Pure Storage FlashBlade

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 of 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

Portfolio includes:FlashArray//X: High-performance all-flash arrays designed for latency-sensitive applications.FlashArray//C: Optimized for capacity and efficiency, as described above.FlashBlade®: Purpose-built for unstructured data workloads, providing scalability and performance.Pure1®: A cloud-based management and monitoring platform that extends visibility into snapshot space consumption, enabling proactive management.These offerings underscore Pure Storage’s commitment to simplifying storage operations while delivering performance and efficiency. By integrating these technologies with your existing monitoring practices, you can gain deeper insights into storage usage and make data-driven decisions to optimize your environment.Innovations with FlashBlade//SFlashBlade//S is the next evolution in unstructured data storage, designed to address the ever-growing demands of modern data workloads. This powerful platform provides unmatched scalability and performance for both file and object storage, making it an essential component of any organization’s data strategy.Key features of FlashBlade//S include:Scalable Architecture: Delivers modular scalability, allowing you to expand capacity and performance independently as your data grows.High Performance: Optimized for high-throughput and low-latency workloads, including AI/ML training, data analytics, and backup and recovery.Unified File and Object Storage: Seamlessly handles both file and object data with a single system, reducing complexity and operational overhead.Sustainability: Engineered with energy efficiency in mind, FlashBlade//S reduces power and cooling requirements while delivering unparalleled performance.Organizations leveraging FlashBlade//S can take their unstructured data strategies to new heights, ensuring seamless scalability and efficiency while maintaining simplicity in operations.ConclusionPure’s technology enables better monitoring and management of snapshot space consumption across diverse workloads. As you adopt new storage solutions like FlashArray//C or explore unified block and file storage, ensure that your monitoring practices are updated to reflect these innovations. With tools like Pure1®, you’re equipped to handle the demands of modern data management with confidence.How Storage Plays a Role in Optimizing Database Environments

The same array. They also have the ability to move workloads in and out of realms, as well as delegate “consumers”—tenant users who can manage data services inside a realm as a tenant.SAW Sample Use Case: Test/Dev OperationsImplementing an SMT model isn’t just for service providers wanting to securely isolate tenants and prevent data spillage between the two—there are many possibilities for enterprises and organizations. Consider an array that concurrently supports production workloads and the Test/Dev team. Many data center architectures might mitigate CPU overconsumption by controlling resources to virtual machines between those tenants but have no way of accomplishing the same with the enterprise storage side. This becomes an easy fix with Pure Storage SMT, where the Test/Dev environment is set up as a consumer tenant that can be managed with a quota and QoS while doing its testing on replicas from production data and managing its own snapshots. This configuration allows for database managers to self-manage their snapshots and any testing they perform without fear of suffocating the production tenant of the array. Pure Storage FlashArray and FlashBlade: Dead-easy SMT to Be IncludedPure Storage is proud to announce that FlashArray will be capable of supporting SMT with Purity updates beginning this month. Once updated, the array will be capable of allowing storage administrators the option to logically divide their storage to better align with upstream demands from their end customers and workloads. Here are some highlights of how our multi-tenancy approach shines brighter than alternative solutions:Simpler configuration for shared infrastructure. Pure Storage SMT requires 75% fewer parameter definitions compared to the competition, making it simpler to implement and manage.Better visibility and isolation capabilities. This capability allows an infrastructure owner to provision more workloads per array, thus increasing array utilization and tenant density.Improved security to prevent data leakage. SMT’s implementation filters traffic at the protocol level based on upstream namespaces to ensure data is not leaked among tenants.This is the first step to a bigger vision. Secure Application Workspaces is the end goal, with traditional and container SMT storage being managed by a unified console.And, in true Pure Storage fashion, SMT will be included with no extra costs and will be simple to implement and manage. In fact, any volumes will be able to non-disruptively migrate into a new tenant space.Some Initial Release NuancesOn its release, FlashArray will support SMT on block-only volumes, while FlashBlade® will support it on file workloads. It will be available on FlashArray files later in the year. SMT will also be only accessible via the command line on initial release. It will be integrated into the array UIs by the end of the year, as well.Keep up with the latest innovations to the Pure Storage platform.Learn More about Pure Storage SMT The Pure Storage release of SMT comes at a great time in the industry. Many organizations are looking to make their data center infrastructure more “cloud-like” in how it operates. SMT and SAW deliver on that vision. Be sure to reach out to

Cases for customers running on a variety of Pure products including FlashArray™, FlashBlade®, and Evergreen//One™, as well as any other underlying on-premises or cloud storage. With Portworx, Pure customers get a modern data platform that manages storage and data protection for their Kubernetes applications, no matter where they are running. 2. Who uses Portworx’s offerings today? As the #1 Kubernetes Storage Platform, according to GigaOm Research, many of the world’s largest digital enterprises use Portworx in production, including Carrefour, Comcast, GE Digital, Kroger, Lufthansa, and T-Mobile. Developers can download Portworx software; use it for free in initial deployments and pilot projects; and then scale it to the largest, most-resilient global deployments with paid editions and enterprise support as they progress through the Kubernetes lifecycle. 3. What does Portworx bring to Pure Storage? Portworx helps Pure Storage realize the vision of a Modern Data Experience™ by providing a subscription-based data-services platform for cloud-native applications running across hybrid-cloud environments in containers. With Portworx, Pure Storage can accelerate their digital transformation by easily running any cloud-native data service, in any cloud, using any Kubernetes platform with built-in high availability, data protection, data security, and hybrid-cloud mobility. Together, Pure and Portworx provide the most complete set of Kubernetes storage choices, from bare metal or cloud storage with Portworx software-defined storage to fully managed all-flash arrays, providing the right storage options at all phases of the cloud-native lifecycle. Resources

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.” For more information about how your organization can leverage the benefits of FlashBlade, visit our website or blog.

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.Database administrators and data architects can encounter a number of challenges when administering systems with different requirements and behavioral patterns. At the June 2023 Pure//Accelerate conference, Pure Storage’s Principal Solutions Manager Andrew Sillifant laid out six of the most common database challenges and his solutions for them.1. Managing Scale within Cost ConstraintsAccording to Statista, the volume of data and information created is increasing by about 19 percent each year, while others report storage growth figures far in excess of that amount.“We are seeing data grow at 30 percent or more annually,” said Greg Johnson, Executive Director of Global Electronic Trading Services at JP Morgan Chase. “We hit the wall and were unable to keep up with traditional storage.”To gain the speed and efficiency necessary to keep up with data expansion, the company switched to all-flash storage arrays that can scale out or scale up as demand requires.“Power critical applications with latencies as low as 150 microseconds are best served by flash storage,” Sillifant said. “Always-on deduplication and compression features can enable more databases to run on fewer platforms.”Sillifant said the Pure Storage Flash Array and FlashBlade arrays provide such benefits. Some are best for top performance and others have been engineered for storage managers to cram more capacity onto a smaller space while still providing good performance, while scale-out file and object platforms are best for demanding high-bandwidth, high-capacity