Pure Storage® FlashArray//C Data Sheet

Consolidate, accelerate, and protect your data with capacity-optimised storage.

Consistent, Reliable Experience

All-flash NVMe Evergreen Storage™ with data reduction, built for 99.9999% availability, replication, and cloud portability.

Hyper-consolidation

Consolidate massive data stores with up to 7.3PB effective (1.9PB raw) in a three-, six-, or nine-rack unit.

Built-in Symmetric Clustering

ActiveCluster provides zero RPO and RTO, is easy to use, and comes built-in at no extra cost.

Better TCO

Pair hybrid storage economics with less management overhead, power, cooling, and data-centre real estate.

Pure Storage® FlashArray//C lets you consolidate workloads with consistent all-flash NVMe performance. You’ll get unparalleled data protection—at a lower TCO than hybrid storage.

Today, most business-critical applications run on high-performance all-flash storage arrays, but some capacity-oriented applications still use hybrid flash and legacy disk systems. These legacy systems suffer from inconsistent performance, complex management tools, and a lack of modern data services.

FlashArray//C provides a 100% NVMe all-flash foundation for capacity-oriented applications, test and development workloads, multisite disaster recovery, and data protection. Your organisation can easily improve business continuity with Pure’s ActiveCluster™ fully symmetric active/active bidirectional synchronous replication solution, which provides RPO zero and automatic transparent failover for RTO zero – and supports both Fibre Channel (FC) and TCP/IP environments.

Enterprises running Fibre Channel environments also benefit from the performance boost that NVMe running over FC provides as a front end NVMeoF transport. FC-NVMe and FC-SCSI protocols can exist on different ports on the same FlashArray//C, streamlining your transition to an end-to-end NVMe solution.

With FlashArray//C, you can scale up to 7.3PB effective storage in three- to nine-rack units. Maximise results and flexibility for high-capacity applications on-premises and easily connect to the cloud. With Pure Evergreen™, you can upgrade performance, capacity, and features over time without disruption.

All-flash storage solutions introduced simplicity, efficiency, and rich data services to performance-sensitive enterprise applications. Now, capacityoriented applications gain these important benefits as well. With the Purity storage operating environment, Pure Storage delivers a comprehensive solution with FlashArray//X for your performance-optimised applications, and FlashArray//C for your capacity-optimised applications.

Popular use cases for Pure FlashArray//C include:

Workload consolidation
Data protection and disaster recovery
Policy-based VM-tiering
Multicloud test/dev
User file shares

All-QLC FlashArray//C Use Cases

Workload Consolidation

Data Protection and Disaster Recovery

Policy-based VM-tiering; Multicloud Test/Dev

User File Shares

FIGURE 1: FlashArray//C use cases**

Hyper-Consolidate Large Data Stores

Pure FlashArray//C densities scale from 638TB to 7.3PB in compact three- to nine-rack unit arrays, and deliver consistent performance that comes with an all-flash 100% NVMe storage solution. You can now consolidate test/dev, virtual machines, data-retention/disaster recovery, and all other capacity-optimised applications on a single array. Let your IT organisation drive simplicity into your infrastructure and eliminate complex siloed approaches to deploying these applications across multiple disparate hybrid disk-based solutions

FIGURE 2: FlashArray//C40 and FlashArray//C60 capacity scaling

Simplicity by Design

FlashArray//C has the power to simplify everything: Your hardware, software, and cloud management experiences are codesigned to make everything work.

Examples of this simplicity include:

One box, 30-minute installation with no manual (with available Pure Professional Services or partner installation)
Data-reduced data-at-rest encryption (FIPS 140-2 and AES-256)
No performance tuning required
APIs for automation
Only six cables
AI-driven cloud management
All array software included
Proactive support

Cloud-Based Management

The Pure1® platform provides simple cloud-based management and effortless predictive support with full-stack analytics and the AI-driven power of Pure1 Meta™. Pure1 provides a snapshot catalogue of all your backups in one place, whether the target is another FlashArray™, a FlashBlade®, another NFS target, or a public cloud like Amazon S3.

FIGURE 3: Purity//FlashArray Features*

Purity: The Software-Defined Heart of FlashArray

Purity for FlashArray delivers rich, enterprise data services, DirectFlash™ global flash management, and Evergreen improvements with every release.

ActiveCluster for business continuity, ActiveDR for disaster recovery, QoS, vVols, NVMe-oF, Snap to NFS, and Purity CloudSnap™ are all examples of new features provided with non-disruptive Purity upgrades. With every array, you get built-in Purity storage services, APIs, and advanced data services**.

DirectFlash™

FlashArray moves beyond the legacy SSD architectures that have flash pretending to be a hard disk. Instead, DirectFlash speaks directly to raw NAND with a super-efficient NVMe protocol and leverages NVMe-oF.

DirectFlash includes multiple components:

DirectFlash software (DFS): DFS manages array I/O globally, for a faster, more efficient architecture. DFS provides detailed I/O scheduling and performance management. This makes I/Os deterministic and reducing average latency by reducing the number of slow I/Os that would often occur in SSD architectures.

DirectFlash Module (DFM): DFM is a Pure-designed flash module that connects raw flash directly to the FlashArray storage via NVMe. Unlike traditional SSDs that use a flash controller or flash translation layer, DFM is just raw flash. This design removes performance roadblocks of SSDs used by many legacy storage architectures.

DirectFlash Shelf: DirectFlash Shelf is used to add additional NVMe capacity to a FlashArray//C and is external to the array chassis. Instead, it’s connected to the chassis via NVMe-oF protocol with RDMA over converged (RoCE), leveraging 50GB-persecond Ethernet. The shelf maintains the ability to support different sizes of DFMs as flash density improves and new forms become available, such as SCM, QLC, and others.

DirectFlash Fabric: DirectFlash Fabric lowers network latency dramatically with the added benefits of enabling enterpriseclass reliability and data services via shared storage versus DAS. NVMe-oF enables massive optimisation between the storage controllers and host over fast networking, which enables DirectFlash Fabric to deliver greater performance and efficiency gains, including host CPU offload benefits.

Evergreen Storage

With Evergreen Storage, you can deploy once and enjoy a subscription to continuous innovation as you expand and improve performance, capacity, density, and/or features for 10 years or more—all without downtime, performance impact, or data migrations. Pure has engineered compatibility for future technologies directly into the product via the modular, stateless architecture of FlashArray. This means you can upgrade non-disruptively and expand the equipment you already own. Evergreen programs like Free Every Three and Upgrade Flex provide full trade-in value when upgrading controllers, giving you the agility you need to grow and modernise.

The Capacity Consolidation program keeps your storage modern and dense as you expand. With Evergreen Storage, you don’t have to re-buy terabytes you already own. Keep your storage evergreen, modern and dense. And always meet your business needs. Pure uniquely offers all of our core solutions either as products (CAPEX) or as services (OPEX) via our Pure as-aService™ portfolio.

Technical Specifications

	CAPACITY	PHYSICAL
//C40	Up to 1.9PB/1.4PiB effective capacity* Up to 494TB/449TiB raw capacity	3U 97.7 lbs (44.3Kg) fully loaded 5.12” x 18.94” x 29.72” chassis
//C60	Up to 7.3PB/6.6PiB effective capacity Up to 1.9PB/1.7PiB raw capacity	3U-9U 97.7-185.4 lbs (44.3-84.1 kg) fully loaded 5.12”-18.94” x 18.94” x 29.72”

* Effective capacity assumes HA, RAID, and metadata overhead, GB-to-GiB conversion, and includes the benefit of data reduction with always-on inline deduplication, compression, and pattern removal. Average data reduction is calculated at 5-to-1 and does not include thin provisioning.

Additional Resources

Data Sheet FlashArray//X

Data Sheet Purity

Data Sheet Pure1®

Data Sheet ActiveCluster

** Not all features available at General Availability.
*** Effective capacity assumes HA, RAID, and metadata overhead, GB-to-GiB conversion, and includes the benefit of data reduction with always-on inline deduplication, compression, and pattern removal. Average data reduction is calculated at 5-to-1 and does not include thin provisioning.

PS1840-03 01/2021