Monday, March 14, 2016

Pure Storage Scales All-Flash to Multi-Petabytes at <$1/GB

Pure Storage introduced an all-flash storage platform designed to scale to multi-petabyte data sets at economics of less than $1/GB usable.

The company said its new FlashBlade architecture makes all-flash storage affordable for even the largest file and object environments, opening up the performance gains of flash to a wide range of applications.

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The system 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 Gbps 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.

Significantly, FlashBlade enables an elastic scale-out, where storage capacity, IO and metadata performance, bandwidth, and client connectivity grow linearly as 8TB or 52TB blades are added non-disruptively to the system. FlashBlade delivers up to 15 GB/s of bandwidth per 4U chassis and consistent all-flash low-latency. The Elasticity OS supports a gigantic scale-out namespace that can be accessed via both file and object protocols, and can adapt to future protocols.

“The value that can be gained from efficiently storing and analyzing unstructured data has a transformative affect on business,” said John Hayes, Co-founder and Chief Architect, Pure Storage. “FlashBlade unlocks new capabilities and use cases that are simply not possible with today’s existing solutions by delivering real-time analytics at massive scale and blazing speeds to enable the future of innovation.”

http://www.purestorage.com