Pure Storage Rolls Out Lower End and Higher End Flash Arrays

Pure Storage, Inc. announced the expansion of its FA-400 Series product line, unveiling new entry-level and high-capacity FlashArrays, and the next generation release of its Purity operating environment, Purity 4.0.

The new software features FlashRecover, a set of integrated, space-efficient replication, snapshot, and policy management services that offer protection against disaster and data loss-both locally, and globally.

With these advancements, the FlashArray more supports mission critical workloads and tier 1 storage use cases, eliminating the need for enterprises to continue making investments in legacy storage solutions powered by mechanical disk.

“To keep pace with rapidly evolving infrastructure requirements, enterprises are now looking for greater scalability, simplicity and efficiency from their storage solutions than ever before,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Research. “It’s a value proposition that all-flash array solutions, such as the Pure Storage FlashArray, are well positioned to deliver – especially if they can offer lower cost of acquisition and reduce TCO.”

Pure Storage delivered an all-flash enterprise storage array for less than the cost of legacy performance disk solutions. Here, with the expansion of its FlashArray 400 Series product line and new Purity 4.0 software, the company offers a tested and mature all-flash array product lineup, setting a standard for enterprise storage performance, scalability, security and efficiency, with a 10x improvement over disk-centric solutions in every dimension.

Expanded FlashArray Family: All-Flash Storage For Every Enterprise
The new FA-405 and FA-450 FlashArrays complement Pure Storage’s current offering – the FA-420 array – with an entry-level and high-capacity solution designed to meet enterprise budget, capacity and performance requirement. The family of products is expandable and upgradable, so customers can start with the configuration of their choice, and extend its performance and capacity as their application requirements evolve.

FA-400 Series product line includes:

New FlashArray 405: An Entry-Level Array for Midsized Enterprises, Distributed Operations and Single-Application Deployments
It punches above its weight, offering up to 40TB of usable space in a 1U controller form factor, making it for top-of-rack and entry-level configurations. Running on the same Purity 4.0 software as it’s higher capacity counterparts, it delivers the power, performance and enterprise features of the FA-420 and FA-450 arrays, with the budget and space conscious requirements of smaller and distributed businesses in mind. It is also for single-application starter deployments, such as VDI pilots or single database acceleration, and can be upgraded non-disruptively to a FA-420 or FA-450 system, as a customer’s capacity or performance needs expand.

FlashArray 420: Original FlashArray
Existing FA-420 continues to be the center of the FlashArray family, suitable for accelerating consolidated applications and supporting up to 125TB of usable space. The FA-420 can be non-disruptively upgraded to an FA-450, as a customer’s capacity or performance needs increase.

New FlashArray 450:
High Capacity, High Performance FlashArray for Large Enterprises
Suitable for replacing racks and racks of tier 1 disk storage for consolidated, virtualized workloads, it offers up to 250TB of usable space, in a 2U controller footprint. Powered by two 2.7GHz 12-core Intel processors and 512GB RAM per controller, it was built to deliver scalability, power and performance for large enterprises. The FA-450 also introduces support for 16Gb FC connectivity.

“A crucial challenge facing all IT managers is the need to implement a resilient infrastructure that lessens the impact of unabated terabyte growth, while reducing power and space requirements, and accelerating data access,” said Joe Unsworth, research VP, Gartner. “Given restricted budgets and enhanced SLAs, software that can evolve with changing needs of the data center and the workload at hand is critical. Seamlessly integrating storage efficiency and data management technologies within an enterprise solid-state appliance increases the real and perceived value of the product, and opens the door for widespread market acceptance.”

New Purity 4.0 Software for Mission-Critical Environments
The fourth generation release of the Purity OS sets a standard for enterprise AFA software, offering expansive and comprehensive DR, data protection and security features. Newly enhanced with FlashRecover, a native and integrated replication, snapshot and policy management service, Purity 4.0 was purpose-built to keep mission-critical applications running in the face of anything-from natural disaster or user error, to hardware failure and malicious attacks.

Key new features of the Purity 4.0 release include:

FlashRecover Replication and Snapshots for Data Protection
Purity 4.0’s new FlashRecover technology features data reduction-aware replication and snapshot services, to deliver space-efficient, point-in-time copies and expanded data protection for local and remote data centers.

FlashRecover Replication runs natively on all FlashArrays, utilizing Purity’s proprietary FlashReduce deduplication and compression technologies to reduce the required network bandwidth to support DR FlashRecover enables replication across the FlashArray 400 Series in any combination of fan-in/fan-out configurations, and supports replication of a single volume, consistent groups of multiple volumes, or all data content on the array.

FlashRecover Protection Policies for Protection Policy Management
New FlashRecover technology also features protection policies, for simplified global management of data protection. Unifying replication and snapshot services into a single policy orchestration layer, protection policies enables users to manage various levels of local and remote data protection, and data retention by volume, consistency group, and/or array.

FlashRecover protection policies are designed to support a variety of tier 1 storage use cases, including DR for mission critical applications, DR-as-a-service, multi-site test and development, content distribution, and remote office protection.

FlashProtect:
Expanded Information Security for Mission-Critical Environments
Purity 4.0’s FlashProtect combines new rapid data locking and dark site support services with existing always-on data-at-rest 256-bit AES encryption and HA to deliver military-grade data security and compliance.

Powered By Purity 4.0,
New Flash Array Family Is Mission Critical-Ready and for Tier 1
Newly fortified with Purity 4.0’s FlashRecover and FlashProtect technologies, the FlashArray 400 Series can now support demanding mission critical applications and tier 1 storage use cases in even highly regulated industries, including financial services, healthcare and the Federal Government.

“Pure Storage has enabled our IT department to do more with less, streamlining our infrastructure management so that we can focus critical IT resources on other things,” said Jeff Thomas, senior director of IT, MarkLogic Corp. “With Pure Storage, there’s no need for complex operational planning to get replication to work – you simply set it up, schedule and forget about it. In addition to its simplicity, Pure’s replication solution is flexible, doesn’t hog the network and makes data recovery a breeze.”

“Pure Storage is more than just our storage solution, it is a true competitive business advantage for us which we’ll leverage as we scale. The savings from the reduction in our data center footprint alone are incredible,” said Chris Asing, director of IT, ServiceNow. “Deploying all-flash storage from Pure has allowed us to consolidate our legacy environment from 1.5 racks to 1/4 of a rack. Pure’s compression ratio quadrupled the amount of data we were able to crunch on a single array so we didn’t need to go out and purchase 4x the storage we thought we needed. Performance was also impressive: flawless, <1ms latency for our SAP environment with zero downtime and that’s with test, dev and production all running on the same Pure box.”
 
Asing adds: “On the simplicity front, the ease of management offers cost savings because our existing admin team can stand it up, literally set it and forget it. There’s no need to hire additional specialized talent in order to run Pure. From a migration standpoint, transitioning from our traditional SAN to Pure was all inline and took nearly 1/5 of the time migrations typically take – that’s soup to nuts planning, execution and verification. It couldn’t have been easier.”

“This is a watershed moment for Pure and the AFA category in general,” said Scott Dietzen, CEO, Pure Storage. “With the FlashArray 450 and Purity 4.0, we are delivering feature parity with incumbent high end disk arrays. Going forward, no one should deploy performance (oxymoron) disk for database or virtualized applications – no one. FlashArray costs less, and yet delivers 10X or better performance, power & space utilization, reliability, and simplicity of operations. The OpEx savings alone vs. traditional disk arrays allow our FlashArray to pay for itself over it’s first 3-4 years in the data center, and it’ll still have years of productive service to deliver after traditional mechanical storage has been written off.“

The FA-405 and FA-450 are available through global channel partner network; Purity 4.0 will ship in June 2014.

Pricing for Pure Storage FlashArrays solutions start at $3-4/usable gigabyte, depending upon a customer’s desired configuration.