Pure Storage’s Next-Generation FlashBlade//S Delivers a Huge Leap Forward for Unstructured Data Storage
As enterprises work through digital transformation — the wholesale migration to much more data-centric business models — they are modernizing their information technology (IT) infrastructure. Given the massive amount of data that IT organizations will be dealing with going forward, getting the storage infrastructure upgrades right is critical. Legacy architectures are just not able to cost effectively meet the performance, availability, and scalability objectives of the next-generation workloads being deployed as part of digital transformation.
Roughly four-fifths of the data growth over the next five years will be composed of unstructured data. That means that most of the data used for analytics will be file and/or object based, and that places a spotlight on unstructured data storage solutions. As they deploy these types of solutions that will in most cases need to scale out to easily support tens of petabytes, enterprises are very concerned about infrastructure efficiency. It is becoming increasingly clear from the strategy changes among hyperscalers that large-scale computing environments can be more efficiently built using disaggregated architectures. Disaggregation enables administrators not only to assemble the right balance of IT resources for a given workload to minimize costs but also to perform technology upgrades on different resources independently as needed. For large-scale settings, disaggregation is a major contributor to infrastructure efficiency. Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) considerations are becoming an increasingly important consideration given budget and datacenter power and space constraints. Enterprises are starting to consider cost and power efficiency metrics as part of the purchase process to ensure that their budgets and IT resources get used as efficiently as possible. In fact, major hyperscalers such as Meta have recently announced storage infrastructure deals where ESG considerations figured prominently.
In June 2022, Pure Storage introduced a major upgrade to its FlashBlade all-flash “unified fast file and object” (UFFO) storage platform called the FlashBlade//S. While this platform has already been tremendously successful for Pure Storage (its revenue allowed it to claim to be a storage unicorn [had it been a standalone business] after less than four years of shipments) and for its customers, the vendor has significantly re-architected the platform. The result of these design changes include disaggregating resources (storage compute and capacity can now be upgraded independently); enhancing system flexibility; optimizing the system to use denser, lower-cost quad-level cell (QLC) NAND flash media; increasing performance and capacity by 2.5 times (relative to the current FlashBlade); and further improving the platform’s already industry-leading cost and power efficiency. To underline its commitment to efficiency, Pure Storage also just released its first ESG report. Enterprises needing to modernize their unstructured storage strategies should look at the new FlashBlade//S.
