Every organization aspires to increase its operational agility. Realizing this goal requires advanced data services to help leverage the priceless information they store. That’s why we were excited to announce Purity 6.0 earlier this month: With a quick non-disruptive upgrade, Pure FlashArray™customers can have a unified block and file storage experience, broader data protection options, and more effective containerization.
Two Key Enhancements
Many companies rely on block storage for their core operational workloads, which include Oracle, SQL Server, or SAP HANA databases as well as virtual environments: and custom applications. But business does not run on applications alone. Data growth comes from unstructured or file data. Handling increasing data calls for a unified architecture that supports your application workloads and file services. This means services delivered through a consistent management experience and benefit from a consistent set of storage efficiencies that ensures that the solution aligns with budget and performance requirements.
By natively integrating the mature and proven technology from last year’s Compuverde acquisition, our engineering and product teams deliver SMB and NFS from FlashArray alongside our existing block protocols. With Purity 6, you can seamlessly manage both SAN and NAS protocols from a single pane of glass, greatly simplifying operations and making better use of your IT resources. The experience (management, monitoring, and APIs) for managing file services on FlashArray mimics that on FlashBlade®.
ActiveDR™ is the other big component of the Purity 6 release. To address the challenges of distaster-recovery (DR) configurations across geographically separated distances, you need a solution that continuously protects your business and simplifies failover/failback. ActiveDR addresses these challenges by providing enhanced business resiliency without the cost and complexity of third-party DR software. Based on our continuous replication technology, ActiveDR protects applications with a near-zero recovery point objective over nearly any distance between data centers.
ActiveDR includes features that allow you to non-disruptively test DR configurations, fail over with a single-command once you’ve identified a disaster, and perform intelligent failback once the disaster is mitigated. Non-disruptive testing is significant, because it lets you test more often and gain more confidence in your business-resilience capabilities. ActiveDR requires no extra infrastructure, no licenses or fees, and set-up takes just a few minutes.
But wait, there’s more! Although not everyone will need the extra headroom, we’ve also increased the maximum number of objects on FlashArray. This provides increased flexibility and consolidation, which are helpful if you’re migrating from legacy arrays or experiencing data growth (as we all are).
With these new capabilities, you have fewer variables to worry about in your architecture and purchasing decisions.
