Pure Storage Announces New Converged Infrastructure Solutions to Accelerate Entire Spectrum of Analytics

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --  @PureStorage (NYSE: PSTG), the all-flash storage platform that helps innovators build a better world with data, today announced #FlashStack™ with FlashBlade™ to accelerate data warehouses. The company also announced that AIRI™ and AIRI™ Mini, the #AI -ready infrastructure solutions from Pure Storage and @NVIDIA, are now available with @Cisco Nexus ethernet switches. Cisco and Pure Storage customers can now establish a spectrum of data analytics to turn data into innovation, no matter what phase in their data journey.   In time, more data will live in "hot" or "warm" tiers, where value can easily be extracted. With this shift, organizations must leverage the latest tools of extraction, and the storage models that allow these tools to work most effectively and efficiently. "Data is the lifeblood of today's economy and the fuel for innovation. New cures, new industries, new possibilities will arise – all because of data. This new era demands a new data mindset and strategy," said Michael Sotnick, VP Partners, Services & Business Development, Pure Storage. "For organizations to stand the test of time, they must understand how to innovate and differentiate through data." AI-Ready-Infrastructure   Data is the fuel driving today's AI revolution. While many pioneers have pushed the limits of what's possible with AI within their own industries, the vast majority of enterprises have had to struggle to get started. Today, not all data's value is easily accessible. Without fast, easy access, data becomes an organization's most expensive asset rather than its most valuable. AI needs to reach more enterprises faster, and provide value immediately. Pure Storage is working with Cisco to make this reality for customers with AIRI, the industry's first solution to simplify AI-at-scale, powered by the NVIDIA DGX-1. "The days where value is measured in dollar per GB have passed. Value is now measured in simulations per day. The industry focuses on outcome orientation because simplicity, performance and resiliency afford us the time to do so," said Ed Horley, VP of Engineering at IT solutions provider Groupware Technology. "With AIRI, customers can begin their AI initiatives within hours and its simple scalable design allows it to grow with your AI needs. By eliminating these infrastructure complexities, customers can focus on what's important - creating innovative products and services." AIRI is the industry's first complete AI-ready infrastructure, architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA to extend the power of NVIDIA DGX™ systems. Powered by FlashBlade storage and NVIDIA DGX-1 servers, AIRI offers enterprises a simple, fast, and future-proof infrastructure. It is configured with four NVIDIA DGX-1 Systems, four petaFLOPS of deep learning performance, Pure FlashBlade 15x 17TB Blades, 1.5M NFS IOPS, and two 100Gb switches with RDMA. AIRI Mini is powered by one Pure Storage FlashBlade, configured with 7x17TB blades, two NVIDIA DGX-1 servers, Cisco 100 GbE switches, supporting GPUDirect RDMA for maximum distributed training performance, and delivers two petaFLOPS of deep learning performance. All software comes included, so that data scientists can get started on their projects by simply turning the system on. FlashStack Powered by FlashBlade While some organizations are using Data Lakes or AI data pipelines, many organizations still deploy most of their mission critical work on a data warehouse. FlashStack powered by FlashBlade, purpose-built for Oracle Data Warehouse, is an integrated infrastructure solution validated by Cisco. "While AIRI is the perfect fit for organizations that need to deploy AI, there are many organizations just dipping their toes into single server solutions," said Matt Burr, GM of FlashBlade, Pure Storage. "For organizations that need an interim step between single-server and AIRI, FlashStack is the solution." There are three primary problems with existing data warehouse solutions: Performance – Data warehouse appliances historically have not kept up with data growth. Pricing – When compute and storage are coupled, as is with warehouse appliances, organizations end up buying too much of one or the other. Flexibility – An inflexible appliance is only effective for a single workload. Data warehouses aren't protected for the future when data pipeline and AI are involved. The new FlashStack, built on FlashBlade and engineered specifically to modernize the Oracle Data Warehouse, delivers more than 2x faster performance than the next-best system. Customers only pay for the amount of compute and blades needed for their project or initiative. FlashStack for FlashBlade is ready for extension into modern analytics and AI when ready. AIRI and AIRI Mini are available now through select reseller partners. FlashStack for FlashBlade is available now through all FlashStack certified reseller partners. Please visit our website for more information.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pure-storage-announces-new-converged-infrastructure-solutions-to-accelerate-entire-spectrum-of-analytics-300682743.html

Enterprise Data Protection for FlashBlade with Cohesity

@PureStorage #FlashBlade, the industry's first all-flash, #scaleout file storage, purpose-built for high-performance and immediate access to mission critical file and object data. FlashBlade provides unparalleled performance across a broad range of environments. @Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage makes your data work for you by consolidating secondary storage silos onto a web-scale data platform that spans both private and public clouds. Join us on April 19th and learn how FlashBlade accelerates data intelligence across modern analytics, machine learning and rich metadata databases with simplified data protection, high performance, application consistent backups and file level recoverability from Cohesity. We look forward to you joining us for the live event! Sponsor: Cohesity & Pure Storage

https://resources.computerworld.com/ccd/assets/150132/detail

Video: Pure Storage Speeds I/O for AI & HPC Workloads at SC17

In this video from #SC17 in Denver, @BrianGold from #PureStorage describes how the company’s innovative #FlashBlade Systems speed up I/O for #AI & #HPC workloads. “FlashBlade is the industry’s first cloud-era flash, purpose-built for modern analytics and designed to drive tomorrow’s discoveries, insights, and creations. In the new age of big data, modern applications and compute technologies leverage massively parallel architecture for performance. From scientific research and movie rendering to artificial intelligence, applications push the limits on thousands of GPU cores or thousands of CPU servers. Parallel compute demands parallel storage. FlashBlade is the industry’s first all-flash storage purpose-built for modern analytics – architected from the ground-up to deliver a powerful cloud-era data platform that’s fast, big, and simple.” Optimized and self tuned for any workload powered by unstructured data, FlashBlade provides the fast, highly scalable and effortlessly simple storage infrastructure required by data-intensive analytics such as artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning. While the conversation around AI and ML solutions tends to focus on analytics software, a new, comprehensive set of purpose-built infrastructure software and hardware support is essential to capitalize on the AI revolution,” said Par Botes, VP of Product, Pure Storage. “With processing power at both the GPU and storage layer a prerequisite of any AI advancement, it is imperative to recognize the framework on which nearly all AI functionality is conducted.”

https://insidehpc.com/2017/11/video-pure-storage-speeds-io-ai-hpc-workloads-sc17/

Pure Storage Goes After NetApp's Lunch With New FlashBlade

#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.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2016/03/14/pure-storage-goes-after-netapps-lunch-with-new-flashblade/#302684d93e1f