Pure Storage Flashblade NAS: Product Overview and Insight

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Bottom Line:

As a NAS solution Pure Storage offers plenty of raw power and is a good option for those looking to add a higher performance storage tier. For those with heavy investments in Dell EMC, IBM or NetApp infrastructures, however, solutions from those vendors may offer easier integration.

For those wishing to operate on block or object storage, Pure Storage is a good option. This product is probably best for midrange workloads and may struggle to scale for the largest storage architectures. The company also lacks the full range of data services available from the likes of Dell EMC and NetApp.

Company Description:

Since its founding, Pure Storage has focused on flash solutions. Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) data solutions enable SaaS companies, cloud service providers, and enterprise and public-sector customers to deliver real-time, secure data in a multi-cloud environment. It boasts a Satmetrix-certified NPS customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies.

Product Description:

PureStorage FlashBlade is a scale-out NAS solution that offers both file and object storage. Thanks to its blade design, FlashBlade condenses the storage provided by 50 racks of legacy storage into 4U of space, according to the company. It also uses a proprietary messaging protocol to deliver up to 320Gb/s bandwidth per chassis.

Key Features:

FlashBlade delivers both file and object. It can be purchased in multiple configurations and scales linearly.

• Ultra-fast S3 object support. FlashBlade, at its core, is object-first.

• Massively parallel design. From software down to each flash chip, it is designed to eliminate any serial bottleneck, and the DirectFlash technology is core to this architecture.

•  While many scale-out storage disaggregates compute and storage like public cloud, the interconnect complexity is integrated into the system, and clients only need a single IP address, no matter the scale.

•  Up to 8 Intel Xeon CPU cores per blade

• High-performance 320 Gb/s fabric

•  17 TB or 52 TB blades with support for up to 15 blades per chassis

RAID/Data Features:

• Purity software offerings include

• RAID-HA protects against concurrent dual-drive failure, and re-builds around failures automatically within minutes.

• DR

• Replication

• Encryption

• Clustering

• 6 x 9’s availability.

Storage Saving Features:

Thin provisioning, deduplication and compression

Data Management Features:

• FlashBlade Purity is a massively distributed key-value pair database that delivers high performance regardless of data type or size.

• S3 object support.

• Massively parallel design designed to eliminate any serial bottleneck.

• Supports block, file and object storage

• Cloud management

• Workload planning

• Predictive analytics

Implementation:

FlashBlade is a plug-and-use system approximately the size of a large microwave that can be provisioned and ready to turn data into tangible value within a matter of hours.

“The installations and bringing into production was as flawless as I have ever experienced. The ease of use is remarkable and the learning curve is excellent,” said a government IT systems administrator.

Technical support:

Pure Storage offers two service levels of the Evergreen support subscription as the main offering. The support team drives and fulfills all software and hardware upgrades. Includes a subscription to all new software, all software-inclusive pricing model.

It also includes a subscription to the engineering team. As new features are added, customers receive free upgrades, non-disruptively. Pure Storage has a Satmetrix-certified NPS customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies.

Capacity:

Largest raw capacity for a 15-blade system is 792 TB of raw NAND capacity. This results in a usable capacity right around 500TB, as some space is used for resiliency protection.

Performance:

• Single-chassis throughput up to 15 GBs. Our full multi-chassis system can support up to 75 GBs.

• IOPs — Single chassis can do 1.5M IOPs and the full 15 blade system can do 7.5M IOPs.

Markets and Key Use Cases:

• AI

• Analytics

• Machine Learning/Deep Learning

• Healthcare

• Life Sciences

• Genomics

• Oil & Gas

• Digital media

• Backup and recovery

Delivery

Delivered in a 4-rack unit appliance package which includes the necessary software.

Price:

FlashBlade pricing starts in the $100Ks.