Pure Storage released the latest version of its flagship all-flash array, FlashArray//m. Pure states that with the new array companies now have access to petabyte-scale storage for mission-critical cloud IT. Along with petabyte-scale, //m offers 99.9999% availability and always on Quality of Service (QoS).
Pure Storage released the latest version of its flagship all-flash array, FlashArray//m. Pure states that with the new array companies now have access to petabyte-scale storage for mission-critical cloud IT. Along with petabyte-scale, //m offers 99.9999% availability and always on Quality of Service (QoS).
The latest FlashArray//m marks the fifth generation of Pure’s flagship FlashArray product. This new 7U array can scale up to 512TB of raw flash, which translates to approximately 1.5 petabytes of effective capacity, according to Pure Storage. This level of density in a 7U space would allow companies to consolidate legacy disck storage down. The new //m leverages Pure’s Evergreen architecture, meaning existing customers can seamlessly upgrade to the newer technology. The latest version of the array has new controller options delivering what Pure claims are a 20 to 30% performance boost and a 100 to 276% capacity boost over the previous FlashArray//m generation. And Pure states that it has improved Object storage by 10X.
Models and performance include:
- //m10 (introduced earlier in 2016) – up to 25TBs effective usable capacity (5 – 10TBs raw storage) and up to 100,000 32K IOPS
- New //m20 – up to 250TBs effective usable capacity (5 – 80TBs raw storage) and up to 200,000 32K IOPS
- New //m50 – up to 500TBs effective usable capacity (20 – 176TBs raw storage) and up to 270,000 32K IOPS
- New //m70 – up to 1.5PB effective usable capacity (42 – 512TBs raw storage) and up to 370,000 32K IOPS
Pure Storage’s FlashArray//m has achieved 99.999% availability cross the installed base or 31.5 seconds of downtime on average per year. Pure is wanting to take this a step farther by including its six 9’s of availability in both upgrades and maintenance, across both hardware and software. Pure states the array could hit his availability without requiring a second array for replication. A key to achieving this goal it to leverage Pure1 Global Insight, Pure’s cloud-based predictive analytics platform.
Pure plans on a different approach to tackle the noisy neighbor problem. The new //m array will have always on QoS that will automatically throttle performance of a noisy neighbor to ensure other applications aren’t starve of resources. Pure states that this automated QoS will greatly simplify QoS implementation.
One other feature that is new to //m is Network Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) support. Pure claims that NPIV support makes the non-disruptive software upgrade experience even more robust and invisible to the host and server as well as virtualization admin teams. According to Pure, with NPIV, IO intended for ports on a FlashArray//m controller that have been temporarily restarted during the software upgrade process is transparently directed to the other FlashArray//m controller, without any dependency on host multipathing software. NPIV removes the risk of downtime due to misconfigured host multipathing software – a common worry for large enterprise environments – and makes storage software upgrades transparent to server administrators by eliminating IO error alerts that would otherwise be generated at the application host layer.
Availability
The new versions of FlashArray//m are available to order, with new //m20, //m50, and //m70 configurations now shipping. Upgrade Flex bundles enable existing FA-400 Series and FlashArray//m customers to upgrade and receive trade-in credit for existing controllers. The Purity Operating Environment, version 4.8, which contains the features mentioned above is currently shipping. Always-On QoS is now available in an Early Access Program for select customers with General Availability for production workloads planned for fourth quarter of 2016.
Sign up for the StorageReview newsletter
