Pure Storage has announced new features in its FlashBlade file and object flash storage family, including zero-move tiering, secure multi-tenancy, always-on quality of service, artificial intelligence (AI) co-pilot for file and an entry-level array.
The feature updates were dubbed “reinventing file storage” by Pure at its Accelerate London event this week. That idea aims to convey the concept of an easily managed and upgraded pool of storage for unstructured data. For Pure, that plays off its unified FlashBlade storage architecture for file and object, the single management plane of Fusion and its existing Purity operating system, the Pure1 management layer and its Evergreen consumption model.
FlashBlade is Pure’s fast file and object family, which unifies file access and object storage in a single array to provide rapid access to large-capacity storage. It’s aimed at what have traditionally been secondary storage use cases – backup, archive and analytics datastores – but which have evolved to require rapid input/output for analysis, recovery and so on.
FlashBlade is all-QLC, but with a distributed scheme that allows part of the QLC drive to be configured like very fast SLC flash.
The first of the new feature offerings is secure multi-tenancy in FlashBlade. According to field chief technology officer Patrick Smith, this is aimed at MSPs and other customers that want single physical hardware but with segregated namespaces and dissimilar workloads.
“Customers can be confident they can provide independent domains to customers,” he said. “Now, FlashBlade is able to be segregated in terms of authentication, clients and data, which all happens at the level of the Purity operating system.”
Next in FlashBlade is always-on quality of service, which aims to ensure workloads don’t introduce resource contention across the underlying storage platform. It’s a way of making sure there’s no noisy-neighbour problem – contention for disk resources – on FlashBlade deployments, said Smith. “It’s another thing needed to run multiple systems for different customers,” he added.
Zero-move tiering
There is also so-called zero-move tiering. Here, FlashBlade will provide different tiers of storage – or, at differing levels of performance and cost – from the same hardware infrastructure.
According to Smith, differences in performance will not come via different hardware. Usually, tiers of storage would be based on different drives with varying cost and performance characteristics. In the case of Pure’s zero-move tiering, data just goes into FlashBlade, with “tiered” access governed by the Purity OS.
In that scheme, data will be tagged with a performance level and access determined therefrom.
“The flash module can satisfy performance needs associated with hot data – that’s a constant,” said Smith. “What differs is the ability to get data outs to consumers, which can be prioritised from hot to cold according to the required profile. A customer still needs to do capacity management at the level of the storage pool with regard to overall capabilities.”
Meanwhile, Pure has launched a new entry-level FlashBlade file and object storage array, the S100. This comes in below the S200 but can be upgraded to the spec of the S200 or S500. “It provides an option for customers where previously we had to go in with a larger system,” he said.
The FlashBlade S200 starts at 126TB, but can expand to around 3PB. It’s based on high-density QLC flash-equipped modules.
Also announced are an AI co-pilot for file, which is a generative AI-driven help function that allows customers to query their FlashBlade systems in natural language.
There is also VM Assessment, which allows customers to run an audit on their VMware deployments and gain metrics on utilisation and resource use.
According to Smith, licensing changes and increased costs of VMware use since the takeover by Broadcom have led to lengthy customer introspection and searches for potential alternatives. This Pure Storage tool aims to help customers understand whether they can opt for fewer (chargeable) cores or to move away from VMware’s vSan storage, for example.
Finally, Pure has introduced Universal Credits, in which customers can make use of discounted rates already gained in one area – storage array capacity, for example – and use it for other subscription payments, such as (Pure’s) Cloud Block Store or Portworx, its container management platform.