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Pure Storage has announced FlashBlade, an all-flash storage platform designed to store ‘the biggest, fastest data of today and tomorrow’. FlashBlade is an elastic scale-out system that delivers all-flash performance to multi-petabyte-scale data sets at economics of less than US$1/GB usable.

While big data increases exponentially, the approach to analytics is growing richer with more complex and highly iterative queries. As a result, scientists, engineers and developers are seeking a new type of storage platform that can deliver fast performance across a massive expanse of data and connecting clients simply and easily, without the expense and complexity of exotic, high performance legacy systems.

FlashBlade is built on an innovative elastic scale-out architecture, which combines commodity hardware components with unique software and ultra-dense packaging to achieve extreme performance, scale, density and efficiency, while delivering a truly affordable price-point for all-flash storage. All FlashBlade hardware and software is engineered from scratch by Pure Storage, and consists of three core elements:

• Blade: The core scale-out element of FlashBlade, each blade contains compute power for data and metadata processing, raw NAND flash for storage and NV-RAM capacity for power-safe protection of writes in flight. Blades are engineered to be ultra-dense and low-power, in 8TB and 52TB capacities.
• Elasticity Scale-Out Software: Running in a distributed fashion across all blades, Elasticity is the software heart of FlashBlade. Elasticity implements a common object store in the system, storage services such as data reduction, encryption and N+2 erasure coding, scale-out protocol services such as NFS (file) and S3 (object), as well as low-level flash management and LDPC error correction. Because Elasticity is one code base across flash management, protocols, volume and storage services, all layers share a common extensible metadata engine and garbage collection for higher global system efficiency.
• Elastic Fabric: FlashBlade includes a built-in, software-defined, low-latency 40 Gb/s Ethernet network. The Elastic Fabric combines blade-to-blade, chassis interconnect and client connectivity into one network, with software-defined QoS to ensure proper traffic prioritization. Both the Elastic Fabric and Elasticity leverage proprietary protocols on top of the commodity Ethernet network for the highest performance low-latency communication.

“IDC believes that the all-flash data centre for primary storage is quickly becoming a reality, but newer storage architectures designed to deliver better cost efficiency at scale are needed for flash to be more broadly used in secondary storage environments,” said Eric Burgener, Research Director Storage, IDC. “With the FlashBlade announcement, Pure now has an integrated portfolio of all-flash offerings that support block, file and/or object access and cost-effectively cover both primary and secondary storage environments.”
www.purestorage.com