Pure Storage beefs up FlashBlade, FlashArray offerings in platform performance focus

Pure Storage has announced a raft of updates to its flash product lines in a bid to help enterprises contend with increasingly boisterous workloads.

Unveiled at the firm’s annual Pure//Accelerate conference in Las Vegas, the next generation products are designed specifically for “high-demand, high-performance workloads”.

First among the updates are an extension of the FlashArray//XL series, the R5, which the company said now “sets the bar for performance at extreme scale”.

At a press briefing ahead of the conference, assembled media were told this new series doubles the amount of IOPS per rack unit compared to the previous generation.

Capacity increases of up to 50% were also touted by the storage firm.

Shawn Hansen, VP & GM at Pure Storage’s Core Platform Business Unit, noted the R5 has “three-times the performance of our nearest competitor” alongside “unmatched performance density”.

“We see a new class of applications emerging in memory databases and real-time decision engines. These things require massive amounts of performance, and so the FlashArray//XL R5 is pushing the envelope,” Hansen said.

Meanwhile, the new FlashArray//ST is a new offering also designed specifically for latency-sensitive workloads such as in-memory databases or NOSQL databases.

The new offering boasts 10 million IOPS with 10 microseconds of latency, Hansen explained.

Pure targets data pipeline performance gains

Among the big talking points on the hardware front at Pure Accelerate is an upgrade to the FlashBlade//S series.

The new FlashBlade//S R2 boasts significant performance gains and is aimed at speeding up data pipelines, the company said. The new series performs up to 30% greater than competitors - who weren’t cited - on critical workloads.

Workloads highlighted by the firm included intensive genome sequencing, AI reasoning, and electronic design automation simulations.