Today, Pure Storage® is proud to be part of the inaugural launch of the AWS Outposts Service Ready Program by achieving the Outposts Ready designation. Pure Storage FlashBlade® is thoroughly tested, performance-validated and then approved by AWS to run alongside an Outpost in customers’ and partners’ data centers. Pure FlashBlade for AWS Outposts delivers a hybrid-cloud solution with all-flash performance, cloud scalability, and operational simplicity to accelerate modern applications and deliver a unified fast file and object storage (UFFO) platform that eliminates IT silos, even across the cloud and on-premises data centers.
This FlashBlade integration represents the first time Pure Storage and AWS are physically working “side by side” in the data center to marry the power of Pure’s performance and cloud-like simplicity with the scale and operational power of AWS’s cloud infrastructure. With the validated integration of FlashBlade with AWS Outposts, AWS users can now leverage a low-latency, high-performance UFFO platform with S3 API support in tandem with AWS services, APIs, and tools—all with simplified management in their own datacenters.
Pure Storage FlashBlade—a UFFO solution—connects to AWS Outposts to offer scalable performant storage with S3 API support plus the performance needed for AI/ML, analytics, rapid restore, and ransomware mitigation. Together, AWS Outposts and FlashBlade support organizations looking to expand their hybrid-cloud functionality with enterprise-class storage that meets modern data and application needs.
A Customer-driven Approach
Pure Storage and AWS are both known for their customer obsession. When developing this AWS Service Ready solution, Pure listened to our customers’ needs, and what they hoped to achieve with AWS Outposts. We identified common themes and designed the solution to deliver:
- Modern analytics and AI/ML that leverages high data throughput to power NVIDIA GPUs within AWS Outposts and load inferencing on images to inform algorithms.
- High performance, high throughput to restore data from data snapshots in order to access and recover data on FlashBlade quickly. FlashBlade Rapid Restore adds comprehensive, built-in data protection capability to AWS Outposts.
- Data sovereignty, compliance, or security needs where, for example, the data can’t leave the country or a secure data center.
- Low-latency requirements for applications that need data to respond to real-world entities with single-digit millisecond latency, such as imaging in health and sciences.
- Local data processing requirements for applications that need to, or prefer to, process data on premises. This need is often because a large volume of changing data would have to be transferred to and from the customer location if processing occurs on the public cloud. An example is IoT applications that run close to a manufacturing factory floor.
Feedback from potential customers drove our design thinking, including:
- “We have a cloud-first strategy but require high-performance and low-latency storage services for file and object data services that AWS Outposts alone cannot meet today.” —Director of Cloud Services, Manufacturing Company
- “I want to use a container layer on AWS Outposts with FlashBlade to help scale, manage, backup, and recover these services.” —DevOps Lead, Financial Services Company
- “I need to deploy a hybrid-cloud infrastructure storage solution in my environment that is closely tethered to my public cloud. Pure Storage FlashBlade and AWS Outposts can meet those needs.” —Director of Infrastructure, Hosting Partner
Design That’s Been Put to the Test
To validate our design, Pure Storage brought an Outpost rack into our Solutions Engineering Lab to ensure we could deliver the simplicity and performance you need. We wanted to do way more than just “plug testing” to be 100% sure that you could drop the joint solution right into your data center and have it perform as expected.
The design is very straightforward:
Here’s what we validated:
- It was quick and easy to connect FlashBlade to an Outpost rack.
- The management of FlashBlade, with Purity software, allowed for easy connection to an Outpost.
- AWS and Pure users would get the storage performance they expected, particularly when running high-performance workloads on NVIDIA GPUs.
- FlashBlade handled any and every workload you’d be likely to throw at the solution—across both file and object protocols.
- It was easy to scale storage capacity for AWS Outposts with FlashBlade without leaving any investment behind.
- You can enable FlashBlade to act as a unified storage platform within the data center and bring data from many disparate sources together in one place to be accessible to applications running on AWS Outposts.
- The solution was fault-tolerant, including interruptions within the data center.
You can learn more about the joint solution, best practices, and the testing we did in our FlashBlade for AWS Outposts Reference Architecture.
As you’re thinking about procuring a FlashBlade and AWS Outposts solution, the great news is you can use “as-a-service models” for both. Through Evergreen//One™, you can get FlashBlade to support your AWS Outposts racks through a single subscription that includes installation, Purity and Pure1® management, premium service, and capacity monitoring.
Evergreen//One is a utility, where just like the AWS cloud, you’re billed based on actual consumption (subject to a minimum commitment). Gone are the days where you had to predict the future to buy or lease storage years in advance. The two solutions couldn’t be more perfectly paired to deliver a Modern Data Experience™.
Today’s announcement on Pure’s achievement of the Outposts Service Ready designation is just the continuation of the work we’re doing with AWS and other partners with AWS Outposts. By acquiring our own Outpost rack, we’ve made a long-term commitment to support and continue to develop new solutions for this unique environment, including working with mutual partners that have technologies in backup and DR, analytics, EDA, and AI/ML. Our Solutions Lab is available if you need to validate workloads on this combined solution.
For more information, check out:
To get started right away, contact aws@purestorage.com.
