#PureStorage have launched an entirely new product line, dubbed #FlashBlade, at its brand new conference Pure Accelerate.
The product was developed in a spin-out, spin-in style inspired by Cisco’s approach to developing the #UCS product (among others) where a new team was hired to build the product in stealth over the past two-and-a-half years. While the team was still connected to the larger Pure Storage entity, it operated at arm’s length, with members not even linked to known Pure employees on sites such as LinkedIn to preserve secrecy.
The resulting product is markedly different from the existing FlashArray product line, though it shares a similar management interface. FlashBlade is a scale-out architecture running a distributed software layer on Intel CPUs on custom boards that connect to NAND chips mounted onboard, rather than in commodity SSDs. The NAND gateway is a custom ARM-chip/FPGA combination designed to provide software style flexibility to multiple vendor NAND chips, rather than having an ASIC.
Pure Storage founder John Hayes, who was part of the FlashBlade team, told analysts and bloggers that the choice of components was designed to provide low cost performance without loss of flexibility. “What we want to do is say, ‘In order to integrate a new NAND chip, what are the fewest number of components we can change?’” Hayes said. He told the group that the competitiveness of the NAND flash market meant that vendors would mean a new chip would be available once every six months, and Pure Storage wants to take advantage of that development cadence.
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