For years, IT administrators have dealt with the challenge of deploying different applications and deployment environments on their storage arrays. Mixing different workloads and data types has typically been avoided and the reasons are numerous.
Perhaps it’s the fear of impacting performance by combining transactional databases with data warehouses. Or maybe there’s a preference to run certain production applications in bare metal on one array, and virtualize test and development on other storage. We have even seen instances where different application versions (databases or ERP) are kept separate to make them ‘easier’ to maintain.
The rise of modern applications, artificial intelligence data, and the exponential increase in data generated present new challenges. Meeting them with the same strategy of building silos is neither cost effective nor easy to manage.
FlashArray//X: A Data-Centric Architecture
Enter the Pure Data-Centric Architecture. Pure Storage helps customers be data-centric – where data is shared, consolidated and delivered as a service. The result is a comprehensive solution that is cost-effective, secure, simple to deploy, and delivers predictable and unprecedented performance – for all business applications, all versions of applications, all data types, and all deployment environments.
Pure Storage built an all-flash architecture, designed from the ground-up to eliminate barriers of the past, and is enabling enterprises to put data at the center of everything they do. Confidently run business critical applications, like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Databases, SAP, and VMWare workloads, without worrying about response times, and management complexity.
The New FlashArray//X Family
The recently announced new FlashArray//X product line is a perfect starting point for evaluating a mixed workload approach to application and deployment environment (Test/Dev/QA) consolidation. Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage (which is a term coined by Gartner) – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation of mixed workloads.
FlashArray//X Features
- With latency as low as 250 μs, FlashArray//X’s all-NVME architecture brings new levels of performance to mission-critical business applications.
- With built-in Purity ActiveCluster, more applications can now benefit from the simple to deploy, always-on business continuity provided by via active/active metro stretch clustering.
- Pure DirectFlash™ with 100% NVMe also enables unprecedented performance density – the kind of density required for mixed-workload consolidation in your cloud. //X currently supports ultra-dense 18.3TB DirectFlash modules, for maximum density and full performance.
- Purity’s always-on and limits QoS features means you can consolidate radically diverse applications without fear of I/O contention.
Modern Analytics, FlashBlade™ and AIRI™
The rapid rise of AI, big data, and machine learning, presents new challenges to businesses looking to transform data, into meaningful intelligence. It also means handling new data types – object, unstructured, and semi-structured. These massively parallel architectures, demand higher performance.
To address this challenge, Pure developed FlashBlade, designed to harness the power of data at scale, running analytics, simulations, and software development up to 10x faster than traditional solutions.
FlashBlade unified fast file and object (UFFO) storage is purpose-built for modern analytics, offering real-time response, with cloud-like agility. FlashBlade is massively parallel at its core. Delivering performance and simplicity for data scientists and engineers. From small, metadata-heavy workloads, to random, large file accesses, it is architected for the unknown – whatever your next big data initiative may be.
Experience the Pure Data-centric Architecture for Mixed Workloads Today
Run any application, any application version, any data type, and any deployment environment – all on a single unified data platform that can simplify production business critical applications, streamline development, and deliver rapid insight for next-gen analytics. We have everything you need to drive industry-defining innovation and achieve business results that were previously unimaginable.
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