Pure Storage rolls out FlashArrays

“To keep pace with rapidly evolving infrastructure requirements, enterprises are now looking for greater scalability, simplicity and efficiency from their storage solutions than ever before,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst at 451 Research. “It’s a value proposition that all-flash array solutions, such as the Pure Storage FlashArray, are well positioned to deliver – especially if they can offer lower cost of acquisition and reduce total cost of ownership.”

A pioneer of the all-flash array (AFA) category, Pure Storage was first to successfully deliver an all-flash enterprise storage array for less than the cost of legacy performance disk solutions. Today, with the expansion of its FlashArray 400 Series product line and new feature-rich Purity 4.0 software, the company now offers the most comprehensive, tested and mature all-flash array (AFA) product lineup available to the market, setting a new industry standard for enterprise storage performance, scalability, security and efficiency, with a 10x improvement over disk-centric solutions in every dimension.

Meet the Expanded FlashArray Family: All-Flash Storage For Every Enterprise
The new FA-405 and FA-450 FlashArrays complement Pure Storage’s current offering – the award-winning FA-420 array – with an entry-level and high-capacity solution designed to meet every enterprise budget, capacity and performance requirement. The FlashArray family of products is fully expandable and upgradable, so customers can start with the configuration of their choice, and non-disruptively extend its performance and capacity as their application requirements evolve. The Pure Storage FA-400 Series product line includes:
· NEW FlashArray 405: An Entry-Level Array for Midsized Enterprises, Distributed Operations and Single-Application Deployments
Don’t let its small size fool you: the FA-405 punches above its weight, offering up to 40TB of usable space in a 1U controller form factor, making it ideal for top-of-rack and entry-level configurations. Running on the same Purity 4.0 software as it’s higher capacity counterparts, the FA-405 delivers all the power, performance and enterprise-class features of the FA-420 and FA-450 arrays, with the budget and space conscious requirements of smaller and distributed businesses in mind. The FA-405 is also ideal for single-application starter deployments, such as VDI pilots or single database acceleration, and can be upgraded non-disruptively to a FA-420 or FA-450 system, as a customer’s capacity or performance needs expand.
· FlashArray 420: Endures as the Data Center Workhorse
Pure Storage’s existing FA-420 FlashArray continues to be the center of the FlashArray family, suitable for accelerating consolidated applications and supporting up to 125TB of usable space. The FA-420 can be non-disruptively upgraded to an FA-450, as a customer’s capacity or performance needs increase.
· NEW FlashArray 450: A High Capacity, High Performance FlashArray for Large Enterprises
Suitable for replacing racks and racks of Tier 1 disk storage for consolidated, virtualized workloads, the FA-450 offers up to 250TB of usable space, in a 2U controller footprint. Powered by two 2.7GHz 12-core Intel processors and 512 GB RAM per controller, the 450 was built to deliver maximum scalability, power and performance for large enterprises. The FA-450 also introduces support for 16 Gb/s fibre channel connectivity.

According to Gartner: “Crucial challenges to all IT managers will be to implement a resilient infrastructure to lessen impacts of unabated terabyte growth while reducing power and space requirements, yet accelerating data access. Given restricted budgets and enhanced SLAs, software that can evolve with changing needs of the data center and the workload at hand is critical. Seamlessly integrating storage efficiency and data management technologies within an enterprise solid-state appliance increases the real and perceived value of the product, and opens the door for widespread market acceptance.”

NEW Purity 4.0 Software: Purpose-Built for Mission-Critical Environments
The fourth generation release of the Purity Operating Environment sets a new standard for enterprise AFA software, offering the most expansive and comprehensive disaster recovery, data protection and security features in its class. Newly enhanced with FlashRecover, a native and fully integrated replication, snapshot and policy management service, Purity 4.0 was purpose-built to keep mission-critical applications running in the face of anything—from natural disaster or user error, to hardware failure and malicious attacks. Key new features of the Purity 4.0 release include:
· FlashRecover Replication and Snapshots for Comprehensive Data Protection
Purity 4.0’s new FlashRecover technology features data reduction-aware replication and snapshot services, to deliver space-efficient, point-in-time copies and expanded data protection for local and remote data centers.

FlashRecover Replication runs natively on 400-Series FlashArrays, utilizing Purity’s proprietary FlashReduce deduplication and compression technologies to dramatically reduce the required network bandwidth to support disaster recovery. FlashRecover enables replication across the FlashArray 400 Series in any combination of fan-in/fan-out configurations, and supports replication of a single volume, consistent groups of multiple volumes, or all data content on the array.
· FlashRecover Protection Policies for End-to-End Protection Policy Management
Purity FlashRecover Protection Policies deliver simplified global management of data protection. Unifying replication and snapshot services into a single policy orchestration layer, FlashRecover Protection Policies enables users to manage various levels of local and remote data protection, and data retention by volume, consistency group, and/or array.

FlashRecover Protection Policies are designed to support a variety of Tier 1 storage use cases, including disaster recovery for mission critical applications, disaster recovery-as-a-service, multi-site test and development, content distribution, and remote office protection.
· FlashProtect: Expanded Information Security for Mission-Critical Environments
Purity 4.0’s FlashProtect combines new rapid data locking and dark site support services with existing always-on data-at-rest AES encryption and high availability (HA) to deliver military-grade data security and compliance.

Powered By Purity 4.0, New Flash Array Family Is Mission Critical-Ready and Perfect for Tier 1 Storage
Newly fortified with Purity 4.0’s FlashRecover and FlashProtect technologies, the FlashArray 400 Series can now support even the most demanding mission critical applications and Tier 1 storage use cases in even highly regulated industries, including Financial Services, Healthcare and the Federal Government.

“This is a watershed moment for Pure and the AFA category in general,” said Scott Dietzen, CEO of Pure Storage. “With the FlashArray 450 and Purity 4.0, we are delivering feature parity with incumbent high end disk arrays. Going forward, no one should deploy performance (oxymoron) disk for database or virtualized applications – no one! FlashArray costs less, and yet delivers 10X or better performance, power and space utilization, reliability, and simplicity of operations. The OpEx savings alone vs. traditional disk arrays allow our FlashArray to pay for itself over it’s first 3-4 years in the data center, and it’ll still have years of productive service to deliver after traditional mechanical storage has been written off.”