Many commercial and enterprise IT leaders are pivoting away from thinking about workloads as Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 and reframing them as performance-oriented vs. capacity-oriented.
It’s an important distinction. You’re constantly striving to meet SLAs and keep users happy. But it’s a big challenge when some workloads are designated Tier 2 and subject to lower standards for quality of service (QoS). The situation has become increasingly more difficult due to the pandemic and so many people working remotely with limited bandwidth.
But you can shift the conversation by focusing instead on each workload’s optimal balance between performance and capacity. Both Pure Storage® FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C use the same Purity environment. FlashArray//X delivers extreme performance for business-critical apps while FlashArray//C offers datastores up to 5.2PB effective and 1.4PB raw—plenty of capacity for even the most data-hungry apps. You can have the simplicity and ease of use for which Pure is famous for all your workloads.
The economic advantages improved further in August with the general availability of FlashArray//C systems containing 24.5TB quad-level cell (QLC) NAND chips that cram four bits of data into every flash cell. At the time, these were the densest flash solid-state drives (SSDs) on the market, but that was three months ago—ancient history)
FlashArray//C and the New Era of All-QLC Storage
Workloads continue to grow in scale, complexity, and volume—from unstructured data lakes and backup targets to AI-generated content and large-scale analytics. FlashArray//C, now powered by ultra-dense 75TB QLC DirectFlash® Modules, has extended its role as the go-to platform for cost-optimized, capacity-rich workloads.
Modern use cases now benefiting from FlashArray//C include:
- AI/ML cold data tiers and model archives
- Immutable backup repositories with SafeMode™ Snapshots
- Cloud-native data protection via integration with Pure Cloud Block Store
- Petabyte-scale media, genomics, and log data retention
FlashArray//C continues to outperform legacy hybrid storage systems by eliminating complexity, offering consistent performance, and drastically lowering TCO—all while helping organizations meet sustainability targets with reduced power and rack footprint.
With continued innovations in QLC endurance, compression, and intelligent data placement, Pure Storage is redefining what’s possible with all-flash capacity arrays—bringing simplicity, scale, and performance to every workload.
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Today, Pure Storage has started shipping FlashArray//C systems that use new 49TB QLC drives to increase capacity and data density. The net result is that FlashArray//C is now cost-effective for a broader set of workloads, thereby eliminating the need for legacy hybrid-storage arrays and inefficient tiering solutions.
FlashArray//C, alone or in combination with FlashArray//X, now provides a great fit for use cases such as workload consolidation, data protection, disaster recovery, and any other workloads requiring massive data-storage capacity. Once again, Pure is changing the fundamental economics of flash storage. This time, we’re making QLC enterprise-grade, more reliable, and more performant.
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