Forward-slash flash: OG upstart Pure Storage shows off fresh models

//X and pals on show in San Fran

FlashStack

The Cisco-Pure converged infrastructure FlashStack system has been given an upgrade kicking too.

It uses Pure's FlashBlade array integrated with Cisco UCS servers and fabric interconnects plus Nexus switches. We're told it provides better performance for the Oracle database, while being extensible to analytics and AI. No component-level details are available yet.

Pure has positioned it as a data warehouse and Big Data analytics-type system, contrasting it with the more modern design AIRI converged systems focussed on AI data pipelines.

There is a VMware SDDC validated design for FlashArray, also pre-built open full-stack toolkits using Ansible, ServiceNow, SaltStack, Puppet and other products.

Pure has worked with Red Hat to produce an OpenShift container-based PaaS reference architecture. There is a Pure Service Orchestrator to work with Kubernetes and Mesosphere on containerised systems, which you can download it from GitHub.

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The products we have seen indicate Pure sees a future IT world in which racks of servers provide stateless, diskless and elastic compute for bare metal, virtualised and containerised workloads, accessing its shared, all-flash storage, providing block, file and object access across NVMe-over Fabrics networks, with full stack orchestration.

Cheap QLC flash has a role to play here – object and low-access rate unstructured data storage for example– as does the Purity OS getting object access. It already has CIFS/SMB and NFS file services through the integrated Windows File Server.

Compute, storage capacity and storage performance are scaled independently. Storage looks after data protection and disaster recovery. SCM will punch array performance up a notch.

In a nutshell, Pure said its shared (flash) accelerated storage can and will be used for every workload.

Possibly Pure might develop smaller systems for SMB, ROBO and IoT use in the future.

Availability

FlashArray//X is orderable today for both new arrays and upgrades and will be shipping in early June. Purity 5.1 is available today. Pure1 VM Analytics, Workload Planner, and Global Dashboard updates will be made available soon.

AIRI and AIRI Mini are available now through select reseller partners. ®