Pure Storage Introduces FlashBlade//E for Unstructured Data

Mountain View, CA – March 1, 2023 — High performance data storage company Pure Storage today announced FlashBlade//E, a scale-out unstructured data repository built to handle data growth at scale. Pure said with the price of the new product  and “lower operational costs, the introduction of FlashBlade//E means that customers no longer need to settle for disk for bulk data.”

FlashBlade//E is intended to provide a better way to manage unstructured data growth efficiently, reliably, and sustainably.

  • Economical: FlashBlade//E is offered at under $0.20 per GB including three years of service. The platform starts at 4PB and scales from there with reliable performance.
  • Energy efficiency: The company said FlashBlade//E consumes up to 5x less power than disk-based systems. The larger the system the greater the efficiency, helping organizations achieve their increasingly critical sustainability goals.
  • Simplicity, reliability, and a non-disruptive future: FlashBlade//E is built to flex and grow on demand with 10-20x more reliability than hard disk based systems and evolving without disruption or forklift upgrades. With cloud-like simplicity, flexibility and predictable performance, FlashBlade//E remains simple to manage at any scale.

FlashBlade//E will be generally available by the end of April 2023. In addition to traditional purchase, customers will have the option to deploy FlashBlade//E through the new Efficiency service tier of Pure Storage Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) subscription, providing pay-as-you-go economics and a cloud experience with the control of on-premises deployment.

For global organizations, unstructured data capacity is expected to grow by 10x before 2030. For large-capacity, price-sensitive workloads that use current disk-based storage solutions, this growth is unsustainable.

Disk-based systems are a burden on many enterprises’ IT teams and budgets as they are challenging to manage, require massive amounts of power, take up large amounts of space and their components fail too often, causing disruption and risking valuable data. Ultimately, this diminishes the ability to derive business value from data. While modern file and object storage solutions are capable of addressing many of these challenges, they haven’t been a viable option for large unstructured data repositories that are price-sensitive – until now.

“While the benefits of flash for high-powered workloads have been largely acknowledged, disk’s price point has limited broader perception of its full potential use,” said Scott Sinclair, practice director, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Nevertheless, the need for a modern platform to accommodate the rise in unstructured data at scale is evident. FlashBlade//E’s promise of a more cost-effective, energy-efficient and easier-to-manage approach to everyday workloads makes a compelling case for leaving disk behind.”