Primer Series: Pure Storage
In this article
This was originally published in September 2020
Do you ever attend meetings where the conversation turns to an unfamiliar technology? Suddenly, a bunch of names and acronyms are being thrown around and you have no idea what they mean. Confused, you scan the room and notice that everyone else is nodding as if they know exactly what's being discussed.
We've all been there before. To help our valued customers make sense of it all, the engineers at WWT offer a continuing series of 'primer' articles to provide a basic understanding of emerging products and technologies. This article introduces Pure Storage and its novel approach to flexible, next-gen storage solutions that are valued for their simplicity, efficiency and resiliency.
Why Pure Storage is a significant WWT partner
Pure Storage, founded in 2009, was one of the first manufacturers to introduce all-flash storage products designed for simplicity and ease of use. Pure quickly built its reputation as a leading provider of all-flash data storage hardware and software products, contributing to the decline of spinning disks as yesterday's technology.
But, for years the early generations of flash storage were regarded by IT planners as promising for niche applications but not ready for broad enterprise adoption: flash was comparatively more expensive than traditional spinning-disk storage solutions. Consequently, flash often was excluded from consideration for many use cases. Over time, as flash storage solutions continued to advance and become more cost- effective, their use cases have greatly increased.
Pure Storage is now a recognized leader in next-gen storage innovation with resilient, easy-to-use all-flash solutions – a proven technology for a global client base – including enterprise-class deployments for Fortune 500 organizations. In fact, Pure was once again named a Leader on the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays. Its well-rounded portfolio of offerings all operate on Purity software as the foundation of its solutions stack.
In 2013 WWT and Pure Storage became technology ecosystem partners. Since then, Pure has become one of WWT's strong data center allies, working alongside other partners in our technology ecosystem to serve customers with simple, powerful, scalable new storage solutions.
WWT has conducted numerous successful proof-of-concept tests of Pure flash storage solutions in the Advanced Technology Center (ATC). The ATC has validated all aspects of Pure's performance and resiliency, including overall performance gains of flash and NVMe, performance under failure and host-level impacts during resiliency testing. For its contribution to a highly successful relationship, WWT was honored as Pure's Innovation Partner of the Year in 2019.
If you're exploring modern storage alternatives for data center transformation, we invite you to learn more about Pure Storage and its key offerings – and the diverse use cases that can benefit from an all-flash environment.
Storage solutions that set Pure apart
Pure's innovative portfolio of all-flash storage solution options – whether block, file or object storage – enable WWT to customize a total solution that might employ multiple approaches. Pure Storage products and services run the gamut of on-prem, cloud-based and storage-as-a-service offerings, including:
- FlashArray – The first 100 percent all-flash, NVMe shared accelerated storage infrastructure that is designed for mainstream and enterprise deployments. FlashArray encompasses two storage approaches:
- Enterprise Class FlashArray//X NVMe Storage: Pure's most performant block storage offering. For example, FlashArray//X70 is ideal for database applications that call for high performance, ultra-low latency and high I/O.
- Mainstream FlashArray//C High Capacity Storage: A mainstream performer that provides superior capacity for customers running high-capacity workloads – ideal for VMs, backup and recovery, email, legal archives and other data repository needs, with all the benefits of flash storage.
- FlashBlade™ for unstructured data: Consolidate complex data silos to optimize infrastructure and accelerate insights. FlashBlade unifies fast file and object storage to handle tens of billions of files and objects while delivering maximum performance and throughput, as well as rich data services for workloads such as analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Built on scale-out metadata architecture, it features rapid restore capabilities and scalability up to 150 blades.
- Pure1® simple cloud-based management and analytics engine: Enable client-driven, AI-powered data management and monitoring with an array of functions to fine-tune each storage array:
- Run dual workload simulations to measure relative performance gains between different FlashArray//X products or other comparisons.
- Perform VM analytics to evaluate the virtual infrastructure end-to-end.
- Leverage telemetry data from arrays to do predictive analytics that can prevent failures.
- Pure as-a-Service™ scalable pay-as-you-go storage: Eliminate the guesswork of preparing for future storage requirements with a simple service contract that treats on-prem and cloud-based storage as a utility-like consumption model. But when clients need to scale up in a hurry, it also offers cloud-like burst capabilities to ramp up and down as needed.
- Pure Storage® Cloud Block Store™ for Amazon Web Services (AWS): This cloud-native data protection and mobility service enables mission-critical applications to run seamlessly on the cloud. It empowers cloud storage for webscale applications, driving true hybrid operations with consistent data services, resiliency and APIs, plus bi-directional mobility and seamless management and orchestration.
- Evergreen™ Storage for seamless upgrades with no downtime and lower TCO – which no other company offers: This service innovation is unique in the industry to Pure, mitigating costly upgrade cycles by providing continuous upgrades without disruption, downtime or data migration. Offered in Silver and Gold subscription packages, Evergreen keeps clients' storage capabilities up-to-date across hardware and software, support and maintenance. Rather than pay for a full upgrade of assets they might already own, Evergreen Storage subscribers pay only for the newest ingredients, which means significant savings.
Applications and use cases
Together with WWT, Pure Storage is committed to helping enterprise and midrange customers derive optimum value from their data with a full portfolio of storage solutions that deliver simplicity, ease of use, flexibility and resilience. Pure eliminates complexity from storage across all industries and applications, with an all-flash solution for virtually everyone.
Gaining traction across the enterprise, Pure Storage and WWT have partnered to run mission-critical workloads such as core virtualization, data analytics and AI for customers ranging from manufacturing and healthcare to IT service providers and entertainment media.
Learn more
This has been a brief introduction to the advantages of all-flash storage technology from Pure Storage, and its real-world applications in a data-driven marketplace where simplicity, speed and scalability are paramount. Follow these links to continue your exploration of Pure Storage solutions: