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Storage Unpacked 243 – Introducing FlashBlade//E (Sponsored)

March 01, 2023

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Pure Storage International CTO, Alex McMullan, discussing the announcement of FlashBlade//E. The new FlashBlade//E platform extends the current offerings, targeting what the company terms the four “E’s” – environmental, economical, effortless and everlasting. Essentially, FlashBlade//E is a highly scalable version of the FlashBlade//S (which we discussed in June 2022). In the new platform, Pure offers both compute/storage and storage-only chassis that start at a capacity of 4PB and increase in 2PB increments.

The big difference between //S and //E models is the cost. Pure Storage has announced a target price of $0.20/GB raw, which is much lower than existing all-flash systems and is closely comparable with consumer SSD pricing. As a result, the FlashBlade//E is aimed at customers looking to retire HDD-based systems while gaining the benefit of random-access performance offered by all-flash systems.

There are some interesting aspects to this discussion. Alex explains that Pure Storage has a roadmap to 300TB direct flash modules, beating anything else on the market today. In parallel, the //E system aims to address the power consumption challenges of modern data centres, initially delivering approximately 1W per TB consumption (compared to 2W per TB today) with a target of milliwatt-level consumption per TB in the future. The third leg to this sustainability discussion is the significant reduction in e-waste compared to hard drives. All of these features are focused on helping customers deliver to their own sustainability targets.

FlashBlade//E is available for internal customer ordering and expected to ship within 30 days.

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Timeline Related Podcasts & Blogs

We have many existing blogs and podcasts that discuss the evolution of the FlashBlade and FlashArray portfolios.

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