Pure Storage Expands FlashBlade, the Industry’s First Native Unified, Fast File and Object Platform

IT and DevOpsAnalyticsObject-Oriented Architecture

By AIT News Desk On May 4, 2020

Latest Software Enhancements Let Workflows Take Center Stage, Help Enterprises Realize the Potential of Modern, Real-Time Analytics

Pure Storage, the IT pioneer that delivers storage as a service, announced the availability of Purity//FB 3.0 for FlashBlade, the next generation of the industry’s most advanced storage software for unstructured data. FlashBlade delivers a truly unified, scale-out fast file and object storage platform purpose-built to support modern application development, modern analytics and next-generation data protection.

FlashBlade is unique in its ability to accelerate applications and enable data to be shared across applications and workloads. The latest updates to FlashBlade enable real-time performance that allow application workflows to take center stage – resulting in a Modern Data Experience that replaces complexities and antiquated systems with fast, flexible and agile solutions built to fit modern needs.

“FlashBlade is so unique because it is designed from the ground-up for tomorrow’s data pipelines and real-time analytics applications, with simplicity, ease of use and performance in mind — something that legacy storage vendors struggle with,” said Matt Burr, Vice President and General Manager of FlashBlade. “It delivers multi-dimensional performance and provides an unparalleled customer experience in the scale-out, unified file and object storage market.”

Architected to help customers achieve better resource utilization for compute and storage, FlashBlade reduces the complexity that arises from data silos. FlashBlade extends this approach to key enterprise features such as replication for file and object and file system rollback, and allows data scientists and data architects to realize the potential of the models they design and create, faster.

“FlashBlade has helped us make exponential improvements across company operations, critical innovation centers and end-user experience. We’ve seen a 45 percent reduction in our need for storage space, and critical customer reports that used to take a month and a half to run are now ready in about half an hour. That means real, actionable insights for our customers weeks ahead of schedule,” said Chris Murley, Director of Network Operations, TownNews. “Most importantly, our infrastructure team is made up of software developers whose talents and passions are best suited for new projects and initiatives. With FlashBlade, our team can take a hands-off approach to storage management, which frees up critical resources to focus on the priorities most important for our customers.”

Purity//FB 3.0, the scale-out software that powers FlashBlade, delivers the same simplicity and ease of use for the new capabilities that customers have come to love and expect from FlashBlade. Pure-as-a-Service, a true OpEx model, allows customers to leverage FlashBlade via a flexible consumption model.

“As a managed service provider in the financial sector, our clients adopt technology quickly and demand the highest levels of reliability, performance, and time to market. Pure continues to enable our growing client base to leverage the latest in block, file, and now high-performance object storage both within our data centers and across our global backbone,” said Micah Kroeze, VP or Product-Managed Colocation, Options IT. “Pure allows us to scale smoothly and deliver a flexible consumption model to our dynamic client base, ensuring that our clients benefit rapidly from new developments in storage technology. Our recent expansion into Pure Storage FlashBlade technology, in addition to driving innovative product development within Options, provides our customers the opportunity to maximize data and analytics for a competitive edge in the financial services industry.”

Purity//FB 3.0 delivers capabilities that can address unique challenges including:

File Replication: Enables the disaster recovery of file systems. Read-only data in the target replication site enables data validation and DR testing.
Object Replication: Replication of object data between two FlashBlades improves the experience for geographically distributed users by providing lower access latency and increasing read throughout. Replication of object data in native format from FlashBlade to Amazon S3 delivers cloud mobility. Customers can use cloud for a secondary copy, or use public cloud services to access data generated on-prem.
File system Rollback: File system Rollback is a crucial file system data protection feature. It enables the fast recovery of File systems from snapshots.
NFS v4.1 Kerberos: Kerberos delivers an advanced level of security by authenticating users connecting to NFS v4.1 file systems on FlashBlade.
Audit Logs and SNMP Support: Key enhancements to enterprise readiness by delivering improved security, alerting, and monitoring capabilities.

Unlocking the Potential of Modern, Real-Time Analytics

Virtually all analytics vendors have begun a shift to cloud-enabled architectures, such as Splunk SmartStore and Vertica Eon Mode. Built to deliver performance, agility and simplicity, FlashBlade is uniquely suited for these environments. Internal tests show that FlashBlade delivers 80x faster query performance than traditional object storage platforms that disaggregate storage and compute. Consistently fast query performance enables faster time to insights for customers, and represents a business-critical advantage in the case of a security breach or ransomware attack. FlashBlade also allows administrators the freedom to scale their compute layer up or down as-needed, and slow administrative tasks are a pain point of the past.

“The adoption of object storage, driven by the rise of real-time analytics in the enterprise, is rapidly expanding, now sitting on equal footing with file storage. This creates a need in the industry for a storage architecture built from the ground-up to provide both native fast file and native object storage,” said Steve McDowell, Senior Analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy. “FlashBlade is the industry’s first native fast file and object storage platform. FlashBlade allows customers to easily scale performance and capacity for both file and object, invisible to the application, leading to a simpler user experience and more impactful outcome for customers.”