Pure Storage Achieves STAC-M3 Benchmark

Pure Storage®, a trailblazer in IT, renowned for delivering state-of-the-art data storage technology and services, has proudly announced that its FlashBlade//S500 has successfully attained the STAC-M3 Benchmark. This benchmark is an industry standard specifically tailored for tick-analytics benchmarks, designed for database software/hardware stacks handling extensive time series of market data.

Key Test Highlights

The system under evaluation featured FlashBlade//S500, an all-QLC flash, purpose-built, unified fast file and object (UFFO) storage platform. Out of the 17 STAC-M3 Antuco (baseline) mean-response time benchmarks, 13 exhibited improvements, and in the case of the 24 STAC-M3 Kanaga (scaling) mean-response time benchmarks, enhancements were observed in 17. Furthermore, compared to a cloud-based solution, Pure Storage FlashBlade//S500 outperformed in 9 out of 17 Antuco benchmarks and 12 out of 24 Kanaga benchmarks, demonstrating significant speed advantages.

These results affirm the exceptional performance of the FlashBlade//S500 series. Engineered to deliver outstanding performance, throughput, and continuous uptime, FlashBlade meets the critical requirements of data scientists and quantitative analysts engaged in multi-threaded, time-series workloads. The platform empowers organizations to execute complex queries across data sets of any scale with maximum throughput and minimal latency. As workloads scaled in volume and thread count, Pure Storage FlashBlade//S500 demonstrated efficient handling of highly parallel workloads. The architecture allows for seamless scalability, a vital feature for the rigorous demands of quant and high-frequency trading.

Jack Gidding, CEO of STAC, commented on the results, stating, “We are pleased to welcome Pure Storage to the ranks of technology providers who submit solutions for independent testing against the customer-developed STAC Benchmark standards. Financial firms on the STAC Benchmark Council designed STAC-M3 to test a representative range of business use cases, and the need for fast and efficient time-series analysis has never been higher.”

Optimizing Trading with Pure Storage Solutions

Apart from FlashBlade//S, Pure Storage offers several solutions perfectly suited to meet the intensive data demands of high-frequency trading. These solutions include:

1. FlashBlade//E: Economics without Compromise
   FlashBlade//E provides all the benefits of all-flash with superior economics compared to disk. It is a capacity-optimized unified file and object storage platform designed to address massive unstructured data growth. With optimal energy and capacity efficiency at multi-petabyte scale, it is ideal for repository workloads required for quant trading, data protection, AI/ML, and more.
2. FlashArray//XL: Scale Up and Scale Out with Native NVMe
   FlashArray//XL offers 100% native NVMe storage optimized for performance at scale. Exceptional performance density allows organizations to consolidate more business services—larger databases, more applications, more users—on fewer arrays.
3. Portworx: Leading Kubernetes Data Platform
   Portworx is the industry’s leading Kubernetes data platform for building, automating, protecting, and securing cloud-native applications. It enables the management of mission-critical applications across any cloud and any infrastructure with zero downtime or data loss, while dramatically lowering infrastructure costs.
4. Evergreen: Future-proof Your Infrastructure
   Evergreen provides a non-disruptive extensible architecture for upgrades and expansions, eliminating worries about service interruptions, decreasing functionality over time, or costly and risky data and hardware migrations. It ensures organizations can seamlessly adopt the latest technology, while the Evergreen as-a-service portfolio offers unparalleled flexibility in purchasing and consuming data storage.

Significance in the Industry

In the fast-paced realm of high-frequency and quantitative trading, every microsecond is crucial. Financial firms are in constant search of data platforms that offer enhanced performance, scalability, and reliability for their quant analysts, data scientists, risk managers, and others supporting their trading teams.

Trading firms and financial institutions aiming for cutting-edge data solutions should delve into the detailed benchmark results in the STAC Report™.