Pure Announces FlashBlade and FlashArray Updates

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — February 16, 2021 — Today Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), specialist in storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, announced updates to its industry-recognized Purity software for FlashBlade and FlashArray. Today’s news is designed to expand Pure’s market reach and further the company’s vision for a Modern Data Experience.

The Modern Data Experience vision changes the expectations for storage and data management, requiring storage to be dynamic, provide a cloud experience through shared services, enable flexible on-demand consumption, and be delivered as code to application developers and operations managers.

The new versions of Purity for FlashBlade and FlashArray deliver exceptional application performance, continuous data availability, and enhanced protection. Key portfolio updates include:

  • Data security for uptime: FlashBlade and FlashArray are now both strengthened by SafeMode snapshots, providing customers with a robust strategy for business continuity against potential disasters or ransomware attacks. Purpose-built to protect backup and metadata while minimizing data loss and downtime, SafeMode snapshots are created and managed automatically with advanced user security functions to prevent unauthorized access. These security advancements in Purity software ensure rapid restore of data, supporting greater productivity.
  • Portfolio of file services for greater value and more use cases: With its scale-out architecture, file services on FlashBlade create an ideal environment for real-time analytics, AI/ML, accelerated DevOps, and rapid ransomware recovery. For FlashArray, file services enable VDI user profile and file server consolidation on an architecture that balances performance and scalability with ease. Whether customers deploy FlashBlade or FlashArray, they are now able to support all workloads with the features provided in the Purity operating environment, leverage the same data layer, user interface, and capacity pool as well as benefit from global data reduction.

Pure is always one step ahead of the market and the latest updates to the Purity software across FlashBlade and FlashArray show that we’ve made the right choice for our business. With Pure, we have been able to achieve 100% uptime in our environment, which is critical to our banking operations. — Antonio Puccio, Director of SAN Storage at Royal Bank of Canada

FlashBlade, the industry-defining Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO) storage platform is architected to address the demands of modern and diverse applications and support the needs of a wide range of unstructured data. Key updates include:

  • Multi-dimensional performance for Windows applications with scale-out native SMB support. FlashBlade delivers native SMB support that scales out to all blades in a cluster, accelerating Windows applications and extending FlashBlade’s rich set of data services, including Replication, File System Rollback, and SafeMode Snapshots for rapid ransomware recovery to SMB workloads. With native SMB, Pure has validated solutions for various healthcare PACS applications and SQL Server Backup at speeds higher than 1TB/min for SQL farms that demand fast backup and recovery.
  • Security with Cross-Protocol File Security Design. Allows access control interoperability between SMB and NFS users while preserving access control lists for both, complying with federal security mandates.
  • Operational control for UFFO. Enhanced object security with S3 simple user policies provides access control at the user level. Granular, user-level performance monitoring meets a critical requirement for real-time visibility into the most active users and unified APIs/SDK improves the automation experience across FlashBlade, FlashArray, and Pure1® with unified REST APIs and Python SDK.

FlashArray is the leading unified block and file storage platform for mission critical applications and secondary workloads. Key updates include:

  • Entry-level FlashArray//C40 priced to compete against hybrid arrays. In conjunction with the refreshed FlashArray//C60, the new cost-effective pricing of the entry level FlashArray//C40 accelerates the inexorable market shift away from disk-based storage. The third generation of FlashArray//C takes Pure another step closer to its vision of an all flash data center.
  • Ransomware protection with Purity SafeMode. Purity SafeMode combines Immutable Snapshots and Policy-based Retention to ensure protected data is always safe and recoverable in seconds. This protects companies against the risk of lost revenues, ransom payments, and brand damage associated with ransomware attacks.
  • Availability through ActiveCluster over Fibre Channel. ActiveCluster™, included with Pure’s Evergreen subscription, delivers stretch clustering solutions for critical applications over any fabric. ActiveCluster is integrated with Pure1 Cloud Mediator, which removes the need to manage a cumbersome third-site witness and enables a third recovery site to be added anywhere in the world.
  • Performance with Multi-protocol NVMe support over Fibre Channel and Ethernet. Support for NVMe over Fibre Channel reduces application latency by up to 50% and complements Purity’s existing support for NVMe over Ethernet (RoCEv2).

“Pure is single-handedly chipping away at the complexity inherent in legacy storage that is not designed for the digital age and stifles innovation and progress. These new versions of Purity software deliver the things most important to our customers – performance, flexibility, and protection.”  — Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer, Pure Storage

Only Pure’s products come ready with all-inclusive licensing, allowing customers to adopt new innovations without disruption, downtime, or the requirement to re-buy capacity. As part of the Evergreen Storage subscription model, these new features require no additional licenses or support costs and ensure zero added complexity.

Today, Pure also announced file replication capabilities on FlashArray with Komprise.

The new features in Purity for FlashArray are available immediately and in Q1 for Purity for FlashBlade.

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) gives technologists their time back. Pure delivers a modern data experience that empowers organizations to run their operations as a true, automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. One of the fastest-growing enterprise IT companies in history, Pure helps customers put data to use while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. And with a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure’s ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.