The Pure Storage FlashBlade is a custom designed NAS and object storage system that scales by adding additional blades, that contain both processing function and flash storage, and clustering of FlashBlade chassis. As a NAS and object storage system, FlashBlade targets high performance unstructured data usage with a system designed to exploit flash technology and a custom, scale-out architecture. File-based applications with need for performance such as data analytics, especially in real-time, and high performance computing applications would benefit from the acceleration. Newly developed applications that use object storage may have performance requirements that would need FlashBlade.
FlashBlade is a storage system for unstructured data, currently supporting file access using the NFSv3, NFSv4, and native SMB2.1 protocols. Object storage with the S3 protocol has been added for use in environments where high performance object access is required.
The FlashBlade//S systems are the second generation FlashBlade systems that feature some significant changes to the original FlashBlade design, including two distinct blade types – S200 and S500 – and use of Pure’s Direct Flash Modules (DFMs).
The internal distributed filesystem and object storage are implemented using a database with key-values to serve as mapping tables to files. The key-value table is in DRAM with the resolution of location of files and objects retrieved from tables stored with data on NAND flash. Pure Storage refers to this as an underlying object storage implementation, which can be confused with object storage access. The database implementation for the filesystem and objects leads to the nearly infinite scaling claim. The expected service time is 200 microseconds for access in the all flash implementation.
Pure Storage FlashBlade Product Analysis Includes:
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