Pure Storage Expands Portfolio With Entry-Level And High-End Flash Arrays

Pure Storage has expanded its product range with two new all-flash arrays: the entry-level FA-405 and the high-end FA-450. The company previously sold a single appliance, the FA-420, which now occupies the middle bracket.

The FA-450 increases the limits of the system to 250TB, while the budget-friendly FA-405 should appeal to start-ups and SMBs. All of the Pure Storage flash arrays are fully expandable and upgradable, so the new arrivals can be combined with the older FA-420 to create a single storage pool.

The company has also released the fourth version of the Purity operating environment, which now includes FlashRecover: a set of fully integrated replication, snapshot and policy management services that offer protection against data loss.

“We’ve had an overwhelming demand for a smaller system,” Vaughn Stewart, chief product evangelist at Pure Storage told TechWeekEurope. “This is us really responding to both potential customers and existing customers who want to grow their footprint out, and need a smaller array to do so.”

Flash for all

Pure Storage, a US start-up founded in 2009, takes consumer flash memory and transforms it into affordable enterprise-ready solutions. Even though it sells hardware appliances, all of the company’s intellectual property is actually in software and data reduction algorithms. The company claims these algorithms allow it to offer “flash at the price of disk”, with much better performance and easier management than that offered by traditional storage architectures.

The new FA-405 can feature up to 40TB of virtualised flash storage in a single rack, with a controller powered by two 8-core Intel processors and 128GB of RAM. It is aimed mainly at smaller customers and organisations taking their first steps with flash.

Pure Storage says The FA-405 is also ideal for single-application deployments, for example VDI pilots or database acceleration projects, and can be upgraded non-disruptively to a FA-420 or FA-450.

The FA-450 is a premium appliance which offers up to 250TB of usable space in a 2U controller footprint. Each controller is powered by two 12-core Intel processors clocked at 2.7GHz and features 512GB of RAM. FA-450 is the first Pure Storage array to support 16 Gb/s fibre channel connectivity.

Both are running Purity 4.0, the latest version of the operating environment which now includes fully integrated, data reduction-aware FlashRecover replication and snapshot services.

Pure says its software technology dramatically reduces the required network bandwidth for disaster recovery features. Purity 4.0 also introduces the new protection policies which simplify data management and protection. It is expected to ship in June.

Stewart told us that quite often, the hardest part of selling the arrays was convincing smaller customers to give flash a try. “When you talk to technologists, particularly storage administrators, they will say something along the lines of ‘well, I don’t need that level of performance’. And I have to sit down with them and talk about the budget. Because when you can buy flash at the price of disk, there are no inhibitors left.

“Then I tell them about what is possible when you have flash, the operational advantages in terms of simplicity and the lack of tuning that you have to do, when compared to disk. You might think you don’t need performance but if you can provide flash to the line of business, applications will absolutely consume the additional performance capacity that’s available within the platform.”

It’s also worth mentioning the company’s Forever Flash programme, which reduces customer’s maintenance contract rates every time they purchase an upgrade. And if they don’t upgrade for three years, a new flash controller will be provided at no charge to enable the latest software features.

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