Pure Storage takes on cloud-native applications

According to Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a site that takes over three seconds to load. To provide a consistently excellent user experience, enterprises must cost-efficiently support widespread deployment of applications that span clouds, break free of silos and drive the benefits of an innovation platform both in the cloud and on-premises.

The DirectFlash advantage.

This is why Pure Storage, the all-flash storage player, has added new DirectFlash Fabric capability for end-to-end Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and NVMe-oF support in Purity 5.2, the software-defined engine of its FlashArray//X products.

“Apps are born in the cloud are built on a different architecture and demand a higher level of performance, and lower latency,” Rob Lee, VP and Chief Architect for Pure Storage said.

With this announcement, Pure becomes the first mainstream enterprise storage provider to widely support NVMe-oF RoCE, which enables enterprises to get flash media closer to applications for more real-time access and greater consolidation.

DirectFlash Fabric enables customers to improve performance of mission-critical enterprise applications as well as web-scale applications that have traditionally relied on direct-attached storage (DAS).

With the new capability, Pure is extending its DirectFlash technologies to NVMe over Fabrics to enable increased efficiencies across the network, in particular with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and cloud-native, web-scale applications such as MongoDB, Cassandra and MariaDB get the benefits and efficiencies of enterprise grade shared storage.

The new capability further extends Pure’s leadership in empowering customers to approach hybrid cloud with a new level of unified infrastructure - to run apps anywhere and protect data everywhere.

“The future is delivering applications and services at the speed of thought,” said Chadd Kenney, VP of Product and Solutions, Pure Storage. “To do this, applications can no longer live within barriers, they must interact, intercommunicate and share datasets in real-time. Architectures must converge alongside the data, and break down the barriers that exist today. DirectFlash Fabric is a key component for helping enterprises unify their cloud.”

Lee explained that the announcement increases performance by optimising application-to-storage access.

“Serial SCSI is like a one-lane road to the carpark when everyone is queueing on the highway. We built a 64K lane road to the carpark from day one, and have been waiting for the stadiums to fill up,” said.

DAS is very low latency, but suffers from efficiency problems at scale, he said.

"The bigger issue is that they don't have the same set of enterprise grade data services. You can't take a snapshot, data protection, replicate the environment somewhere, the business continuity story, it's very difficult.

"Directflash can provide the benefit of both world class latency performance and services benefits from shared storage. We think it's going to be a game changer," he said.

DirectFlash Fabric delivers massive optimisation between storage controllers and hosts over fast networking and makes Ethernet a first-class citizen in the data centre for storage. According to Pure Storage, other solutions today may not perform to the same level because:

- They do not have full enterprise features enabled,

- They may utilise NVMe over Fabrics with Fibre Channel rather than the superior RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE). RoCE offers the biggest potential jump in performance for Ethernet customers with a 50% latency reduction compared to iSCSI, Pure Storage said.

FlashArray//X supports end-to-end NVMe on 25G and 50G Ethernet ports. Interoperability with NVMe-oF-capable network interface cards (NICs) is available or planned from Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell and Mellanox.

“As organisations undergo digital transformation and become more dependent on data and the ability to turn that data into compelling business insights, it is also driving a need to transform enterprise storage infrastructure to deliver better performance, availability and efficiency,” said Eric Burgener, Research VP, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC.

“NVMe technology will be at the core of that shift, and vendors like Pure Storage that can deliver true enterprise storage capabilities along with NVMe performance today give their customers the right infrastructure to build on for the future.”