100 Units Shipped of Pure Storage FlashArray

Pure Storage, Inc., an all-flash enterprise storage company, announced that its next generation FlashArray 300 Series with the 2.0 release of the Purity Operating Environment is available.

The FlashArray delivers higher resiliency via active/active high availability, FlashCare Technology and an enhanced Data Integrity Fabric. Additional advances include always-on encryption with zero key management, a new web user interface, command line interface, and VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) support.

Pure Storage makes it affordable for enterprises and cloud providers to broadly deploy all-flash storage for their performance workloads, including virtual servers, virtual desktops, and databases and analytics workloads. With over 100 units shipped and production deployments for over a year, the FlashArray’s performance, reliability, deduplication and compression are enterprise proven.

"Flash-based solid state systems are increasingly deployed in data centers, and Gartner believes this market will grow to $3.96 billion in 2015," said Dave Russell, research VP of Storage Strategies and Technologies at Gartner. "Seamlessly integrating storage efficiency and data management technologies within enterprise solid-state appliances will increase the real and perceived value of these products and open the door for widespread market acceptance."

This release also marks the end of the Pure Storage Early Adopter Program, a two-year effort where Pure Storage partnered with customers to field-test the FlashArray in some of the most demanding storage environments. From financial services to manufacturing to web/high tech to government organizations to cloud service providers, these customers ran a variety of mixed workloads against the FlashArray including virtualized servers and desktops, and Oracle and SQL databases, often mixing multiple workloads against the FlashArray.

Customers achieved, on average, 5.8-to-1 reduction in their data from the FlashArray’s deduplication and compression algorithms. The customer results universally proved that inline deduplication and compression combined with 100% MLC flash delivered a disruptive new value proposition in all-flash storage at the price the enterprise is currently paying for mechanical disk.

New Features in FlashArray

• Active/active HA – Multiple storage controllers are clustered via IB for HA which allows for active/active IO handling on all ports of all controllers. It provides non-disruptive operations by healing around any hardware component failure, including a complete failure of a FlashArray controller. Additionally, all storage components are hot-swappable (controllers, flash drives, NV-RAM modules), allowing for replacement of failed components without downtime.
• FlashCare Technology – While competing arrays must rely on SLC or enterprise MLC flash (eMLC) to meet the endurance needs of enterprises, Pure Storage leverages standard MLC flash to drive down cost. FlashCare Technology delivers flash-cell longevity, and reliability that is comparable to SLC at a substantially lower cost, while simultaneously ensuring consistent latency. It employs IO management techniques, including an SSD-optimized data layout, wear leveling, geometry-aligned writes, IO micro-scheduling with QoS monitoring and non-blocking reads & writes. FlashCare enables the FlashArray to sustain years of multi-100,000-write IOPS workloads while maintaining consistent sub-millisecond latency without compromising the flash media or the data it stores.
• Enhanced Data Integrity Fabric – One of flash’s challenges is a higher bit error rate than rotational disk. The FlashArray implements a multi-layer Data Integrity Fabric, which combines overlapping user block-level and array page-level checksums with continuous background analysis to detect and heal data integrity issues automatically. This Data Integrity Fabric extends data protection beyond the already ECC that runs within each SSD.
• Always-on full array encryption with zero key management – The FlashArray encrypts 100% of the data that is stored within the array. This protects user data from the theft or loss of SSDs, whether that happens in the data center, in transit, while an array is being serviced, or as SSDs are being disposed during technology refreshes. Encryption has zero performance impact, and leverages a built-in key generation and management scheme that requires no end-user key management.
• VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) support – It now supports the VMware VAAI APIs with vSphere 5.0, supporting write-same/block zeroing, ATS, UNMAP and thin provisioning.
• New full-functionality web GUI and CLI – Designed with simplicity in mind, it now features an enhanced web management GUI and CLI. It eliminates whole disciplines of storage management, including: RAID configuration, space reclamation, setting tiering policies, carving LUNs, performance troubleshooting for spindle contention, and so on. The new GUI enables the provisioning of storage with a single click, and provides in-depth historical performance analytics for no additional fee. Finally, it is DevOps ready with a CLI designed for scripting and automation, offering complete programmatic management of the FlashArray.

"With our customer base continuing to accelerate, it was important to find a storage solution that allows us to run analytics and have a faster rebuild time without affecting their performance experience online," said John Merryman, CTO, Yodle, Inc. "With the Pure Storage FlashArray, we are able to introduce analytics to our environment as well as add more workloads to the infrastructure without slowing it down. This solution works well for us because it enhances the ability for Yodle to keep innovating for customers quickly, while simultaneously delivering high service quality."

"The industry is acknowledging solid state drives for enterprise applications as a highly attractive IT solution for next-generation server systems that offer outstanding energy efficiency," said Byungse So, SVP, Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics. "Samsung will continue to work closely with Pure Storage to develop advanced high-performance technologies to expand the green memory market."

"Storage has been constrained by mechanical disk and has thus been untouched by Moore’s Law," said Scott Dietzen, CEO of Pure Storage. "Storage accounts for far too much latency, power, floor space and capital expenditure in the data center. We set out to push mechanical disk out of the performance path, and to do so by making all-flash storage less expensive than arrays of 15K rpm disk drives that do the performance heavy lifting today. With all-flash storage radically faster, more space and power efficient, simpler and more reliable than disk arrays and hybrids, why buy disk?"