Cometh the hour, cometh the technology?

I recently attended Pure Accelerate in London where Pure’s co-founder, John Colgrove (Coz), talked about capacity drives. Currently shipping 48TB DirectFlash drives, Pure is on the cusp of launching 75TB drives and is actively developing 150TB drives. Both high end and low end performance formats which now makes flash a genuinely viable option for all storage requirements from performance production arrays to archive! The consequence of this is a far smaller storage footprint in the data centre with significantly less power consumption and cooling. That’s good for a business’ bottom line as well as for the planet and great for any business’ Sustainability goals.

Pure’s decision years ago to develop its own ‘DirectFlash’ module means its capable of delivering these huge capacity drives with industry-leading data reduction ratios. That investment in hardware and software is now paying dividends and with 1-2% of the world’s energy consumption being data centres, and with roughly 25% of that being on storage, Pure is in a unique position to not only help businesses but help the planet.

Seven years ago Pure launched its Flashblade product with the press release announcing:

“Built for innovators, Flashblade addresses today’s rapidly expanding data requirements, powers tomorrow’s discoveries, insights and creations – one blade at a time.”

With the business value that AI can deliver becoming more evident, that statement about ‘tomorrow’s discoveries, insights and creations’ is proving itself out. Flashblade is now a mature and proven solution to underpin AI and ML workloads. Crucial to these workloads is speed! Accurate results require huge datasets to be both processed and ingested. The faster this happens, the quicker results and value are obtained. Flashblade ensures the data is available to the workloads, in parallel, at the necessary speed. It’s no wonder the likes of Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team adopted Flashblade years ago, and in 2022 Meta selected Flashblade for its AI Research SuperCluster. Interestingly, one reason Meta opted for Flashblade was that it provides the required capacity and performance within the power budget Meta had. So another tick in the box for Sustainability.

During my time at Pure Accelerate, it struck me that Pure Storage is more relevant now than it has ever been. Outside of Sustainability and AI, Pure has much more to offer!

As an engineer at heart, I appreciate the simplicity and elegance of Pure’s technology and engineering. Couple that with its client focus and company principles, Pure is a company I can easily get behind, and it’s any easy choice for me to include Pure in my designs.

You can hear more in Natilik’s podcast here

 

Nigel Pyne

Principle Architect, Natilik

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