The Pure Storage FlashBlade is a custom designed NAS system that scales by adding additional blades that contain both the processing function and NAND flash storage modules. With a unique design, Pure Storage has brought a NAS system to market that does not rely on commodity components. Object storage support was subsequently added to FlashBlade. Objects are stored in native format.
FlashBlade is a storage system for unstructured data, currently supporting file access using the NFSv3 and CIFS/SMB 2.1 protocol and object access with S3 protocol API. Most recently they have announced NFS 4.1 over TCP (pNFS) for the newest models, //EXA. At some point in the future, protocol support for CIFS/SMB 3.0 will be added for NAS support.
The FlashBlade//S models represent the second generation of FlashBlade systems and offers two distinct models – //S200 and //S500. The //S models utilize a 5U chassis, and a more modular design than the previous generation by utilizing Pure’s Direct Flash Modules.
The S200 blade has a focus on capacity and efficiency and utilizes a high level of compression. The S500 blade bypasses some of the compression to instead focus on greater performance. The two blade types cannot currently be intermixed. The S100 is a single chassis configuration for entry level use cases.
As an all-flash file and object storage system, FlashBlade//S is used for acceleration of unstructured data storage. Pure Storage cites big data analytics and genomics common use cases.
Pure Storage FlashBlade Product Review Includes:
- Overview
- Highlights
- Usage
- Architecture Deployment
- Futurum EvaluScale Product Review Methodology
- The Futurum Group’s Opinion
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