Pure uncloaks rack-scale FlashBlade object filer for unstructured data crowd

FlashBlade is Pure Storage’s rack-scale flash system for multi-protocol access to unstructured data and the first all-flash object-based unstructured data storage system. Although its rack-scale is differentiated from EMC’s DSSD rack-scale flash system, which is primarily for latency-sensitive structured data. It is a …

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha

Less than three weeks ago I had a briefing with a large competitor at their exec briefing center where they claimed the big Pure reveal was going to simply be native NFS/CIFS in the current line, not a new product.

Guess quite a few people have been caught unawares.

[MortenMadsen]

Re: Ha

They presented it to us at the customer advisory board last year and at that time they had a few customers running the system in "pre-alfa".

almost everybody said they wanted CIFS, but they also pitched idea of doing something very different like backup directly to the system without backup software.

They do have a lot of processing power in 4U, so I guess they could do a lot of interesting things.

At the time they planned 40 gb Ethernet, hope that will not hold back the deployments.

[Mr.Nobody]

sound great, but

This sounds incredible. I want one, but...

CIFS isn't included in GA. Why? I would think this would block a bunch of sales, because who knows when it going to arrive, and a lot of people depend on cifs, rightly or wrongly, for their business.

And then it begs the question - what version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: sound great, but

Name a scale out computing environment that uses cifs. Go home MCSE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is my maths off, or would $1/GB make a single unit (assuming 1.6PB per blade, and 10 blades) make it $1.6 million?

I'm assuming I've done something wrong :\ That seems a lot for a 4U unit when you're trying to justify it to the board. It may well be worth it, but in my experience the board like to see something physical for their money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well

In my experience they don't want to see anything for the money! A surge in moving to the 'cloud' has proven that. The 'board' doesn't even know what the 'thing' is :)

16PB of usable SSD for $1.6m may not be far off if the article is right.....?!

What would pay for say.....1PB of *disk* from one of the big vendors? More if not the same!

[decoy_underpants]

Re: owncloud...

You don't have to buy it fully populated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that is 1.6PB 'Effective'@3:1 data reduction@$1/GB. If the customer doesn't get 3:1 then the cost per GB is much higher, capacity much lower and they need more flash blades. This is the absolute top end which might be true for a tiny handful of installations. Its like airlines advertising tickets for $1 when in fact only one seat is available for that price and all the others are $500.

[EMC is the Best <3]

They'll have quite a challenge competing with DDN. I doubt their salesforce knows how to sell into scale out compute environments. I like the concept, and I think it is the future, but I don't think Pure will have a solid hit with this at all. These types of scale out deals take a long time to get off the ground.

This is however, a great validation of the statement "SSD is dead".