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18:18 Video

Meet the FlashArray Family

The FlashArray family continues to grow, giving you more flexibility than ever while still staying true to the core value of simplicity. Watch this session to meet the family from the //C40 to the //XL170 and everyone in-between. In this session we'll highlight the differences, but just as important the similarities of the FlashArray portfolio.
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00:02
Family and a couple of seats up front, plenty of room, plenty of room please fill it in. Thank you. Thank you for joining us here at uh, Yeah, thank you for joining us today. The tech fest 20 to accelerate, excited to be in person right here. I'm Zane Zane Allen,
00:24
principal technologist and I'm joined by my colleague and friend here JD Wallace and we're both from Seattle. So this heat, it's not really working for me. I wanted to move this one inside. No, such luck appreciate it. I think we're gonna do okay, yeah, we're gonna meet the flash flash family. I feel like we need a theme song.
00:42
That's correct. So We were at the last accelerator at 2019. Right in person. That's where they, it brought out the flash racy. Right. The flash racy. Get out the way here um, Flash racy which were charlie on stage today talking about the Q L C. And what's going in the Flash blade? S but this is really where it started,
01:02
right for us. The Q L C. Bring that given that density to the, to the flash array family and really just starting to address more workloads in the data center. Right? Um, as you can see here, Not at this accelerate, but since last accelerate we introduced another piece of that flash right family. Right?
01:21
Really growing the use cases and where we can put them. That's the flash Excel. Right. JD Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I know you all saw the keynote, we've had a really big new announcement. Flash played as that's super cool. We drew the short straw though. So we get to talk about.
01:35
No, no, absolutely, still great. Still growing, the theme is all about expanding. Being able to do more with with your products and that's true. Absolutely of the flash played as we learned earlier today. Absolutely. Flash array as well. And so you know, we started in the early days of pure with Flash ray X and charlie even
01:54
mentioned this in his keynote this morning. Customers loved it but they came to us and what did they say? They said, you know what, it's great, it serves 10% of my use case and so as Zane pointed out in 2019, flash racy using that Q L. C media, we were able to really go after all of those workloads that you had been traditionally supporting with something like a hybrid with
02:16
disc with maybe a little bit of flash backing that up. And now we've got the opportunity to really for the first time start targeting all of those use cases data center but customers came to us again and they said that's really cool. But you know this, you've been telling this story for a long time, data is expanding. We're using more and more.
02:32
We're saving more and more ransomware is come in and now we're doing a really good job of protecting data is not going anywhere so is exploding. And so now um I sometimes I need multiple Flash ray X is to deliver for a particular workload and that's where Flash ray Excel came in and this is not an announcement way today, but we did make this recently I think around december time frame and
02:56
this extends the family even further and gives us more opportunity to really tell that story. And so really for the first time we feel like with all these announcements pure has the opportunity to deliver a platform for your data center object with flash file in the cloud cloud block store in the cloud in the same period. E O S That's right. The thing we really want to highlight though is
03:18
despite having three very distinct products in this portfolio, there's still an incredible amount of similarity. All of the value that we talk about, the ease of use of simplicity is all true. No matter where in this architecture you find your needs lie right, just giving up a little bit here, give you that. So, still great products,
03:38
still flash array, a little bit of just give up a little bit of performance, still single digit latency and you get, was that almost twice the capacity or more of flash ray X ray X l doing that. But now with new levels of scale in terms of objects, how many things we can put on that? How much capacity? How much performance. So this is your flash array family.
04:01
All right. And the thing, the other thing that's really common across all these is what we're doing with direct flash and in fact all three of these different products in that flash array family wouldn't exist if it weren't for what we were doing with direct flash, which is really a way to software defined flash as I say, wait a minute here. We're talking about hardware that's a software
04:20
to find flash software to find what's that all about. You know what, I appreciate you calling me out on that and actually, charlie stole a little bit of our presentation because in in his keynote this morning, he actually talked about how some of the best software innovators also innovate by developing their own hardware as well. And that's what really it's all about when it
04:41
comes to the right flash, it's how can we go and optimize that flash media too so that we can take advantage of all that flash has to offer. Let's take away all of the legacy components that were put in there to make it look like a hard drive. So now, rather than having to, you know, address all of these little black boxes there S S. D.
05:02
S. Now we can actually go and talk to this entire fleet of flash and we can use our software to find services to get the most out of it. Right. And so we see a lot of efficiencies here, That's all envy me based its powers are direct flash software. Um we don't have to hide any flash, we get access to all of that.
05:20
So we can be very efficient there. And now with flash racy and Q L. C. You know, we can be very have a lot of density in those platforms. 49 pointed out earlier to look at that. 40 90. Yeah. So what did we do different with flash racy with flash racy.
05:35
We took advantage of a new media type that the industry made available to as Q L C quad level cell. You know, my friend Andrew Miller is sitting here in front of me and he's reminding me of the awesome series that we did uh Coffee Break. Uh and you know, if you haven't seen it, I hope you'll go and check that out because we really we have our friends from Kiyoshi A that are on we go and we deep dive on what Q L.
05:56
C. Is. But it's really a new dense type of flash that gives us those capacity metrics right now. You got to give up a little bit right? It's not quite as fast. It's still flash. Still incredibly fast. So we give up just a tiny amount of performance to get that incredible density that we're talking about.
06:11
And so this is what we did With with, you'll see. And with flash racy back in 2019, we're continuing to innovate again though. Right, look at that. Yeah. So with flash array Excel um we talked about density in the flash array platform for uh for kind of primary use cases now, um there were a couple of hardware changes that we made that enabled that.
06:34
One of the things is, you know, we want to pack as many direct flash modules in that five you that we could possibly could couple more you but still not, not a lot more now Zane, you're very familiar with? Flash ray and Flash ray X. What? What keeps me from filling that thing full of direct flash modules?
06:50
I got something in there, donut that's kind of getting in the way, Yeah, there's four slots at the top of your familiar flash array where we had to put the NV RAM. Right, very important to our I O path, makes all this possible. Let's just get rid of it. Can we just get rid of it? Maybe not.
07:05
Maybe we need it. Okay, so we can't get rid of it. We need we need NV RAM. That's an important part of the process. If I can't get rid of it. But I want to pack that thing as just as I can with direct flash modules, Where do I put it? Well, let's just put it right in got a whole bunch of these modules.
07:21
Absolutely. So, we actually built a new type of direct flash module, we call it D F M D or D F D F M with distributed NV RAM. And this is actually giving us a tremendous amount of efficiency because now, not only can we reuse that space to put actual flash, we can put 40 modules modules in a flash ray Excel. But now we can be very flexible in the amount
07:44
of envy RAMs were getting a little backup singing. It sounds like I'm just gonna assume everybody can still hear me. Okay, awesome. So that that actually also gives us the ability to very flexible in how we adjust that NV RAM. One of the things that's giving us the scale that we get in flash is I can pack as as many NV RAM modules as I need through these new D F
08:03
M D s, incredibly powerful. Right, Good stuff. So, I love all the hardware innovations. That's really cool. And that's what you guys are here for a bunch of cool hardware. It's all about the hardware. No, no, no. We talked talked about software to find flash earlier.
08:16
Right? So that's really the heart of it. Right? We got purity here will notice in one title because this is across the entire family. So, we talked about different, different levels of the data center. But again, all powered by the same Os Pure D O S on F A Hold on,
08:31
wait a minute, wait a minute. So, flash racy. All this all this flash ray X. Yeah. What do I lose when I go to Excel? Nothing. Nothing Now. Just for the small price of nothing. So free, right? Included, purity runs.
08:44
And I would even say the Excel probably drives the features because for the Excel to support things, purity code has to grow and everybody benefits on this. And this is what drives, you know, everything from the data reduction that we'll talk about here, right? Goes into R E S G into our into our efficiency. We're setting you up here too.
09:07
Some new stuff again, that's come out since the last accelerate file services. FA file services running on that same CXXL two R. Active D R. Which I'm very passionate about that built in data protection that purity oS gives you. So as we're on the spectrum to even ransomware remediation, right?
09:26
With our safe mode, anybody heard about this? There's plenty of in fact, I think we have a couple other sessions of virtual sessions that you want to learn more about that. Go check those out. We dive into this very deeply with some with some demos right to to even to our non disruptive upgrades. But you know what I love that you kind of
09:45
highlighted some of the new capabilities. We've gotten purity. I've been here a little bit, not not a lot, but a little bit longer. So I'm gonna go g we're gonna talk about some of our features that we've had for a long time data reduction table stakes, right? Everybody knows we've got this is a big part from the early days, what made period actually work if I'm gonna take flash,
10:02
which, let's be honest, especially in the early days of flash, right, a little bit more expensive. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you that value. I need a way to to double or even, you know, triple or more the amount of stuff that you can put on there. Data protection is how I get there. We know that we love that.
10:15
That's a big part of what we talk about, but it's actually driving some newer conversations that we're having as well. So Zane one of the things that you and I've been getting to work on today is we've been over at the pure sustainability booth and we're talking a lot about this new E S. G. Report that we released and there's so much goodness in there. I hope you'll go and check that out,
10:33
read that report. But one of the things that we really talk about is all the environmental benefits of flash array of the entire portfolio, but we're talking about a lot more efficient. It's, this is at the heart of it, this is part of it, those direct flash modules. Another incredibly important part of it. This is what's enabling us to really to do something.
10:51
So check out that report, a lot of fun. Security, security, another O G. We've been doing this from day one, uh, you know, this is a core thought that goes into everything that we do but we've actually accelerated this quite a bit in recent in recent times. Because was there a ransom where you talked about a little bit earlier,
11:12
build a lot more capabilities into what we're doing with safe mode. We also have some new capabilities in the new version, newer versions of purity that allows us to actually have two way communication with Pure one. This was unheard of before. Right. Pure one. That's only read only analytics. I'm getting data out but now with features like
11:32
being able to do self service, upgrading that low touch. So security is right at the heart of that. Don't have a admin in the middle of that passwords being compromised and all that actually locking that down and making it easier to manage. And I've got to trust that. Right. If you're one is gonna be talking to my array doing the analysis,
11:48
I need for self service upgrades or what about that new product we talked about fusion. Pure fusion puts a whole middleware of management in pure one. I need to harden that. And so that's a big part of what we've been doing is making sure that we just double down on security. Uh And even you mentioned Pier one and had multi factor authentication in there were even
12:07
the latest code and growing in the next code bases. Multifactor authentication is coming on the arrays themselves. Right? So really locking down how anybody accesses that in your data center. You brought back to compressions uh de duplication and compression.
12:22
So I'm gonna talk about our snapshots really quick cause this is also kind of foundation of a lot of the safe mode and things that we talked about. But just really how pure does the snapshots also on an efficiency standpoint space savings. That's it's a meta operation. Were already indexing the data in such an efficient way on the way into the array. It's just a meta data operation.
12:43
Keep that meta absolutely. What? No no no hit on the array. No no performance hit. Yeah, quickly restore that data. Right? Nothing's faster than meta operations operations and they're free. Right?
12:57
I mean they're sitting on their we're not moving the data anywhere. They can be part of your I. O. Path. I've got a secret What's that? It's so easy to use. You'd assume everybody did it. You would assume that there's actually a ton of customers today that are not taking advantage
13:11
of this capability that's built in free to use available and can save you in a ton of scenarios. So I got I got an asked today if you take nothing else away from what Zane and I are talking about. Please go back log in turn on snapshots. Their limitless and simple. Then we will we will have achieved our goal.
13:31
This is really what the presentation should have been called here, snapshots are flexible and they let you leverage safe mode. Right? We kind of hit that safe mode. I turned on snapshots safe modes there not only do I have snapshots instantaneously I make sure that they're around. Should I be attacked or happy compromised?
13:49
So I have that data. Should I need to flip it back? So a lot of stuff coming with this as well. Right? Latest code we're getting innovating on this more granular, more specific with how the safe mode is applied. So definitely again, got a couple sessions, we might talk about that too that you can go look at if you want to dive
14:04
into that deeper and we're not leaving it up to fate. Right? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you really nicely. Go turn on snapshots, snapshots but in the latest version of purity, we're actually gonna help you out. We've got some new workflows in there. When you create a new volume and purity 6.3, it's actually going to prompt you.
14:18
It's gonna say, hey obviously you want to protect this. Right, Which protection group would you like to, You heard JD ends and you're gonna use snapshots? Right? Yeah, absolutely. So we're helping you make a part of the provisioning process. So it doesn't get missed.
14:29
And the other thing I like to kind of highlight about safe mode is we think about safe mode as a feature but it's really a collection of features that's continually improving over time as we bring newer and newer capabilities. Again, Zane highlights on this, 63 some tons of new stuff we're doing with granularity, giving you some more choice and how you turn it on on the array. So, uh, so lots of goodness here,
14:49
still get that faster store, but I kind of hit on this from the beginning, going back to the pure D O. S, all of the built in data protections capability to talk about, we talk about snapshot to use them, but we really have this spectrum. Right. And I got got our modern data protection partner out here, Jason really kind of hones in on that a lot.
15:07
But this is the spectrum that that pure can provide from R H A R. Active cluster, right? Or seekers replication to that new feature, Active D R. I say Active new features nuisance less accelerate the active D R to give you that near zero R P O at a distance. Right. Really taking a lot of the work out of a D R
15:25
process, making it predictive. Built in testing, no non disruptive. And then of course, you know, racing snap, taking snaps off to the replication but even into our backup partners from cohesive, the the VM to calm vault driver toss where we can delta api integrations. Right. So, really the whole spectrum of data
15:45
protection all the way from even long term protecting and out of the out of band on the array. Um, and even to uh snap to nFS and cloud snap. Right? And we even put flash played in this presentation. So we talked about, we were talking about it today, but even our even flash arrays, sister or cousin or whatever that is,
16:02
you can even leverage that in your data center. If it's used for other workloads in your slides out of day, you need a new logo, new face plate, so check globally all included across the flash weighted family. Yeah, so again, the theme today has really been all about Flash ray for the entire data center. We really cover the entire spectrum now from your core data center with flash ray,
16:22
ex ex l when you need that scale. Flash racy for those workloads, you're traditionally thinking about hybrid four. Don't do that anymore. We're done with this. Get rid of them. Were all flash now all the time. And with flash racy you've got the capacity of the density, that you need to actually be able to do that.
16:36
Flash ray X comes in a lot of different permutations of sizes. So for all those edge applications, your X 10, for example is gonna be really great. B C D R D R D R. This is continuity, disaster recovery, all of those capabilities built directly into the array. How much are they going to pay for those?
16:53
Still nothing, still nothing right? You get pure, you get all this immediately instantaneously, just like snapshots. Absolutely. And then finally get an ability to Use those features in your uh, public cloud as well with cloud block store five star, which runs on the cloud, not adjacent, not in the cloud,
17:11
but on the cloud. Right purity on the cloud. So yeah, we hit it here. You can take all of your targeted applications and use cases from your high performance, most demanding consolidating that as we hit scale to more users per workload down to your apps and VMS, we probably keep hitting on this. But modern data protection,
17:30
disaster recovery, flash forward data recovery, it's all about the restore uh, to even user file shares, as we mentioned earlier. So put a mix of user file shares on that block store as well and and serve that up directly off the flash array and flash Tracy flexibility. So I think that's it. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you for helping me introduce everybody to
17:51
the family. We had a good time and I are gonna hang out a little bit here, so if you have any questions, feel free to come by and let us know also after this, you can find us at the think the sustainability booth and we'll talk about anything though. Yeah. Hey, thanks so much sir, how many can we put you down for one to each
  • Video
  • FlashArray//XL
  • Pure//Accelerate
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