Pure Storage today launched the sixth generation of the Purity FlashArray OS. The upgrade includes extended disaster recovery, integrated file support and NVMe-over-Fabrics with RoCE for Cisco UCS and VMware.
Purity 6.0 adds a DirectMemory Cache, multi-factor authentication, increased volume management and simpler quoting for Pure1 management software. A Cloud Block Store is in beta test on Azure.
James Kelly, senior systems administrator at Chapman University, a private university in Orange Country, California, said in a prepped quote: “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.”
Purity 5.0, announced in June 2017, delivered initial NFS and SMB file services support and synchronous replication. There was also a demonstration of end-to-end NVMe over fabrics to Cisco UCS servers using a 40Gbit/s RoCE v2 Ethernet link at the v5.0 launch.
Active DR
Pure is offering “active disaster recovery” built on new continuous replication technology. It uses active-passive replication for geo distances, and provides a near-zero RPO (three to four seconds). It is bi-directional, there are no journals to manage and Pure says it provides a fast recover/failover time. Customers have test failover, failover, reverse and failback functionality.
Pure offers a wide range of replication options according to availability requirements and price points: synchronous, active-active, replication with ActiveCluster, snapshot-based asynchronous replication, and now continuous replication.
There are validated designs for VMware Site Recovery Manager and applications such as Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP and MongoDB.
Files
In April 2019, Pure Storage acquired Compuverde, a Swedish storage software developer. Purity 6.0 incorporates Compuverde’s file access technology, which sits alongside the existing block protocol above the data reduction and encryption layers in the Purity software stack. This makes FlashArray a unified file and block storage platform.
Block and file data benefit from global deduplication and compression of the shared storage pool in FlashArray.
Alex McMullan, Pure’s VP & CTO, International, told us that the current FlashBlade file support is aimed at high-performance file applications such as big data and machine learning environments. FlashArray files is suited to user-stye file services that don’t need the scale-out capability of FlashBlade.
He said FlashArray files will get near-synchronous replication. Unstructured data on Purity’s new file services can be protected with Veeam and CommVault backup offerings.
Other features
Pure announced the third generation FlashArray//X R3, which can be fitted with an Optane cache, in February. Purity 6’s DirectMemory Cache tries to satisfy read requests from this cache and delivers 50 per cent improvement in read latency – down to 125µs. Customers can add Optane capacity in 3TB or 6TB packs of 750GB DirectMemory Modules.
The NVMe-RoCE (RDMA over lossless Converged Ethernet) has a validated design for Cisco UCS servers. Pure will offer NVMe/TCP support but does not say when.
Purity 6.0 hits the streets on June 18. Evergreen Storage subscription customers receive all Purity 6.0 features, with no additional licenses or added support costs. Cloud Block Store for Azure should be delivered later this year.
