Support for Redundancy and Rapid Reconstruction
Pure Storage engineered the FlashBlade system for flash and NVMe flash. Many older systems have a long history of data center use, but this is a mixed blessing. Those systems also have a long legacy of old protocols that are based on hard-disk standards, which means that old commands and methods of accessing data (dating back to the 1960s) are included in many modern standards for addressing storage.
This adds overhead to modern devices that operate more like RAM than traditional rotating storage in how they’re accessed. Pure Storage bypasses those old protocols and standards with an all-flash system.
To ensure redundancy and fault tolerance, the FlashBlade system uses erasure coding as well as variable block sizes, distributing files across multiple blades in multiple chassis, with sufficient error correction so that even if any pieces are lost, the whole file can be quickly reconstructed.
In addition, pulling files from multiple locations on multiple blades increases throughput. With the FlashBlade, that happens automatically — no need for planning on the part of the administrator. The system is elastic and dynamic, self-optimizing for maximum throughput on files that see the most use, without sacrificing performance on other files.
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Processors: 8-core Xeon, per blade
Connectivity: 8x40Gbps Ethernet or 32x10Gbps Ethernet connectors per chassis
Custom Configurations: REST APIs