Pure Storage pushes all-flash array purification

Three-way boost as hardware, software and service get updated

Controllers

The two controllers, each capable of full performance, are blade servers with Intel Haswell CPUs, up to 64 cores, 1TB of RAM and high availability via NVMe PCIe non-transparent bridging. This replaces the InfiniBand linking used in the FlashArray 400 products.

The controller blades use NV-RAM (2 or 4 mirrored non-volatile DDR3) which is accessed using NVMe. All the flash module slots use tri-mode SFF8639 connectors offering SATA, SAS and PCIe.

When the coming generation of Intel CPUs – Broadwell or Skylake – arrive they will have enough PCIe bandwidth to enable Pure to implement NVMe connectivity directly to the flash modules, thus increasing performance.

//m rear view

They are called flash modules. Pure builds them from industry-standard Samsung and Toshiba SSDs, taking two SATA SSDs and integrating them together into one module, giving dual density and 2x performance per slot, according to the company. A Pure-designed system presents them to both //m controllers for resilience and density.

McMullan says Pure does garbage collection at a system level and treats the flash modules as dumb wafers.

Controller blades and flash modules can be upgraded independently and non-disruptively, meaning the arrays can scale performance and capacity separately. Customers buy Capacity Packs with 5TB, 10TB or 20TB of raw capacity (15TB, 30TB, or 60TB usable respectively) to expand base chassis capacity.

Host connectivity is 16Gbit/s Fibre Channel, or 10GbitE. A Purity OS upgrade adds the NVMe support.

Pure1 support

Pure wants to deliver a more proactive support experience and Pure1 is a cloud-based management and support scheme to do this.

McMullan said all of its arrays are instrumented and cloud-connected, shipping more than 10,000 data points per day to Pure. Currently it has more than 1PB of such information – that's after 5PB of raw data has been compressed and reduced.

Incoming real-time data is filtered and analysed, and oncoming problems can be detected and hopefully resolved, with proactive customer alerting.

With cloud-based management using HTML5, Pure customers can monitor their arrays from anywhere, using iDevices and Android ones as well as notebooks and PCs. They can get reports analysing their array’s state and performance. Administration is done from within a customer’s firewall. No support/managability software needs installing.

“We are first-line support for every customer and can call customers to alert them to a problem,” McMullan said.

In the future, McMullen looks forward to Pure1 getting linked to UPS and Fedex systems, for making replacement part shipping status information available to customers.

El Reg suggested Nimble’s InfoSight was influencing Pure1.

“InfoSight is a great product. We’re taking it further and faster for our customers,” McMullan said.

Pure1 array status displays