Integrating enterprise storage into complicated data centers has always been tricky. A pretty common occurrence is having to navigate production network topologies that have been around for a while with reactionary growth.
Storage networks are no exception to this concept—their Ethernet-based fabrics are subject to the same quasi-chaos and ever-expanding hunger for more networks and IP addresses. Network administrators continue to have to find new ways to segment the network to accommodate growing networking needs including adding VLANs, trunking, subnetting, and interconnects.
To aid in dealing with the ever-increasing networking complexity, Purity//FA 6.4.5 significantly increases the supported VLAN tags to 500 and subnet interfaces to 2000. These new thresholds enable customers with very complex networks to add their FlashArray systems to their network fabric without adding more complexity. Whether you’re a very large enterprise customer or you just have a lot of network segmentation, these expanded limits should decrease the effort involved in getting your FlashArray systems connected.
The expanded thresholds for network scalability also enable a bigger potential—effective storage consolidation. Pure’s vision of an all-flash data center will require workloads that leverage spinning disk to eventually be migrated to FlashArray, and expanded networking will make that effort an easier lift. More VLAN tags and subnets enable direct access to more hosts and other existing arrays in the data center without complicated routing or other networking workarounds. Virtualization, containers, security, and application segmentation are just a few of the reasons why organizations continue to need support for more networking connectivity.
Expanded VLAN capabilities are now shipping with Purity 6.4.5.
