Pure Storage has announced Purity 6.0 for FlashArray, the latest version of the company’s flagship suite of software. These new agile data services from the storage vendor offer customers an efficient way to store, safeguard, manage, access and mobilise their data with strategic consumption models customised to their needs.
According to the firm, 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. Users 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 licenses, no added support costs, and zero added complexity, said the firm.
“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.”
He added that Pure solutions are designed for massive amounts of data, to be fundamentally upgradeable without disruption, and to be compatible with future innovation.
“This way 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,” he explained.
The new release includes the following capabilities among others:
- 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 reuse.
- 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
- 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
The vendor’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.
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.
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.
