Pure suggests dishing out intelligence to dumb storage shelves

At Pure's Accelerate conference last week, the company talked about distributing intelligence to its NVMe fabric-accessed storage shelves. Pure's all-flash arrays have a dual-controller design, with the controllers talking to dumb storage shelves. The idea seems to be that some controller intelligence could be implemented at …

[CIA]

Since When Is This New?

Putting intelligence on the drive shelves is not a new, novel idea. LSI put intelligence all the way down on the drive controllers themselves years ago. And coupled it with SoC's on the trays. While distributed everything always sounds good and efficient, it also increases costs and troubleshooting complexities. Who's asking for this capability? There tends to be a trend in engineering companies to take an 'if we build it, they will buy it' mentality. LSI did that, they became Engenio, then they became NetApp, now they're almost phasing out.

[flyguy959]

Re: Since When Is This New?

Who's asking for this capability? Anyone asking for a scale-out architecture, aka current EMC, Nimble, IBM customers. They have to have CPU down in the shelf as a target for the NVMe protocol between controller heads and shelf anyway, why wouldn't you use it? Offloading DirectFlash management to the shelf enables more possibility for Purity Run now and scale-out in the future.