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89: Keith & Ray show at Pure//Accelerate 2019

There were plenty of announcements at Pure//Accelerate in Austin this past week and we were given a preview of them at a StorageFieldDay Exclusive (SFDx), the day before the announcement.

First up is Pure’s DirectMemory. They have added Optane SSDs to FlashArray//X to be used as a read cache for customer data. As you may know, Pure already has an NVRAM write cache. With DirectMemory, customers can have 3TB or 6TB of Optane storage in a FlashArray//X70 or //X90 storage. It almost looks plug and play, you take out one or two flash modules and plug in Optane SSD(s) and off it goes. DirectMemory went GA at the show.

Pure also announced FlashArray//C at Accelerate. This is a new capacity optimized storage solution. They have re-designed their flash module to support higher capacity flash, and supply higher capacity storage (targeted for QLC flash but will originally ship with TLC). FlashArray//C supplies ~5PB of effective (~1.4PB raw) capacity in 9U. Although, FlashArray//C offers cheaper storage on $/GB basis it is also much slower (RT latency on order of 2-4msec) than FlashArray//X storage.. Pure like other vendors we have talked with are trying to drive disk technology out of the enterprise. We had some interesting discussions with Pure (and others) on this topic at the reception. Just remember, tape is still alive and well in the enterprise AND cloud, 52 years after being pronounced dead.

Pure had announced CloudBlockStore (CBS) previously but it is now GA through partners or on AWS marketplace. Give them kudos for their approach as they have taken a different approach to Pure storage in the cloud. With CBS, they have effectively re-archetected and re-implemented Pure FlashArray using AWS EC2, IO1, EBS and S3 storage and ended up with a highly available (iSCSI) block software defined storage. It will be interesting to see how well it’s adopted. Picture is from me explaining CBS architecture to @DVellante.

For Pure’s FlashBlade storage, they have doubled the number of blades in a cluster (or name space), from 75 to 150 FlashBlades. Each FlashBlade contains storage and compute (almost computational storage), so one should see an increase in bandwidth with the added blades. None at Pure would go on record with specific numbers on any performance improvement because it’s still undergoing testing.

Finally, FlashArray//X will offer full NFS and SMB file support. This is coming from a recent acquisition (Compuverde). They plan to differentiate between file on FlashArraiy//X file storage and FlashBlade by saying that FlashArray//X file is for those customers with mostly block storage requirements but also need small amount of file storage and FlashBlade for everyone else that needs file.

The podcast is ~23 minutes. Keith is a long time friend and co-host of our GreyBeards On Storage podcast. He’s always got an interesting perspective on how new technology can benefit the data center today. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations. Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.

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GreyBeards talk all-flash storage with Vaughn Stewart, Chief Technical Evangelist Pure Storage

Welcome to our 12th monthly episode where we return to discussing all-flash storage arrays, this time with Vaughn Stewart, Chief Technical Evangelist for Pure Storage. This our third all-flash storage array vendor that the GreyBeards have talked with since the start of the podcast, not counting server side flash and scale-out/hybrid storage systems.

Vaughn has had a long and illustrious carreer in the storage business most recently prior to joining Pure, at NetApp in product strategy and marketing. Pure Storage seems to have disrupted the normal economics of Flash storage and as a result have seen success in the marketplace.

This month’s episode comes in at a little over 48 minutes long. 

In this podcast we discuss how Pure Storage is changing the economics of Flash storage, primarily through 5 forms of data reduction, some of which are unique to Pure Storage. Their storage solution is block storage, targeting tier 1 applications needing higher IOPS and with the consistent low response time of Flash at the economics of high performing disk storage.

Vaughn provides a good rational as to why we haven’t seen any Pure Storage SPC-1/SPC-2 benchmarks, mainly because SPC will not audit storage that uses data reduction.  Sometime in the podcast we have a good discussion on scale-out vs. scale-up solutions for block storage.

I would have to say that Vaughn is one of the more articulate storage geeks the GreyBeards have come across. We seem to take off on a number of tangents, not the least of which is all the innovation going on in storage these days, where Cisco may go, and where it will all end up,  but we try hard to bring it back to product technology.  Listen to podcast to learn more.

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Vaughn Stewart, Chief Evangelist, Pure Storage

Vaughn Stewart is the Chief Technical Evangelist at Pure Storage, where he shares his perspective on the emergence and capabilities of a flash-powered economy. Prior to joining the ‘flash revolution’ he spent 13 years in technical and marketing leadership roles at NetApp where he led the virtualization and cloud strategy and was awarded a US patent. Vaughn strives to simplify the technically complex and advocates to think outside of the box.

You can find his thoughts on the role of storage with cloud computing and big data online and in print. He publishes his blog, ‘The Pure Storage Guy’, has authored a number of books including his latest is “Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere & Cloud Computing” and is a frequent guest on various online mediums.