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FlashArray C Data Sheet
Data Sheet

Pure Storage FlashArray//C

Consolidate, accelerate, and protect your data with economical, all-flash storage.

Intuitive, Evergreen 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 8.9PB effective in a three-, six-, or nine-rack unit.

Performance

  • Predictable, consistant latency as low as 2ms, suitable for business-critical workloads
  • NVMe and NVME-oF (Fibre Channel, RoCE, TCP)

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.

Industry Recognition

  • A Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for storage ten times in a row.1
  • Certified Net Promoter Score in the top 1% of B2B companies by Medallia.

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

Today, most business-critical applications run on high-performance all-flash storage arrays, but some applications still use hybrid flash and legacy disk systems. These legacy systems suffer from inconsistent performance, complex management tools, and an architecture which impairs innovators.

FlashArray//C provides a all-flash foundation for databases, test and development, multisite disaster recovery, data protection, and content repositories. Your organisation can easily improve business continuity with Pure Storage 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.

Consolidate Workloads and Large Data Stores

Pure FlashArray//C densities scale from 590TB to 8.9PB effective capacity in compact three- to six-rack unit arrays, and deliver consistent 100% NVMe performance. You can now consolidate production workloads, test/dev, disaster recovery, backup and restore data, and more 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.

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.

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Purity: The Software-defined Heart of FlashArray

Purity for FlashArray delivers rich, enterprise-level data services; DirectFlash global flash management; and Evergreen improvements with every release. Features such as ActiveCluster™ for business continuity, ActiveDR™ for disaster recovery, ActiveWorkload for workload migration, VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols), NVMe-oF, Snap to NFS, Purity CloudSnap™, and SafeMode™ are all examples of new features provided over time with non-disruptive, no-additional-cost Purity upgrades. All Purity storage services, APIs, and advanced data services are built-in and included with every array.

  • Data reduction: Purity averages an industry-leading 5:1 data reduction with a total efficiency of 10:1 (including thin provisioning).
  • Always-on encryption: Purity’s “encrypt everything” approach provides built-in enterprise-grade data security without user intervention or key management.
  • High availability: Purity protects against concurrent dual-drive failures and initiates re-builds automatically within minutes. Purity also treats performance variability as a failure and uses parity to work around bottlenecks to deliver consistent latency.
  • Unified storage with file services: If you run NAS-based apps in addition to SAN-based enterprise databases, Purity’s consolidated SAN and NAS capabilities let you avoid the trouble and expense of running two incompatible environments.
  • Always-on ransomware remediation: Cost-efficient, portable, SafeMode snapshots prevent cyber attackers from tampering with or maliciously destroying critical recovery data.
  • Intelligent quality of service (QoS): Purity continuously tunes infrastructure using always-on QoS to prevent workloads from hogging resources and to ensure maximum utilization of the array.
  • Faster, more consistent performance: Pure DirectFlash Fabric gives you maximum throughput with microsecond latency that’s far more predictable than with conventional SSDs.
  • On-demand data portability: Quickly and easily move data where they most cost-effectively meet service level agreements to satisfy your customers: between both physical and virtual machines, between on-premises and the cloud.

Speed Recovery Effortlessly with ActiveCluster and ActiveDR

Make slow recovery a thing of the past with Purity, ActiveCluster, and ActiveDR. ActiveCluster uses synchronous replication and a symmetric active-active design to deliver zero RPO and zero RTO automatic failovers without user intervention. Unlike active-passive implementations, Purity ActiveCluster simultaneously serves I/O on the same volume from both sites.

ActiveDR offers continuous data protection that seamlessly replicates application data across almost any distance, with the lowest possible RPO. ActiveDR radically simplifies remote site recovery with a single failover command, straightforward. Uncomplicate Data Storage, Forever 3 failback (re-protect), and non-disruptive disaster recovery testing. With ActiveDR, you can respond quickly to real-world outages and compliance testing requests with a single click or with a single API/CLI command.

Secure Data Protection with SafeMode Snapshots

Get flexible backup and recovery built for today’s ever-increasing ransomware threats. Pure’s immutable snapshots provide simple, built-in, local, and cloud-native protection for FlashArray. FlashArray SafeMode ensures your snapshots will be available to help you recover from a cyberattack. With SafeMode enabled, your snapshots cannot be eradicated for a fixed, configurable period, even by someone with admin privileges. Together, Purity Snapshots, Snap-to-FlashBlade, Snap-to-NFS, and CloudSnap enable free movement of space-efficient copies between FlashArray and FlashBlade® systems, to third-party NFS storage, or to the cloud, respectively.

DirectFlash Innovation

FlashArray is specifically architected for innovators, moving 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 NVMeoF. DirectFlash includes multiple components:

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 software: DirectFlash software manages array I/O globally, for a faster, more efficient architecture. It provides detailed I/O scheduling and performance management. This makes I/Os deterministic and reduces average latency by reducing the number of slow I/Os that would often occur in SSD 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 100GB/sec Ethernet. The shelf maintains the ability to support different sizes of DFMs as flash density improves.

DirectFlash Fabric: DirectFlash Fabric lowers network latency dramatically and enables enterprise-class reliability and data services via shared storage versus DAS. NVMe-oF enables massive optimisation between the storage controllers and host over fast networking: Fibre Channel, RoCE, and TCP. DirectFlash Fabric delivers greater performance and efficiency gains, including offloading the host CPU.

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 Ever Modern and Ever Agile 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 dense as you expand, without becoming obsolete. With Evergreen Storage, you don’t have to re-buy terabytes you already own. Keep your storage simple, evergreen, 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 Evergreen//One™.

Technical Specifications

Technical Specifications

Effective Capacity

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.

Raw Capacity

Calculated using raw label capacity.

Physical
Effective Capacity

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.

Up to 8.9 PB / 8.1 PiB
Raw Capacity

Calculated using raw label capacity.

Up to 2.3 PB / 2.1 PiB
Physical

3U–9U
1191–1530 (nominal–peak)
200–240 volts (input voltage range)
97.7–185.4 lbs (44.3–84.1 kg) fully loaded
5.12”–15.75” x 18.94” x 29.72” chassis

Effective Capacity

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.

Up to 4.8 PB / 4.4 PiB
Raw Capacity

Calculated using raw label capacity.

Up to 1.3 PB / 1.1 PiB
Physical

3U-6U
1068–1424 watts (nominal–peak)
200–240 volts (input voltage range)
97.7–185.4 lbs (44.3–84.1 kg) fully loaded
5.12”–15.75” x 18.94” x 29.72” chassis

Effective Capacity

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.

Up to 1.6 PB / 1.4 PiB
Raw Capacity

Calculated using raw label capacity.

Up to 482 TB / 438 TiB
Physical

3U
1016–1276 watts (nominal–peak)
200–240 volts (input voltage range)
97.7 lbs (44.3Kg) fully loaded
5.12” x 15.75” x 29.72” chassis

Slide

//C Connectivity

ONBOARD PORTS
(PER CONTROLLER)

HOST I/O CARDS
(3 SLOTS/CONTROLLER)

  • 2 x 1/10/25Gb Ethernet / Replication
  • 2 x 1Gb Management Ports
  • 2 x 100GbE Direct Flash Shelf
  • 2-port 10GBase-T Ethernet
  • 2-port 10/25Gb Ethernet, NVMe/Roce, NVMe/TCP
  • 2-port 100Gb Ethernet, NVMe/Roce, NVMe/TCP
  • 4-Port 10/25G Ethernet, NVMe/TCP
  • 2-port 40/100Gb NVMe/RoCE, NVMe/TCP
  • 2-port 16/32Gb FCP, NVMe/FC (X20 and X50 Models)
  • 4-port 16/32Gb FCP, NVMe/FC (C50 Model)
  • 2-port 32Gb FCP, 64G capable, NVMe/FC (C70 and C90 Models)
  • 4-port 32Gb FCP, 64G capable, NVMe/FC (C70 and C90 Models)
Slide

** Not all features available at General Availability.

1 Pure Storage is named A Leader again in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Primary Storage. This marks the fourth consecutive year being positioned highest for Ability to Execute and furthest for Completeness of Vision in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ and the 10th* year in a row as A Leader. Pure Storage was a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays for the previous 5 years. Gartner has retired this latter report and is provided here for historical purposes only.
Disclaimer: GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organisation and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

PS1840-08-en 05/23

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