Pure Storage unveils Purity 6.0 for FlashArray, delivering agile data services to enable modern user experience

Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers storage as a service in a multi-cloud world, today announced Purity 6.0 for FlashArray, the latest version of Pure’s flagship suite of software. Engineered with the modern organisation in mind, these new agile data services provide customers with an efficient way to store, safeguard, manage, access and mobilise their data with strategic consumption models custom-tailored to their needs.

Purity 6.0 further simplifies modern infrastructure with a unified block-and-file solution designed to help solve infrastructure challenges, including storage silos and sprawl, which impact modern business across every industry. With a host of new agile data services, Pure customers can immediately leverage two key new capabilities – unified protocol support with NFS and SMB, along with active disaster recovery built on brand new continuous replication technology. As part of the Evergreen Storage subscription model, these new features require no additional licences, no added support costs, and zero added complexity.

“Flexible consumption models represent the bedrock of Pure’s modern data experience,” said Prakash Darji, General Manager, FlashArray. “We’ve had the tremendous advantage of being purpose-built for the modern era – our solutions are designed for massive amounts of data, to be fundamentally upgradeable without disruption, and to be compatible with future innovation so that our customers never have to wait for the latest tools. Purity 6.0 represents the next and most logical step in delivering that continued value to our customers – services that can be consumed in whatever way best fits the customer need at any given moment.”

Pure’s new unified block and file capabilities on FlashArray save customers the trouble and expense of running two incompatible environments. They are designed to simplify operations for organisations that primarily run block storage but still require or utilise separate network-attached storage. This enables customers to run all workloads within the Purity operating environment, leverage the same data layer, user interface, pool of capacity and benefit from Pure’s industry-leading global data reduction.

Similarly, the new continuous replication feature, ActiveDR, helps Pure customers improve their business resiliency without the cost and complexity of third-party disaster recovery software add-ons.This new active-passive replication technology addresses a major business requirement by protecting critical applications with a near-zero recovery point objective (RPO). Now customers have the ability to leverage synchronous, active-active, replication with ActiveCluster, snapshot-based asynchronous replication, and now continuous replication all on the same Purity platform.

“Pure Storage enables us to offer entirely new areas of service for our faculty, staff and students by continuously innovating with our modern set of IT problems in mind,” said James Kelly, Senior Systems Administrator for Research Support at Chapman University. “The challenges we face are diverse, and require a diverse set of solutions. Purity 6.0 will allow us to solve critical problems in more – and more creative – ways. The unified SAN and NAS capabilities of this new FlashArray OS represent a game-changer for our highest performance file-based workloads that otherwise need to run in all-block environments. It offers us a great way to cost-effectively run VDI or performance-critical file-based applications right alongside our key enterprise and research workloads in Pure's familiar, reliable, cloud-like operating environment.”

Enterprises with big data or machine learning requirements will still assign those workloads to FlashBlade, but for other use cases and for many smaller businesses, FlashArray now addresses all data storage needs.

“Managing each file server and its data in a consistent way can be cumbersome without shared storage between them. Compromising on performance or making similar infrastructure tradeoffs is not an option for modern organisations,” said Jeff Fonke, Global Technical Solutions Architect, WWT. “We worked with Pure to beta test the file implementation in the WWT Advanced Technology Center (ATC), where we rely on a wealth of resources for testing OEM integration for new features. FlashArray affords our joint customers an uncompromising converged block and file solution capable of handling critical workloads and daily-use unstructured data.”

Purity 6.0 delivers additional enhancements, capabilities and solutions that customers can adopt immediately, non-disruptively and as part of their Evergreen subscription to innovation. Highlights from this release include:

• Expanded backup to cloud options with CloudSnap for Google Cloud Platform: A technical preview, this capability adds cloud storage targets on the Google Cloud Platform where Pure Storage’s space-efficient snapshots can be replicated for offsite storage and re-use.
• Categorise data sets for easier identification with public volume tags.
• Ensure data is safeguarded and access is controlled using RSA’s two-factor and multi-factor authentication.
• Effectively plan for capacity expansion with Pure1 click-to-quote.
• Protect critical workloads using ActiveDR with the following validated designs:
• Virtualised workloads using ActiveDR support for VMware Site Recovery Manager.
• Business-critical applications such as: Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP, and MongoDB.
• Protect unstructured data on Purity’s new file services with Veeam and CommVault backup solutions.

“For Pure Storage, the introduction of native file system support on its FlashArray will be a boon for existing and new customers alike,” said Eric Burgener, research vice-president, IDC. “Now customers can cost-effectively consolidate multiple file servers onto this unified storage platform and get the all-flash performance, ease of use and differentiating customer experience around which the vendor built its reputation with block-based workloads over the last decade.”

For more information about how your organisation can leverage the benefits of the agile data services delivered by Purity 6.0, visit our Web site or blog.