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32:09 Video

Next Generation Data Protection: Accelerating Outcomes with FlashBlade//S

Join this session to learn how FlashBlade//S provides a highly flexible, secure, high-performing platform to grow cutting edge data protection capabilities.
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00:07
Hello. I hope you're having a great accelerate. Welcome to last session on next generation data protection where we're going to show you you can accelerate your data protection outcomes with flash blade. This isn't a solo effort. I have. Am Rita with me? So am Reacher.
00:24
Introduce yourself. Hi. My name is a retired US on the director of flash play Product Management. My areas of focus, our new platform introduction and course offer. Great to have you with me and Rita. I'm David Huskies, and I'm the director of pure data protection Solutions on I really own the
00:45
pure data protection roadmap on I'm responsible for driving integration of validation efforts without pure data protection partners on then to conclude the session today we have Mike De Hon from the Mississippi Department of Revenue is going to spend some time talking about some really world experiences with flash blade and data protection. I want to talk about exciting developments on our flash flood platform.
01:12
We have over five plus years of innovation with our flash laid product. We're super proud of what we built on what our customers have done with this product. And we are very excited about going with flash lead on the way ahead. So I'm delighted to announce our lyrics platform Flash Blade s Flash Blade is here to make data store. It's simpler forever.
01:39
Flash Big s stakes are proven true Scale out software platform. And now it's super charge for the next generation of applications and leader centres. We set out double down on the team that has become one of biggest competitive advantages which is the ability to go design hardware and software and the cue Elsie at the media level, we can now serve aboard the highest performance requirements and some of the largest capacity
02:07
optimised requirements. Our platform is going to double the density, double the performance on allow customers to build out for new kinds of platforms at a scale that is currently not possible with any other flash. Liz, our production flash Good s is built fundamentally on the marriage of hardware and software with an efficient,
02:31
all cue Elsie based design on the disaggregate in of compute and storage. And that is the course of our new platform. We can flexibly scale performance, our capacity based on customer requirements on. We've really worked on improving the resiliency space efficiency on the serviceability of the platform. Last but absolutely not the least.
02:56
This new platform brings Evergreen forever to flash league. Priority for Dog Zero continues to be the software defying heart of Ashley s. So we worked a lot on our software. This is our new major release. It adds a number of features for providing complete control on visibility. It's billed for unlimited scale on it's the same simple priority that
03:28
you're used to with evergreen storage, our subscription to innovation. Then we deliver news of features two customers they received those without the need for licensing or upgrades with flash laid s. We also offer included non destructive hardware upgrades to future platform enhancements. And it's all backed up with our work last customer experience which has consistently
03:55
achieved the highest net promoter score of any enterprise storage company in the industry. So let me give you a quick walk through what Flash Player s is all about. So this is how it looks like. It's a fine you chassis, the same as excel on. You see that we have this aggregated compute and storage.
04:20
So now we have the blades and we have drives, which configurable storage within the blades so you can have a minimum of seven blades. A maximum of 10 blades on each bleed could have won two Ford rise. These drives can be 24 terabyte capacity or 48 terabyte capacity, so there is a lot of flexibility and modularity that we're offering in terms of this platform.
04:50
Onder the Flash Player Integrated networking It continues to be the simplified networking that you're used to. You see the fabric I owe module, the past supply modules and the parts supply units over here, and all of these are designed as field replaceable units. With this new platform, you get 50 gig blade and 100 gig chassis networking on.
05:14
We really worked on improving our coupling capabilities. Offering 100 gave 40 Gate 25 gig and tending networking. So a lot of goodness in here when it comes to our integrated networking, so you'll see that now we'll have four models with flash played s, so we are introducing the 200 models for capacity on the 500 models for
05:42
performance. You also see D and be so D stands for our 48 terabyte drives and B is the 24 terror by drives. So based on the configuration that you want, you can tailor these configurations to fit your workloads, so there is a tremendous opportunity here to customise your storage. You can scale your computer or storage independently.
06:08
You can customise based on your requirements, and you will have a moderate to suit each of your workload. From a software perspective, biological architecture stays the same, so everything is still always distributed. We are focusing on the pose of flash played platform, which is the disaggregate in of compute and storage.
06:32
On enabling Cue Elsie Support without tears without usage of SCM. I've already talked about enhance networking capabilities that we have introduced as part of this platform. We're also introducing always on in line deep compression, using up your proprietary algorithm so you'll see that the S 200 systems have deeper compression than the 500 systems at all of the
07:01
capability that you used to. When it comes to our course of their replication, Snapshot safe won't support. All of that continues to be a part of a new platform, so we have filing object application that supported across purity wash ins and black forms. Snapshots. Support continues across black farms on DSS.
07:24
Safe mode for final object storage to protect against ransom. There continues to be a part of their form. Okay, Thank you. And Rita, that was terrific. And we're all extremely excited about the arrival of Flash Blade s. So before we get into, you know, talking about some of the work we've done with Flash Blade s
07:43
and our data protection applications I just wanted to spend just a few moments here to level set on why Rapid restore is absolutely critical for organisations on Do you know, I've been involved with flash blade and data protection for sort of 3.5 years of pure storage, and I've certainly learned a lot of lessons over that time, but also that the landscape is, you know, the landscape has changed quite a lot.
08:12
You know, when we when when I was first involved with Flash Blade is a data protection target. It was all about bringing data back as quickly as possible to keep your mission critical applications running. And of course, that that's not really changed. But I think we'll all agree that over the last sort of two or three years, we've seen an unprecedented growth in what you might call
08:36
ransomware attacks. And so I just wanted to just pull out some some interesting data points that we got from a study that we asked Enterprise storage group to go and do for us. We wanted them to go and talk to organisations about their attitude towards ransomware on dare preparedness on. Do you know, we asked a lot of questions but I thought this was a kind of interesting and
09:02
quite key one for this session. And really, the conclusion here is that you can see the slide that, you know, data protection back up is really the go to technology that organisations choose to recover, you know, to get themselves out of a ransomware event. And yes, there are lots of other blue bars on
09:25
this screen. But a lot of them really just talk about different flavours of data protection so that that kind of tells you that, you know, not only is the sort of fast recovery or wrapping restore capability of flashlight pretty call customers air using it now a za pool, a strategy to get out of a you know, a potential Rance aware event. So bearing that in mind,
09:53
this is probably a little bit more concerning on. But we all know it's a game of cat and mouse between us on the Attackers. And, you know, we put more obstacles up, they develop mawr innovative ways of taking them down. And so this should tell you that the backup copies of data are firmly in the crosshairs of a potential attacker,
10:17
and it kind of makes sense, right? You know, again, we know that a sophisticated attacker will spend over 200 days lurking around your network looking for copies of your of your primary data, looking at your data protection software, trying to get in, you know, trying to attack, you know, attack those copies,
10:40
you know, delete them or encrypt them, and so shouldn't be. It shouldn't be any surprise because obviously they want the ransom on Do. If you can recover, you can avoid paying the ransom. It's all it's all pretty straightforward, but it should really make us think that you're you know, that you're back ups, whether it's snatched copies of snapshot or your actual data
11:04
protection software that you're using is under threat and you can see again. There's another sort of perspective. If you look at the developments that the data protection software vendors have made over the last few years, they've algo on into some kind of ransom where kind of protection and partly it's locking their own products down to make sure that you know credentials are safe.
11:32
But they're also now getting into standing on, booking a back up images. So everyone's trying to build, you know, solutions to put more obstacles in front of a new attacker. And really, I think this this really sums up and really talks to the really the massive value that the flash played has delivered. You really need to things in the event of an attack.
11:56
Clearly, you want to have copies of your backups that are safe that have not been, you know, attack deleted, interfered with. But that's all well and good. But if you can't bring back your backups in time or recover from your backups in time, it's largely pointless. And so that that rapid recovery message it's still really important on DHS.
12:23
Certainly in our discussions with organisations, one place where organisations generally fail is they don't design their restore to recover, You know, an entire environment, because I think that they're sort of, you know, they've been they've been designing, restored and maybe bring back 10 virtual machines and a couple of databases, which was fine in the old world. But in the New World,
12:48
you really need to be recovering at scale on also that mass restored. That's really were flash blade as it has an incredible value. You know, we bought at a safe mode technology that I'm Rita talked about that can protect your backup coffees through extra authentication on. Then you've got the scale out high performance of flash Blade.
13:11
So that's really where we are today in respect of flash blade on data protection. So this is why we're super excited, super excited in the pure data protection universe, with with the arrival of flash blade s that really takes, you know, the recovery on greed to talk about some of the capabilities earlier. It really takes that rapid recovery to the next scale.
13:41
So on again, before we sort of get into, you know, get into some of the work we've done recently with Flash played as just wanted again level set here. You know, we've managed to build a really comprehensive, pure data protection ecosystem, if you like. And you can see on that on the slide here, Aled, the vendors, all the partners we've built solutions with on Do you know part of my role
14:09
of pure is to is to is to basically bring this level of validation and interoperability Flash Blade esque until we are meticulously going through with each of these vendors to make sure you know, we're showing best practise best performance with Flash Blade s. So before I share some of the findings on results from our from our solutions lab,
14:41
I just wanted to just just again sort of level set a little bit on some of the work we've been doing without with that sort of priority applications, if you like. And you can see, we've got being Baracus Oracle combo and sequel server. You know, on the slide here on, I guess just in the same way that the flash blade has flash blade s just because of the use and the implementation of industry standard
15:10
protocols, it's it's made my life on the solution. Engineering teams like so much easier A pure because all of our major vendors on. But I showed you a previous screen. Certainly the ones with concentrated on for the for the launch of Flash Lady. The ones on this screen awful implemented, you know, industry standard protocols on D.
15:36
You know, that's one of Flash Blade, as his biggest strength is really just these things just run out of the box. Doesn't mean we don't want to test them thoroughly on understand scaling and performance. But you know the ability to use those industry standard protocols across ALS, the across all of these major back a vendor's is certainly very key for pure and on our
15:58
customers on D you know, we've been able to know only use those protocols for, you know, the actual act of backing up on restoring. So this is effectively restoring, you know, in the case of calm, bold on been storing their backup repositories on Flash Blade s onder, obviously with sequel Andre, our man is really it's a really storing housing those
16:26
dumped files on flash laid s. But we've also been able to use our safe mo technology that's come across from all the work and returned the team have done on Flash Blade. And so, you know, with safe mode. We can, either if we're using SNB or NFS, weaken, take snapshots, which they then managed by safe
16:47
mode. So that's really removing the ability of the administrator. Todo go and do deletions, you know, having to contact your support on go through an authorisation mechanisms to change any parameters around how long snapshots are kept for, plus also removing those snapshots.
17:07
But again, if you're using calm bowl, for example, and three, we now have objects safe mode, which again works beautifully on Flash Blade s andan object safe mode, really, is that we think the future of our safe mode technology on but the absolute beauty of objects. Safe mode is the ability to lock objects a soon as they arrive in the S three bucket from com bold, which means there's there's milli seconds
17:36
of delay. Whilst those objects are being locked in the three bucket, which overcomes potentially some delays you have when you're taking snapshots because you're not taking snapshots every second, you will wait for a backup to finish on. Then take a snapshot of you know they been repository, for example. But I think the conclusion here is the seamless way that Flash Blade s uses
18:03
standard protocols process safe mode has just meant that, you know, being able to build out solutions very quickly has been easily achievable. So if I just share just some preliminary numbers here and again, I just want to emphasise, you know, this this is a work that's taken place in our solutions lab. You know, obviously any kind of back up
18:26
performance, whether you're recovering or backing up, is highly dependent on you know, the infrastructure that you're using. And obviously we're in a test situation. But hopefully you can see here some of the fantastic out of the box informants performance improvement we've seen with Flash Blade s over the over our first flash blame model on were especially proud of.
18:52
We're proud of all of them, but I think you know the ones that really stand out. You know, you can see that up left of 64% with performance with calm bowl using history on. Then you can see the massive improvement with with sequel and sm Bay back up. So hopefully more to share a Zoe bring solutions to market. And then finally, you know, it's not always all about.
19:16
You know, it's not always all about the performance important. No, it important. Important. No, it is. You know, the deep compression that flash blade s Kenbrell to the table you can see again significant improvement on this wide. You know, Large is the reason why the back of vendors aren't on here is because,
19:36
you know, ah, lot of the back of vendors do their own compression and d duplication on DS. So we let our sort of design philosophy around Data protection partners is really to let the backup product do what it can on, especially in respect of the duplication. That's pretty important to let the backup product do its own d jube, because ah, lot of the back up Ben is a build some really clever technology inside of their
20:04
product. But it'll depends on that. Got product doing. It's d jube. So we're going to do now is we're gonna change gears here on. Do you know, Mike, as I introduced him at the start of the session, is going to talk about some of his real world experiences with flash played s at the
20:22
Department of Mississippi Revenue. So, Mike, why don't you introduce yourself over to you? Hey, my name is Mike to Han. I'm an enterprise architect for the Mississippi Department of Revenue around these parts and kind of the resident storage nerd, our storey with pure began about six years ago, we were looking to convert a mainframe
20:41
application into a Web on be needed, some storage to go to onto it. That was theme Arvin application at the time, which is responsible for the tagging titles for the entire state of Mississippi. A couple of years later, we needed to find a new platform to put the tax system we call it Mars and pure had been such a winner for us previously that we grew right into that
21:05
environment as well. On Ben. Following that up, we also needed to back everything up and after, you know, kind of knocking around on a few different solutions. We landed on Flash Blade as a great place for those backups to live and then even moving forward. We've been working with pure lately for some
21:21
testing of the flash blade. It's been a great experience. And I can't wait to talk to you guys some more about it. Yeah, So just wanted to ask you a couple of questions today. So the first one being what technology problems were you looking for?
21:35
Flash played to solve? Yes. Oh, flash, But really stepped up big for us in the back up arena. Previously, we were using Cem purpose built back of appliances. We have lots of issues over time with those with you. No consistency in our back up chains. So, you know,
21:55
we kick off our full backups that happen. And then on the third day, they would freeze up, lock up and then mess up the following chain so we wouldn't have full consistent backups. And it was just, you know, it was a large pain points. So we reached out to our developers and we asked them,
22:11
What do you guys want? Right. We went right to the source of truth, and they said, We just want to dump database back ups on the file system, something straightforward native. We can work with those. So we kind of reached back into our arsenal for some of the tips and tricks and tools that
22:27
we've had a lot of success with over the years, and one of those has been pure for us. So we started looking into the flash blade and it turned out to be a great solution for us. There's always great to hear Mike on. I'm resuming. It wasn't just the back up. Recovering quickly from outages was also key decision point in your choice of Flash Flare.
22:49
Yes, that's actually a great point to bring up. So you know as well everybody when there's an outed, you want to get past it as soon as possible, right, Because nobody wants to be in a down situation, so that's important. And then another important part of that is we do weekly restores from our production environment down into our staging so our developers can get to developing on Mondays,
23:10
right? So with our previous issues that we've had, you know, we had tried some other you know, cheap and deep spinning rust before we went to Flash Blade. And well, that was a new experience, to say the least. So it took so long for some of these restores to happen that air developers were coming in on Monday and just kind of do,
23:31
too. Do you know they didn't really have anything to do because they're still waiting for their restores to come into their staging environment. So we were able to bring the flash plate in and our restores happened so much faster. They got in on Monday and it's eight o'clock on a Monday morning. Let's get to work. Would start driving at it.
23:47
So really help us to realise more value out of our development staff, they were able to work more effectively. Yeah, that's that's fantastic. Exactly what we want to hear. We've been so excited. You've been testing our new platform. Flash Blade s.
24:04
How has the experience being so far for you? So Flash Blade s has retained all the features that made the flash blade a legendary solution for our backup needs. But they simultaneously pushed the boundaries of usability and performance even further. And one of the great things about that is it makes it even easier for us to throw Mawr
24:26
workload at it. It's just adapted to everything we've put on it. So the setup process was like most things here that we've done. It was fairly intuitive we didn't have a lot of stick spots in pain points. And, uh oh, we got to go into our network. We gotta put this like this and do that. I mean, we're technical people, so you know, we've all been there,
24:44
right is you got to stand something up and it's supposed to work and supposed to be easy. And it's not, You know, you evened out kind of going through your area logs and trying to find the little tweaks and tunes and things you have to change. But we haven't encountered that, especially with this new platform. So since it's so adaptable and scaleable, you know, one of the things we tested with it was
25:05
some of our more specific backups using sir to so historically with these air to backups, we've had to have a Windows server doing an SNB share that we then dropped everything off of. It's an extra point of failure, so and at that it's a single point of failure. So we were able to point this directly at the flash blade and completely skip a step. That's that's Julie really greed any other workloads that you've dried out on Flash Blade
25:33
s so you know, us engineering folks. We always like to keep a couple tools in our tool belts and things on the back end that are nice. And one of those that we did have a lot of success with was Splunk. You know, Splunk can be There's a little pooling and trickery. Sometimes you got to do to get stuff to work. It's very particular tool,
25:52
even though it is powerful. We didn't encounter that when setting this up. It was really just stand up and snb get everything joined up with active directory credentials. Fire away. We've just set that thing up on the back side. It's just eating everything I can throw at it. I kind of I'll be honest.
26:09
You know, I'm I'm bad at a lot of things. But one thing I'm really good at is breaking things Have had a hard time breaking the flash blade s. Yeah, that's music to our years. I think, Um, I'm also now that you've spent some time testing flash played s Are there other use cases that you're looking into for this platform?
26:32
Yes. So with it, it's, you know, it eats everything we put at it. So there's more things I want to throw at it, some less things that can kind of adapt to that. One of the things I want to do is as much as possible. Just a djinni Eric backup location. Because everybody's got you know,
26:49
you've got your network controller over here. That needs to drop back ups on NFS, and you've got this one over here that can run really well on. You know, using s3 is a target for dropping those things off there. And as I keep coming across those little things, it's really become a de facto landing zone, right? It's We have the specific need for a far
27:09
workload. That's really odd ball left field. We just need a place to put it. It's really becoming a place for that as we find more things that's been performing and it's able to eat him up, and we could just throw things at it and not have to worry. So that was all really good stuff, Mike, and it sounds like you've had a fantastic experience
27:29
with both flash blade and flash play there, so we're delighted to hear that. So I guess you know we're introducing Evergreen forever with Flash Lady? Yes. Can you just tell us a little bit about your experience with evergreen hardware and software on? Do you know how were you able to sort of grow kind of grow your your storage?
27:50
You know, it's sort of from a capacity and a performance perspective. Yeah, sure. So we've actually had a lot of experience with using the Evergreen Features S O from a procurement side of the house. You know, we do work in state government, so inevitably, we have to bow down to the budget. And it's a lot easier when we can consume just the Evergreen subscription model on a yearly
28:13
basis. That's something we do for everything we have support. We have subscription licences, so we don't have to worry about that every five years. We've got to go through the whole procedure for all of this equipment, and we have to do you know, Iraq and stack and pull it out. There's outage windows and scheduling and working with the business unit.
28:30
That's that's never fun. Nobody likes that side, you know. I'll speak for myself, at least as an engineer. The you know, having to go through the procedural things. I like to make storage go really fast so that, you know, it makes that more consumable. But then on the operational side,
28:49
well, I have to be honest, we've kind of abused the power and the flexibility that we get with that because it's allowed us to grow in scale to fit our needs, Right? We've moved shelves over, and we've done early upgrades of a raise where we know went ahead and fast forward into when are next. Track is going to be with those things. And we were able to meet the needs of our
29:12
workloads where they set. And it was something that it kind of blew me away. How simple it was. We had to. At one point we had an array with an extra shelf hanging off of it and one day to centre. And we needed that capacity in another data centre, and we wanted to upgrade that array as
29:26
we did it. So we used the evergreen model to move that capacity shelf evacuated, clear everything off of it, move it three hours across the state, dropping in place through the controller upgrades. And, you know, usually when I go into a situation, I expect things to break right. That's one of those. You just gotta You have to set realistic
29:46
expectations, but we're able to do that seamlessly. Our workload stayed up running. We didn't have any. You know, everything's on fire moments during that. So it's one of the things I'm excited to see that coming to the flash playing space. It's gonna just make my life a little bit easier and presumably as a sort of technologist,
30:04
but also someone who s to your owns and runs, runs runs a service that's running on your on your equipment. I need to be able to get interesting, greatest technology without you described quite well, sort of message upgrades on Do you know, having to kind of go through the whole cycle every five years? That must be pretty that much be quite an
30:28
exciting prospect, You know, it's one of those things. I think if it's the modern business experience a little bit more effectively than some of these legacy, you know, every five years we've got to do the whole shebang, and it's one of those things. I'm excited that we've been able to grow with here with this,
30:44
I never feel like we get left behind. And we've got old the antiquated technology because we are able to stay up today with it. You know, a couple weeks ago, we got a new controllers in, and we didn't have to do some whole big refresh project to get it. They came in and, you know, I'm I was. Whenever we get new equipment, my my bosses
31:01
called me Christmas Mike because like a kid on Christmas, I want to open everything and want to look at him. What? Oh, 25 reports on there. We're gonna get more speed. We're gonna be able to put these extra workload. And it's something I can do without having to go through that whole painful process.
31:16
Thanks. My delighted to hear that you're a great experience with flash laid s with Flash Lady s. We are doubling down on our hardware and software or design, and that you'll see we can sell the highest performance and capacity requirements so they're doubling the density, doubling the performance on doubling the power efficiency. Okay.
31:39
And thanks. In return from a data protection perspective, I hope you can see how flash blade s will accelerate your recovery speeds on through our safe mode technology provide a level of protection for your backups. They were really pleased to be able to share this with you today. So that's the end of our session. I really hope you enjoyed it on de enjoy the
32:02
rest of accelerate. Thank you.
  • Video
  • FlashBlade
  • Data Protection
  • Pure//Accelerate
  • FlashBlade//S

Pure FlashBlade//S is a high performance unified file and object storage platform designed to accelerate your data protection outcomes. In particular, FlashBlade//S dramatically improves restore performance, allowing you to get systems back on line quickly.

Join this session to learn how FlashBlade//S provides a highly flexible, secure, high-performing platform to grow cutting edge data protection capabilities. FlashBlade//S is tested to work with multiple backup software solutions.

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