Pure Storage addresses the demands of unstructured data

Pure Storage, the brand that provides the most advanced data storage technology and services in the world, announced the FlashBlade/S family of products this week at Pure/Accelerate techfest22, with a new modular architecture built on uniquely co-designed hardware and software.

The new platform employs a nearly infinitely scalable metadata architecture, providing more than twice the density, performance, and power efficiency of previous versions. The platform evolves over time to meet the needs of the customers.

“The architectural differentiation of FlashBlade//S is a result of better science driving innovation in both software and hardware. It enables exceptional performance, efficiency and scalability, providing customers with flexibility and confidence in their long-term unstructured data strategy. It is not only the last scale-out platform organizations will ever need, but also the right choice for meeting environmental and sustainability ambitions, which are increasingly important to customers.” – Matt Burr, General Manager, FlashBlade, Pure Storage

Pure Storage rewrote the scale-out storage rules in 2017 when it introduced FlashBlade as a unified fast file and object platform – the first high performance storage solution for modern data. Pure also designed its software and developed DirectFlash technology to anticipate the future demand for flash across a broad range of workloads.

With the recent announcement of FlashBlade/S, Pure revolutionizes the market once more by introducing a modular architecture that separates compute from capacity. Storage, compute, and networking components can be upgraded flexibly and without downtime, resulting in a highly configurable and customizable file and object platform that can address the most diverse set of modern workloads. With Pure’s proprietary all-QLC architecture, it can deliver the highest levels of performance and capacity optimization without the need for costly caching solutions.

“To better accommodate the evolving nature of unstructured data workloads, organizations need a modern storage platform that legacy designs simply cannot match. The new disaggregated architecture and deeply co-engineered software and hardware makes FlashBlade//S a highly attractive choice for customers looking for a high performance, scalable platform that also provides environmental efficiencies.” – Patrick Moorhead, Founder, Moor Insights and Strategy 

According to IDC, storage platform disaggregation allows for greater flexibility in building highly efficient IT infrastructures. It not only allows administrators to assemble the right balance of IT resources for a given workload in order to minimize costs, but it also allows them to upgrade different resources independently as needed.

Designed for forward-thinking organizations, FlashBlade//S delivers: 

• Future-Proofing with Evergreen™ Subscription: By leveraging the full power of Evergreen subscription-based services, customers get unmatched flexibility and non-disruptive upgrades with FlashBlade//S. Organizations never have to worry about their storage platform becoming obsolete or disruptive data migrations again. This is further improved with today’s announcement detailing the expanded Evergreen portfolio.  
• Peace of Mind for Sustainability Demands: As end users are under more pressure to prioritize sustainability, the new FlashBlade//S family helps them deliver on these needs with better performance on key metrics such as capacity per watt, bandwidth per watt, and capacity per rack-unit, resulting in an overall smaller data center footprint. For these reasons Meta chose Pure to power its AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).   
• Performance at Scale, Simplicity, and Efficiency of Unstructured Data: The new FlashBlade//S family, through closely engineered hardware and Purity//FB 4.0 software, pushes the boundaries of performance, scale and efficiency. FlashBlade//S will also accelerate the pace of innovation and help bring denser and more power efficient  technologies to market faster. This enables customers to achieve simplicity, exabyte level scale, and the multi-dimensional performance required for consolidation of key unstructured data workloads.   

General availability of the FlashBlade//S products will start in Q2 FY23.