The News: Pure Storage has created its latest FlashBlade data storage system, FlashBlade//E, to provide a new scalable, lower-cost, and energy-efficient unstructured data repository infrastructure for enterprises that are drowning in huge stores of unstructured business data. FlashBlade//E, which is slated to arrive from the data storage technology and services company in April, is being added to complement Pure Storage’s high performance FlashBlade//S system that debuted in June 2022 to serve the most demanding workloads of enterprise customers. Read the full Press Release on the new FlashBlade//E systems on the Pure Storage web site.

Pure Storage Unveils FlashBlade//E for Unstructured Data

Analyst Take: Once Pure Storage unveiled its powerful, FlashBlade//S enterprise flash data storage system last year, it quickly became clear that a similar system was also needed to help customers that have lots of unstructured data without the same high-performance requirements.

That is where the latest FlashBlade//E comes in to help solve that conundrum for customers, delivering modern data storage at affordable prices with much greater energy-efficiency and scalability compared to traditional disk-based storage systems.

This is a great move by Pure Storage, giving it the ability to grow its offerings and deliver specific products aimed at varying storage needs, while doing so at different prices and with custom-aimed performance on a scalable basis as needed. That is just what enterprises want and need, and it’s smart of Pure Storage to make it happen. That is how you build customer growth and loyalty: give them what they need at an affordable price, with great features, and allow it to grow with users. Pure Storage was clearly listening to customers who have asked for this over the last few years.

What I find most powerful about this latest FlashBlade//E offering from Pure Storage is that it delivers huge energy-efficiency – up to 80 percent over traditional disk storage – along with easy scalability for unstructured data storage, which are critical requirements by enterprises to combat the higher costs of traditional storage.

At an acquisition cost that is competitive with cheap spinning disk storage, in addition to lower operational costs, the FlashBlade//E option from Pure Storage gives enterprise customers a real choice to now integrate more flexible flash storage. This should be a very attractive combination for customers that are looking to update their existing unstructured data configurations.

The availability of the FlashBlade//E systems also brings another big gain for enterprises that integrate them with Pure Storage’s higher-performance FlashBlade//S systems – by pairing the technologies, customers can remake their overall storage systems and eventually create all-flash data centers, increasing performance and reliability while cutting energy consumption costs and complexity. That is a powerful concept and a laudable goal for any data-intensive enterprise to consider.

Pure Storage FlashBlade//E Details

FlashBlade//E runs on Pure Storage’s Purity//FB software, which provides deeper visibility across everyday file and object workloads while removing unnecessary storage management complexity. Purity//FB provides native NFS, S3, and SMB storage support for billions of files and objects in a single system.

This combination of FlashBlade//E and Purity//FB allows customers to decouple their storage and compute resources so they can create a custom, easy to manage and fully scalable all-flash system for their everyday file and object workloads. Again, this is a huge boon for data intensive enterprises to make their data management easier.

Pure Storage FlashBlade//E unstructured data storage is priced at less than $0.20 per GB, including three years of service, starting with four petabytes of ever-scalable storage capacity, according to Pure Storage.

The energy consumption for FlashBlade//E is up to five times less than traditional disk-based systems, while providing 10 to 20 times more reliability and cloud-like simplicity for adding or removing capacity on demand, according to Pure Storage. The environmental benefits of this flash storage alone is notable to help companies reduce their environmental impacts around the globe.

Adding flexibility for customers, Pure Storage offers FlashBlade//E in several forms. Customers can buy and install the systems or they can deploy FlashBlade//E through a new service tier of Pure’s Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) subscriptions. This allows customers to pay for the services as they use them, along with a cloud delivery experience and the control of on-premises deployment. I believe that will be a compelling offering for many enterprise users.

Pure Storage FlashBlade//E Overview

According to Pure Storage, unstructured enterprise data capacity is expected to grow to 10 times today’s totals by 2030. And for less-critical unstructured storage, that growth mixed with the current costs of today’s disk-based storage will be too expensive and unsustainable for many businesses, according to the company.

These are some of the critical issues that will make Pure Storage’s latest product appealing for enterprises with large stores of unstructured data, and they add up to major benefits for customers that want to effectively deal with the data storage challenges they have experienced for years.

Pure Storage is a company that is continuing to innovate and deliver for its customers and this latest FlashBlade//E offering is more evidence of the company’s progress and mission.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.

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