Storage

Pure Storage makes multiple object storage announcements around FlashBlade

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An upgrade to 75 blades in a single system provides 5x capacity and speed, a new 17TB blade was announced for mid-range deployments, and a new ultra-flash S3 object store was unveiled.

SAN FRANCISCO — Today at their second annual Accelerate customer event, Pure Storage made a three-pronged announcement to significant upgrade their FlashBlade product line. Focused on Big Data analytics, FlashBlade provides flash-based fast access to unstructured data with a native object storage-based implementation. The three components of the announcement begin with an upgrade from 15 to 75 blades in a single system – which enhances performance as well as capacity fivefold. Secondly, Pure has announced a mid-sized 17TB blade, between their existing 8TB and 52TB offerings. Last, and certainly not least, Pure has announced an ultra-fast, all-flash S3 object store which they see unlocking additional use cases for FlashBlade in rich media, healthcare and advanced analytics.

“The FlashBlade announcements are all about the transition from Big Data to Big Intelligence,” said Jason Nadeau, Director, Product and Vertical Marketing at Pure Storage. “They make Big Data into Fast Data. And while they involve a hardware product, the big breakthroughs here are really on the software side.”

The ability to scale up to 75 blades comes from the latest Purity software for FlashBlade. It now provides a total maximum raw capacity of 4PB and an 8PB namespace, able to accommodate billions of files or objects.

“The increase from 15 FlashBlades to 75 means not only that capacity is increased by five times, but it’s all five times faster as well,” Nadeau said. “There is massive parallelism.” Read speed jumps fivefold to 75 GB/s, while write speed’s 5X increase brings it to 25 GB/s. IOPS is now 8.5 million. The 8PB are available in a 20U standard rack mount.

The new scalability is complemented by a proprietary networking module that lets up to five chassis be managed as one cohesive system, allowing larger-scale, higher-performance systems to be deployed.

Pure has previously had 8TB and 52TB configurations, and has now complemented those with a 17TB blade.

“This middle 17TB blade provides a more flexible capacity point, which will provide mid-range customers with a better $/GB option,” Nadeau said.

The third component of the announcement is Fast Object Store, an ultra-fast S3-compatible object protocol.

“Object storage is becoming more important, as organizations that have used file systems in the past look for better performance,” Nadeau said. “The problem is that until now, object has been big and slow, with translation lawyers adding complexity. Increasingly, however, object needs to be fast for modern analytics.”

“Because both FlashBlade and Purity are built as a native object implementation, they speak object natively,” Nadeau said. “Fast Object Srore is 100 times faster to first byte compared to Amazon S3.” Pure also says that its 100 times faster at indexing one million objects than an existing solution from a leading Webscale company.

“Object storage is the future,” Nadeau said. “It’s being used by next-generation developers to build next-generation apps. Fast Object Store will be a game changer for us.”

Pure also announced updates to the SMB v2.1 protocol interface, which allows data to be shared between SMB, NFS and HTTP clients, and to the HTTP protocol interface, which allows data to be shared between SMB, NFS and HTTP clients. Support was announced as well for IPv6 addresses for data and management to enhance data centre scalability.