Pure Storage Introduces FlashBlade//S

New architecture disaggregates resources to give customers the freedom to scale in any direction, unlocking the most diverse set of workloads while providing investment protection

Today at Pure//Accelerate techfest22, Pure Storage® (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technology and services, announced the FlashBlade®//S family of products with a new modular architecture built on uniquely co-designed hardware and software. The new 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, Pure Storage rewrote the rules for scale-out storage by introducing FlashBlade as a unified fast file and object platform – the first high performance storage solution for modern data. Pure also architected its software and created DirectFlash technology to anticipate the future need for flash across a wide spectrum of workloads.

With today’s announcement, Pure revolutionizes 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 Pure’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. 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 Pure to power its AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).
• Performance at Scale, Simplicity, and Efficiency of Unstructured Data: The new FlashBlade//S family through closely engineered hardware and Purity//FB 4.0 software pushes the boundaries of performance, scale and efficiency. FlashBlade//S 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 environment and sustainability ambitions, which are increasingly important to customers.” — Matt Burr, General Manager, 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.” – Patrick Moorhead, Founder, Moor Insights and Strategy.

As part of today’s launch, Pure also announced the next generation of AIRI®//S, the industry’s first comprehensive AI-Ready Infrastructure powered by NVIDIA. This Pure and NVIDIA solution further enhances FlashBlade’s expansive set of use cases across AI, machine learning, and modern analytics.

FlashBlade//S family of products will begin to GA in Q2 FY23.

To learn more, visit:

•  FlashBlade//S Product Page
• Blog: The Last Scale-out Solution You’ll Ever Need Is Here