Earlier this month, we announced the availability of Purity//FB3.0 for Pure Storage® FlashBlade™. This milestone expands a diverse set of file and object use cases with the industry’s first unified, fast file and object platform. It also gives us a chance to reflect on the need for new architectures that ultimately brought FlashBlade innovation to the marketplace. FlashBlade has not only uniquely met the historical needs of “big data”—it truly advances a modern data experience for analytics.
The Origin and History of FlashBlade
As early as 2013, a group of Puritans were evaluating the need to bring all-flash storage to data-centric, unstructured workloads. “Big data” was driving change across the industry. But infrastructure architectures were dominated by big, slow disks. The opportunity had arrived to rethink infrastructure for unstructured data with an all-flash architecture. This culminated with the 2016 introduction of FlashBlade, bringing new levels of “big, fast, and simple” to the world of big data. From the start, FlashBlade offered a multi-PB platform with high throughput that sped workloads with an I/O capability and management simplicity you now expect from Pure.
Today, this revolutionary product continues to transform customer experiences with modern analytics applications. Why? Many organizations struggle with utilizing data locked in silos, warehouses, and lakes. This slows insights, restricts innovation, and complicates IT operations. Additionally, application vendors have begun a shift to cloud-enabled architectures, such as with Splunk SmartStore and Vertica Eon Mode. A modern data experience with FlashBlade accelerates decision-making with high-performance systems. It protects innovation investments with adaptable architectures that are easy to scale and optimized for cloud-enabled applications. Finally, technology adoption and migrations are eased with the dramatic simplicity of disaggregated architectures and easy-to-use, easy-to-scale systems.
Across Pure, we focus on enabling a modern data experience so organizations are empowered to run operations as a true, automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. This focus is represented by the principles that fast matters, clouds are everywhere, the smart way is the simple way, and that enabling a subscription to innovation means removing disruptions to your business.
In short, we offer a modern data experience for analytics so you can maximize the value of your data assets. How is this done? In addition to high-performance systems and architectures, we offer tools and support that simplify operations and keep you focused on adopting the innovation that drives your business forward. Our support is AI driven, so we can predict and resolve issues before they become outages. Our customer experience NPS score of 93 is in the top 1% of all businesses. Plus, we offer options for pay-as-you-go billing with scale up and down flexibility so you can consume IT resources that fit your business needs.
Delivering the Modern Data Experience
With FlashBlade as a platform, we apply the principles of our modern data experience to your analytics environment as follows:
- FAST MATTERS: The ability to derive business value from your data sooner by powering every analytics tool—from ingest to visualization—for real-time results at any scale. Specifically, our focus on ‘fast matters’ has allowed us to design platforms, particularly FlashBlade, that provide massive throughput for accelerating every aspect of AI workflows and data analytic pipelines — at any scale for structured and unstructured data needs. With real-time data becoming 30% of the global datasphere by 2025, according to IDC, fast matters.
- CLOUD EVERYWHERE: You can develop and deploy analytics anywhere for a better ROI on compute and storage, and preserve your investment with the choice of an on-premises all-flash solution for file or object storage. Additionally, you can combine the control and efficiency of on-prem solutions with the economics of the cloud model through Pure as-a-Service™. With fast object storage from FlashBlade, you can run cloud applications with a level of consistency and performance not possible through alternative solutions.
- SIMPLE IS SMART: You can control shadow IT and deliver a predictable experience for data scientists by unlocking big data with scalable, efficient data storage that’s easily leveraged by large numbers of users and applications. With Pure’s focus on ‘simple is smart,’ we disaggregate compute from storage to offer an efficient platform for hosting multiple analytics applications, concurrently supporting large numbers of users, and easily scaling with data growth. The result: You can eliminate the complexity of siloed approaches.
- SUBSCRIPTION TO INNOVATION: When you speed up innovation by eliminating costly and complex data migrations, you get the flexibility to redirect budgets to compute as needed and realize cloud economics with on-premises ownership. Finally, with Pure’s Evergreen™ storage subscription to innovation and cloud everywhere approach, we make purchasing easier, freeing budget to areas critical for analytics (e.g. compute) locally or in the cloud.
Learn more about how FlashBlade and Pure solutions can modernize your experience with data analytics.
