Pure Storage Launches New Generation Of ‘Affordable’ All-Flash Arrays

Pure Storage, the company that takes consumer flash memory and transforms it into affordable enterprise-ready solutions, has launched the third generation of its all-flash storage arrays.

FlashArray 400 Series doubles on capacity and performance of its predecessor, released just a year ago, thanks to patented Purity 3.0 software.

Pure says that its clever code allows it to offer considerably faster storage at a price per GB that’s comparable to traditional HDD arrays.

Flash for All

NAND flash memory is a lot faster and more energy efficient that the traditional disk drives, but it remains prohibitively expensive, especially in business environment, where it has to reliably last through several years’ worth of intensive workloads.

Pure’s flash optimisation software enables it to offer Samsung’s consumer-grade MLC flash with reliability and longevity expected by IT professionals. The all-flash arrays are ten times faster than HDDs, and ten times more efficient both in terms of space and energy. Pure promises all this at a price that’s less to buy, operate and maintain than disk.

“In the early days of flash, everybody was way too focused on performance. They were building these products that were a bit like the Ferraris of storage – very fast, very expensive, and kind of hard to drive,” Matt Kixmoeller, VP of Product Marketing and Management at Pure Storage told TechWeekEurope.

“And we wanted to be the company that figures out how to take flash mainstream. To do that, you needed to do two things: have a price that’s affordable for most people, and build a product that’s easy to use.”

The FA-400 arrays come in capacity up to 100 TB, and work at speeds up to 400,000 8K IOPs. The average latency for these appliances is under a millisecond, or, as one Pure Storage advert puts it, “f***ing great”.

Each array features two Intel ‘Sandy Bridge’ 8-core CPUs and 256 GB of DRAM, while requiring just 420W of power. They are primarily aimed at server and desktop virtualisation enthusiasts, and billed as ideal for database or application acceleration.

New Purity 3.0 software contains proprietary data compression and deduplication technologies that take care of the memory chips and allow users to cut costs by packing more data on the flash disk.

The arrays feature completely non-disruptive upgrades and always-on 256-bit AES encryption. Each unit calls home every 30 seconds for problem identification, analysis and instant alerts, as part of the CloudAssist service.

FA-400 supports OpenStack, with a CINDER driver for the array.

From today, Pure Storage has taken on a new tagline – “Flash for all”. It rings true, since the  current customers of the company include everyone from schools to government organisations to banks. Interestingly, one of the major investors into Pure is In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm of the US intelligence community.

“We have Hedge Fund customers who have been able to fundamentally change the amount of market data they can analyse. Because they have to look at information between when Asian markets close and the US markets open, and that’s a fixed window. Your storage can only go so fast, and it might have taken 18 or 20 hours to do analysis which can now be done in an hour,” said Kixmoeller.

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