Pure Storage unveils FlashArray//m, Pure1 and Evergreen Storage

Pure Storage’s new Evergreen Storage model eliminates the three- to five-year rip-and-replace storage lifecycle that has impaired IT efficiency for decades. With this new model, customers deploy storage once and upgrade it in-place for generations. Evergreen Storage is delivered by combining FlashArray’s modular, stateless and software-defined architecture with Forever Flash, the company’s standard maintenance program. Forever Flash delivers predictable ongoing “flat and fair” pricing, and includes software updates as well as periodic hardware upgrades, keeping the FlashArray modern over time. Pure Storage is also announcing Upgrade Flex Bundles, which enable customers who are expanding their capacity to upgrade their FlashArray controller hardware, if desired, and receive trade-in value for their existing controller investment. Evergreen Storage enables enterprises to invest in a storage infrastructure that helps their business be faster, smarter and more innovative – both today and tomorrow.

“Today, even when a customer buys the latest storage array, newer replacement equipment lies just around the corner, ready to render the current deployment obsolete. To refresh their technology, customers endure upgrade costs and hours of decreased performance or service interruptions during their ‘forklift upgrades’,” said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president, Products, Pure Storage. “The Evergreen Storage model changes all this completely. Now customers can invest in a storage platform that can add value to their businesses for a decade or more, and make individual component, non-disruptive upgrades to capacity and/or performance when required by the business. This flat, predictable, SaaS-like procurement model further lowers the bar for customers to bring all-flash storage into their data centres, unlocking both business and IT transformation.”

“It is clear that flash storage in the datacentre is here to stay. IDC recommends that all data centres should have flash deployed in at least some capacity today and should be strategically considering how best to leverage it going forward,” said Eric Burgener, Research Director, IDC. “With today’s announcements from Pure Storage, they are creating a unique, new model for technology refresh that offers significant value for their customers. Supported by modifications in the hardware of their new FlashArray//m, customers can now and going forward upgrade entire FlashArrays in the field to completely new technology generations without any downtime, performance impacts, forklift upgrades or data migration. This new model will change customer preconceptions about the way technology refresh is performed in enterprise-class storage arrays.”

FlashArray//m: Marrying Hardware and Software Innovation in All-Flash Storage

FlashArray//m, the fourth generation of Pure Storage’s flagship FlashArray product, delivers complete end-to-end integrated hardware and software innovation, a first for an all-flash array. FlashArray//m features a modular upgradable architecture, and delivers a 50 percent increase in performance, 2.6x improvement in density, and 2.4x improvement in power efficiency-per-terabyte over previous FlashArray generations. The FlashArray//m fully integrates two high-performance Intel Haswell controllers running the Purity Operating Environment 4.5, new NV-RAM cache modules, and new dual-drive flash modules inside the three rack unit (RU) chassis. This density results in the consolidation of racks of legacy disk storage, driving a 5-10x power, space, and efficiency improvement.

The FlashArray//m offers three controller options to meet a variety of performance and capacity needs:
· //m20 controllers – up to 120+ TBs usable (5-40 TBs raw storage) and 150,000 32K input/output operations per second (IOPS),
· //m50 controllers – up to 250+ TBs usable (30-88 TBs raw storage) and 220,000 32K IOPS,
· //m70 controllers – up to 400+ TBs usable (44-136 TBs raw storage) and 300,000 32K IOPS.

Consistent with its Evergreen Storage model, Pure Storage crafted the new FlashArray//m to deliver density, performance and simplicity without sacrificing scalability and upgradability. The FlashArray//m delivers:

· Mini Size: Capable of consolidating racks of spinning disk into 3U, Pure Storage has shrunk storage arrays that were once the size of multiple refrigerators down to the size of a microwave, cutting power consumption down to one kilowatt (kW) – equal to reducing the power usage of ten residential homes down to one toaster oven. New dual-drive flash modules coupled with Purity’s FlashReduce data reduction software delivers up to 40TBs/U density, and enable mixing/matching with modules of higher density over time.

· Modular Scale: With the new modular, customisable, and upgradable hardware design, customers can scale from accelerating a single application of 15 TB up to nearly ½ petabyte (PB) usable storage, capable of running an entire rack, business, or cloud. The modular design permits Pure Storage to deliver both processor and flash upgrades approximately every nine- to 12 months and enables customers to adopt these advances within their existing FlashArrays without data migration, downtime or performance impact.

· Mighty Performance: The FlashArray//m delivers up to 300,000 32K IOPS at less than one millisecond average latency – 10 times faster than traditional disk-based storage – and up to nine gigabytes per second (GB/s) bandwidth. Coupled with Purity’s FlashProtect software, the FlashArray//m maintains its sub-millisecond performance through software and hardware upgrades.

· Meaningful Simplicity: With appliance-like installation, the FlashArray//m is only one unit to rack and connects with only six cables. All software is included in the base price, meaning no additional charge for high availability, snapshots, replication, encryption, or management software. The FlashArray//m stays simple and evergreen over time, with non-disruptive upgrades to performance and capacity.

Pure1: Bringing Cloud-Based Management and Support Simplicity to Storage

Available today, Pure1 is Pure Storage’s new cloud-based management and support platform that enables customers, support staff and partners to seamlessly and securely collaborate to manage and support storage. Pure1 is built upon the Pure1 Cloud platform, an expansion of Pure Storage’s existing CloudAssist technology. More information on the Pure1 announcement can be found in today’s concurrent press release.

Evergreen Storage that Translates to Business and IT Transformation
With today’s announcements, Pure Storage is introducing a modern, next generation storage platform that combines the industry’s first flash-optimized software and hardware flash array (FlashArray//m) with a revolutionary business model. This platform delivers a new storage ownership model that results in business and IT transformation for customers.

· Business Transformation: with all-flash storage from Pure, customers are faster, smarter and more innovative. Business applications that run faster improve yields, employee productivity, and customer and partner experiences, allowing them to make smarter decisions and increase innovation across their organisations. A more innovative organisation creates new, differentiated customer experience and brings new products or services to market that were previously not possible with legacy storage infrastructure in place. For example:
o Shutterfly eliminated the storage bottleneck with a 500 percent improvement in performance, giving them the confidence to deploy new services and products (ThisLife) without fear that the customer experience would suffer. The confidence and agility translated into positive impact to their bottom line, and allows them to continue to innovate and maintain a competitive edge.
o A national accounting solutions firm was able to run nightly builds of its development environment in 80 percent less time, giving them 14 hours of greater productivity per day - equivalent to two full time employees.
o A global medical device manufacturing firm believes it can reduce inventory on hand by 5 days, resulting in savings in excess of $100 million.
o SurveyMonkey was able to support a major expansion of its services targeted at large-scale customers by introducing a new product based on never before accessible analytics, giving customers greater market insights and increased competitive advantage.

· IT Transformation. The operational simplicity, quick provisioning, easy programmability, low management overhead and linear, low-cost scaling of the Pure Storage platform allows customers to implement the cloud model for IT while improving efficiency and agility. Benefits include an “effortless” end to end experience including storage cost savings of 50 percent, storage management cost savings of 90 percent as well as server and application consolidation. For every 250TB of Tier 1 performance disk storage replaced with Pure Storage, customers can save over a six year period, an average of more than $500,000 annually. Examples of IT Transformation include:

o Sierra Nevada: Hardware costs were cut significantly by moving from racks of spinning disk to flash, resulting in over $200,000 in savings and a 50 percent reduction in datacentre space. Sierra Nevada uses 1/10th of the power compared to what was needed for spinning disk, which has positively affected their bottom line, helped meet their sustainability goals and reduce their carbon footprint.
o Perfection Fresh: Moving to an all-flash data centre has allowed Perfection Fresh to process queries up to ten times faster, freeing up IT staff across the business. Combining the speed, and power & cooling savings, the FlashArray has delivered $120,000 in savings back to the business in the course of a year.
o Securities America: With a data compression ratio of 4.7:1, Securities America anticipates a savings of $600,000 over 3 years.
o Workday: Developers with no SAN experience can manage storage, navigate FlashArrays user interface in minutes, and learn how to create a LUN in under an hour.

“Pure Storage continues to raise the bar with all-flash technology and FlashArray//m is proof of the company's commitment to innovation. Pure Storage allows us to be more dynamic and we no longer worry that we are going to run out of data storage," said Peter Dunn, Director of Communications and Services, Lamar Advertising. "The administration of FlashArray is easy and intuitive, it just works! Pure allows us to run business intelligence applications with the optimal performance, accelerating the completion time for critical development projects."