (Al-Ready Infrastructure) solution, co-developed with Nvidia Corp. AIRI//S is a ready-to-deploy NVIDIA OGX BasePOD reference architecture for Al, developed by Pure and Nividia and including the latest FlashBlade//S storage. The FlashBlade hardware portfolio is GPU Direct Storage (GOS) ready, with software enhancements delivering complete GOS support to be available in the near term, further strengthening firm’s partnership with Nvidia and enhancing OGX BasePOD certified solutions.

Comments

Pure Storage Accelerate 2023 conference happening this week in Las Vegas, NV, was the opportunity for a company's update and understand some product directions. The firm continues to preach that no HDDs will be sold in 2028. We’re always surprised to hear also that the objective of the company is to kill disks, but when you say that where is the value proposition for end-users and partners. Now adopting flash in its various form contributes to a compelling TCO, a better footprint, better performance, better energy consumption and a few other points.

As a pioneer of all flash storage for enterprises, Pure took advantage of its show to unveil new models of its block oriented product line, the well known FlashArray aka FA, a new Direct Flash Module and Evergreen extension. These FA become more unified storage offerings which represent a true trend on the market.

Horizontally across all models, the company runs only one operating software named Purity deployed on 2 distinct architectures leveraging their in-house designed flash storage component, the Direct Flash Module.

And one of the strategic directions taken and promoted as a key differentiator by the vendor relies on the Cloud Operating Model that invites users of on-premises configurations to run and operate these like the cloud. This transforming approach was instrumental in the footprint of their solutions facilitating their adoption thanks to Evergreen, Pure1 and of course Purity despite a proprietary philosophy. This proprietary model motivated by real choices and desire to deliver an optimized solution in many dimensions is finally masked by the cloud operating model which is a real value for end-users.

In Pure’s mind, the ultimate goal is to mimic the cloud what Rob Lee, CTO, summarizes by:

Run like in the cloud,

Run in the cloud,

Build for the cloud

and finally Power the cloud.

He also confirmed some work done with hyperscalers, we already know the deployment at Meta to support AI supercomputers but some talks exist with others…

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FA//X and FA//C R4 mark a serious milestone for the company as the generation 4 coupled with FA//E, it clearly extends the choice for enterprises’ end-users to support various workloads and use cases. At the same time, these FA exposed block only interface or unified block + file and thus participate to offer a consolidation value proposition to users.

Of course performance is improved, capacity is increased with new Intel CPUs, DDR5 DRAM memory, PCIe Gen 4, new network capability, DirectCompress Accelerator and various connectivity options.

DFMs are now available in 2 flavors, 75TB for QLC and 36TB for TLC, improving the density and the global capacity of each model. To improve NAND capacity on the board, the engineering team has decided to move some processing operations on the above layer controlled by Purity. The team has insisted on the roadmap to deliver DFM with 300TB capacity and we immediately convert this number for full chassis. Now is it a drive or not, vast debate…

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