Pure Storage Unveils Cloud-Scale All-Flash Data Platform

By apacciooutlook | Monday, April 18, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Pure Storage, a provider of computer hardware services and solutions, announces Pure Storage FlashBlade, an all-flash storage platform designed to store enormous amounts of data at ultra-fast speeds.

FlashBlade is an elastic scale-out system capable of delivering performance as that of all-flash systems, but with the ability to scale up to the petabyte level. It aims to provide enterprises with an all-flash storage platform at less than $1/usable gigabyte.

FlashBlade’s hardware and software consist of three core elements: Blade, Elasticity Scale-Out Software and Elastic Fabric.

Each blade contains compute power for data and metadata processing, raw NAND flash for storage and NV-RAM capacity for power-safe protection of writes in flight. Blades are engineered to be ultra-dense and low-power, in 8TB and 52TB capacities.

Elasticity is the software heart of FlashBlade. Elasticity implements a common object store in the system and also performs storage services such as data reduction, encryption and N+2 erasure coding, scale-out protocol services such as NFS (file) and S3 (object), as well as low-level flash management and LDPC error correction, because Elasticity is one code base across flash management, protocols, volume and storage services, all layers share a common extensible metadata engine and garbage collection for higher global system efficiency.

Elastic Fabric is a built-in, software-defined, low-latency 40 Gb/s Ethernet network. The Elastic Fabric combines blade-to-blade, chassis interconnect and client connectivity into one network, with software-defined QoS to ensure proper traffic prioritization. Both the Elastic Fabric and Elasticity leverage proprietary protocols on top of the commodity Ethernet network for the highest performance low-latency communication.

Pure Storage targets FlashBlade to perform the workloads of scientists and engineers, as they look to take advantage of the computing power offered by limitless compute cores. Pure Storage also targets FlashBlade to run analytics on data collected from millions of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, as the IoT is exponentially getting widely adopted. FlashBlade is also apt for cloud-native applications, according to Pure Storage as more organizations are moving toward a DevOps approach of building and running applications and containers, while micro-services are becoming more popular.

“The value that can be gained from efficiently storing and analyzing unstructured data has a transformative affect on business,” says John Hayes, co-founder and chief architect, Pure Storage. “FlashBlade unlocks new capabilities and use cases that are simply not possible with today’s existing solutions by delivering real-time analytics at massive scale and blazing speeds to enable the future of innovation.”