Pure//Accelerate techfest22: Pure Storage FlashBlade//S Platform
To address demands of unstructured data
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on June 10, 2022 at 2:03 pmAt Pure//Accelerate techfest22, Pure Storage, Inc. announced the FlashBlade//S family of products with a modular architecture built on co-designed hardware and software.
This platform leverages a nearly unlimited scalable metadata architecture, offering more than double the density, performance, and power efficiency of previous versions. The platform evolves over time in alignment with customer requirements.
In 2017, the company introduced FlashBlade as a unified fast file and object platform – a high performance storage solution for modern data. The firm also architected its software and created DirectFlash technology to anticipate the future need for flash across a wide spectrum of workloads.
With this announcement, the company changes the market again with FlashBlade//S by introducing a modular architecture that disaggregates compute from capacity. Storage, compute, and networking elements can be upgraded flexibly and non-disruptively, delivering a highly configurable and customizable file and object platform to address the broadest set of modern workloads. It can deliver both the highest levels of performance and capacity optimization with the firm’s proprietary all-QLC architecture without the need for expensive caching solutions.
According to IDC, disaggregation of storage platforms provides more flexibility in creating highly efficient IT infrastructures. It not only enables administrators to assemble the right balance of IT resources for a given workload to minimize costs, it also allows them to perform upgrades on 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 the compant to power its AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).
- Performance at scale, simplicity, and efficiency of unstructured data: The FlashBlade//S family, through closely engineered hardware and Purity//FB 4.0 software, pushes the boundaries of performance, scale, and efficiency. It 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.
“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,” said Matt Burr, GM, FlashBlade, Pure Storage
“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,” said Patrick Moorhead, founder, Moor Insights and Strategy
As part of this launch, the company also announced the next generation of AIRI//S, an industry’s first AI-Ready Infrastructure powered by Nvidia Corp. This 2 companies solution further enhances FlashBlade‘s expansive set of use cases across AI, machine learning, and modern analytics.
General availability of the FlashBlade//S products will start in 2QFY23.
Resources:
FlashBlade//S product page
Blog: The Last Scale-out Solution You’ll Ever Need Is Here
Comments
These 3 news from Pure Storage during its annual users conference mark a major milestone for the company and we notice that they're all about file and object storage with the new FlashBlade//S, AI and partnership with Nvidia around AIRI//S and finally new services within the Evergreen family. Nothing about FlashArray for a company that receives its vast majority of its revenue from its block storage product line. We don't remember any Pure conferences without any FlashArray news. It is a significant fact.
Does it means that Pure realizes the market pressure with players like Quantum, Qumulo, Vast Data and Weka and has decided to react to that. Probably, but at the same time, this effort is not a 6 months mission but more a 4-5 years deep and strong R&D project so it came from serious considerations of the market and users needs and natural evolution. In other words, unstructured data is a huge opportunity - nothing new here - and must be considered as one of the key revenue driver for the company in the coming years. Recent Pure Storage 1QFY23 earnings with 50% growth Y/Y and $2.66 billion revenue projection invite us to think about this significant contribution from FlashBlade product line.
Introduced during Pure//Accelerate 2016, FlashBlade occupies an interesting market position. Recognized as an advanced solution combining NAS and S3 in a full flash flavor, the product got recognition from the market, users, partners and analysts. And clearly Pure has participated to the progress of that domain with new ideas and design aspects.
But we have to admit from real facts that Pure has made real efforts on the block side, with several iterations, developments and product generation for FlashArray and clearly less on the FlashBlade part. We saw some evolution for sure like the multi-chassis support and TLC introduction among others but it was far behind what we saw on the block side. Now this is clearly the result of the multi years effort mentioned above that delivers a real new FlashBlade generation with several new key innovations and features.
First, more than a product, FlashBlade//S is a family that Pure just announced with 2 models to start, the S200 and S500. This new platform, seen as a single one wit same Purity 4.0 software, targets all workloads with efficiency and performance requirements, much wider that the previous generation. Simplicity is a key word to describe the new model with a double in capacity, in performance and in power efficiency.
Pure continues to promote a design with only DRAM and QLC without any need of SCM or cache layer. One of the key architecture choice was to decouple the compute engine on each blade from the storage represented by the DirectFlash Modules. It means that the networking, compute and storage are independent and can be upgraded without interruption. Of course it remains a shared-nothing approach globally.
The FlashBlade//S is a 5U chassis with 10 blades powered by one Intel Ice Lake CPU, DDR4 DRAM, 100GbE ports, PCIe Gen 4 and 4 DirectFlash Modules per blade loaded with 24 or 48TB of QLC flash NAND capacity. Immediately it means that a single 5U chassis full of blades with 4 DFM each can scale up to 1,920TB. Then you can aggregate horizontally multiple chassis to build a large scale-out cluster and the capacity argument competition often articulated disappears.
As usual the proven philosophy stays the same with hyper-scalable metadata engine, stateless blade, N+2 wide erasure coding across all chassis i.e across all blades globally.
This new generation participates to the eco-responsability with high ESG goals with top capacity per watt, Watt per terabyte or bandwidth per watt. This new model delivers more terabyte per rack unit, requires less cooling and less power ie. 1.3W/TB.
This is a perfect illustration of an U3 - Universal, Unified and Ubiquitous - solution being more global in terms of use cases addressed.
With this announcement, FlashBlade reinforces that file storage is also primary storage. It will be interesting to see how competition will react and how they adapt their arguments. But clearly with Pure Storage, Qumulo, Vast Data, Weka, Nasuni and CTera, enterprise file storage is hot today.
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