Pure Storage has announced some additions to its unified storage portfolio. The company releases updates to its Purity software for FlashBlade and FlashArray and adds QLC support to its FlashArray line of storage solutions.
To improve performance with connected Windows machines, Pure Storage has added SMB 2 to the Purity software running on FlashBlade and FlashArray. Pure Storage promises that this results in very high throughput speeds and IOPS with low latency, regardless of file size. The company also promises to add support for SMB 3 this summer.
To enable SMB, Pure Storage used the Cross-Protocol File Security design. This makes it possible to use SMB and NFS alongside each other while maintaining existing access control lists.
Pure Storage has also worked on ransomware protection. FlashBlade and FlashArray now both support SafeMode snapshots, which should enable users to recover from data loss within seconds. These snapshots cannot be altered, even by ransomware. Furthermore, Pure Storage has improved the object security of FlashBlade, which makes user-level access control possible. Administrators can now also gain insight into the activity of different users.
QLC storage
A recent development in the world of SSDs is models with Quad-Level Cell (QLC) technology. This technology allows for more bits to be stored per cell, resulting in higher capacities and lower prices. However, these advantages come at the expense of particularly the write performance. Many applications mainly require many and fast reads, so the lower cost may outweigh the lower write performance.
Pure Storage will therefore also offer FlashArray solutions equipped with QLC SSDs. For this, the company will release the FlashArray//C40 and FlashArray//C60. The company is thus directly targeting hard disk storage solutions, as QLC SSDs are much faster than HDDs for little higher cost. The company announced FlashArray with QLC last summer but is now actually releasing them.
Availability
The new features in Purity for FlashArray are available immediately and in Q1 for Purity for FlashBlade.