Purity//FA 6.6.0: Paving the Way for FlashArray//E

We are very excited to announce the general availability of Purity//FA 6.6.0. This Feature Release (FR) of Purity//FA delivers bold environmental, social, and governance (ESG) benefits, enables storage consolidation, and simplifies storage provisioning along with other improvements for FlashArray™ customers. Let’s take a look at the highlights.

Revolutionary FlashArray//E Platform for Tier-3 Workloads Lowers Operating Expenses by 60%

FlashArray//E™ was announced at Pure//Accelerate® 2023 back in June, and Purity//FA 6.6.0 has been released to pave the way for general availability for it. FlashArray//E allows you to benefit from an all-flash array (AFA) platform to address tier-3 capacity-intensive use cases like backup or archive retention for both block and file workloads, all at comparable acquisition price points of HDD-based storage arrays. FlashArray//E also exhibits great ESG benefits as it consumes up to 80% less power and space than traditional spinning disk or hybrid arrays while generating up to 85% less e-waste.

5 Billion Files per Array Enables Storage Consolidation into Fewer Arrays 

Purity//FA 6.6.0 increases the maximum file count to 5 billion files per array. This enables high file count use cases such as enterprise imaging/PACS, archives, and content repositories. This increase in scale also improves capacity utilization and eliminates the need to purchase multiple storage arrays to accommodate higher file counts. 

“Pure Storage’s FlashArray//E contributes to lowering our operating costs and minimizing risks by enhancing the reliability and resilience of both our production data on our //X arrays and now our backup data stored on //E arrays. Additionally, it reduces power consumption and management costs associated with backup data while facilitating seamless capacity expansion to accommodate inevitable growth, leveraging the arrays’ deduplication and compression capabilities. We leverage features such as SafeMode Snapshots for data immutability and ActiveCluster for real-time replication and availability of data between our primary data center and our disaster recovery site. Pure Storage’s ability to make implementation and management of these sophisticated features simple, and with no additional licensing required, is impressive. Our experience with Pure Storage’s platform and support over the last 7 years made the choice of FlashArray//E for our next-generation of backup storage an easy choice.”  – Chris Coleman, Director – Technology, Area9 

NFS v4.1 Support in vSphere Plugin Eliminates Manual Overhead, Enabling Easy and Native Provisioning of NFS Datastores in vSphere 

vSphere admins can save time and complexity when managing NFS datastores with the latest vSphere plugin as part of the Purity//FA 6.6.0 release. New API-driven operations in this release enable customers to easily and natively provision NFS v3 or v4.1 datastores in the vSphere Client, “undelete” NFS datastore-based virtual machines, and quickly revert NFS datastore-based virtual machines and their disks. 

If you’re not using the Pure Storage vSphere plugin yet, you can take a look at the install documentation and start taking advantage of these great features today.

Upgrade Purity//FA Today

Customers wanting to upgrade to this version will be able to do it via self-service upgrades through Pure1® or work with Pure Storage Support to get it installed.

This first version in the Purity//FA 6.6 release line continues Pure Storage’s promise to our customers to continuously deliver innovation and value. To learn more about the release, please see 66x Release Notes (Pure1 login required).