Storage Unpacked 243 – Introducing FlashBlade//E (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Pure Storage, Sponsored, Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Pure Storage International CTO, Alex McMullan, discussing the announcement of FlashBlade//E. The new FlashBlade//E platform extends the current offerings, targeting what the company terms the four “E’s” – environmental, economical, effortless and everlasting. Essentially, FlashBlade//E is a highly scalable version of the FlashBlade//S (which we discussed in June 2022). In the new platform, Pure offers both compute/storage and storage-only chassis that start at a capacity of 4PB and increase in 2PB increments.

The big difference between //S and //E models is the cost. Pure Storage has announced a target price of $0.20/GB raw, which is much lower than existing all-flash systems and is closely comparable with consumer SSD pricing. As a result, the FlashBlade//E is aimed at customers looking to retire HDD-based systems while gaining the benefit of random-access performance offered by all-flash systems.

There are some interesting aspects to this discussion. Alex explains that Pure Storage has a roadmap to 300TB direct flash modules, beating anything else on the market today. In parallel, the //E system aims to address the power consumption challenges of modern data centres, initially delivering approximately 1W per TB consumption (compared to 2W per TB today) with a target of milliwatt-level consumption per TB in the future. The third leg to this sustainability discussion is the significant reduction in e-waste compared to hard drives. All of these features are focused on helping customers deliver to their own sustainability targets.

FlashBlade//E is available for internal customer ordering and expected to ship within 30 days.

Elapsed Time: 00:34:49

Timeline

  • 00:00:00 – Intros
  • 00:01:00 – New announcement – FlashBlade//E
  • 00:01:50 – Data growth has exploded, is this sustainable?
  • 00:02:35 – FlashBlade//E is a capacity-optimised system
  • 00:03:45 – Data usage is changing, more data needs to be online
  • 00:04:30 – Sustainability – HDDs are hard to reuse, may get recycled
  • 00:06:10 – Pure is moving toward 300TB drives within a few years
  • 00:06:55 – Panorama (UK current affairs series) highlighted data centre impacts
  • 00:09:40 – Does the TCO work to replace HDD with all-flash?
  • 00:11:25 – Power costs have significantly affected TCO calculations
  • 00:12:00 – We also need to consider Total Cost of Value and Flexibility
  • 00:13:40 – Pure has 1 exabyte deployed at Meta, good learning environment
  • 00:14:35 – What does the FlashBlade//E system look like?
  • 00:16:15 – The //E model uses architecture ideas from FlashArray
  • 00:18:10 – FlashBlade//E evolves the issues with fixed node and blade capacities
  • 00:19:15 – 4PB (raw) is the entry point with 48TB drives, 300TB in the future
  • 00:21:30 – AFR rates is much lower on Pure custom SSDs compared to generic products
  • 00:23:25 – FlashBlade//E has two chassis types – how will performance change?
  • 00:27:00 – How does FlashBlade//E fit into the Evergreen consumption models?
  • 00:28:35 – How will data mobility be achieved between FlashBlade systems?
  • 00:30:45 – How does FlashBlade//E address our initial sustainability discussion?
  • 00:33:20 – FlashBlade//E is available within 30 days
  • 00:33:55 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

We have many existing blogs and podcasts that discuss the evolution of the FlashBlade and FlashArray portfolios.

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