Pure Storage has solutions for your Datacentre that make it more 'green' (sustainable), secure and modern. Today, we'll cover all the types of Flash Array that Pure Storage offers and decide which one is right for you.

First off all, what is an all-flash array?

An all-flash array (AFA) is a storage infrastructure that contains only flash memory drives instead of spinning disk drives. All-flash storage is also known as Solid-State Array (SSA). AFAs and SSAs deliver speed, performance, and agility for your business applications.

For a long time, Hard Disk dominated Datacentres, but with the SSD boom, many companies started to opt for Flash memories, much faster and more efficient but expensive. Thanks to Moore's law, flash storage has become more cost-effective making all-flash versions of devices viable. Pure Storage deals exclusively with this type of all-flash Array, called the Flash Arrays or All-Flash Arrays.

Pure Storage Flash Array Types

FlashArray//C

FlashArray//C is enterprise ready and provides proven six-nines of availability, non-disruptive upgrades, and consistent single-millisecond latency for the most demanding environments.

The all-QLC FlashArray//C is so cost-effective for capacity-oriented workloads that you can say goodbye to hard disk drives and hybrid arrays.

Pure DirectFlash modules and unique data-reduction technologies combine to deliver the most usable effective capacity. Your capacity-sensitive workloads benefit from the same Purity advanced data services as your most business-critical performance-sensitive workloads.

Delivering 99.9999% availability with effective capacity options between 797TB in 3U all the way to 7.3PB in 9U, FlashArray//C is latency-tolerant, designed for availability, and meets the capacity expansion requirements of data-intensive workloads.

The FlashArray//C is a 100% non-disruptive architecture with a flexible buying program, Evergreen™ frees you from the complexities, risk, and expensive upgrades of legacy storage. Get all the features of Purity—including ActiveCluster™ synchronous replication over Fibre Channel or Ethernet—at no additional cost.

Know more about FlashArray//C.

FlashArray//X

All-flash FlashArray//X is software-driven storage that’s optimized for your corporate or enterprise requirements today, with a non-disruptive path for the future.

This Flash delivers exceptional performance density, allowing you to consolidate more business services—bigger databases, more applications, more users—on fewer arrays. Accelerate all your business-critical workloads, along with file services on unified storage. Scale further and gain AWS and Azure cloud agility with Pure Cloud Block Store™.

FlashArray’s™ Purity operating environment delivers the power, performance, and resilience of a Modern Data Experience™. Get rich data services, global flash management, industry-leading efficiency, and fabric support—and continuous innovation.

You can protect your data from disasters and ransomware attacks with built-in capabilities to meet your RTO and RPO service-level agreements and security requirements. Get immutable SafeMode snapshots, backup to cloud, and array replication for business continuity. And also, boost performance of business-critical apps such as SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle with DirectMemory™ modules built with Intel Optane SSDs. Plug them in and watch latency drop by up to 50% without configuration or tuning.

Know more about FlashArray//X.

FlashArray//XL

Designed to be as easy to use as it is powerful, FlashArray//XL gives your business the freedom to innovate without storage as a constraint.

Consolidate more business services—bigger databases, more users, and more app workloads—on fewer arrays with FlashArray//XL. With an all-new 5U chassis, designed for the latest powerful CPUs, expect an up to 70% performance boost over FlashArray//X90.

Run business-critical apps, such as SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle, faster than ever. DirectFlash® Modules with Distributed NVRAM lift the limit on write throughput and reduce read latency to as low as 150µs, driving up to 20% improved density.

You can Protect your data from disasters and ensure business continuity with FlashArray//XL’s increased internal redundancy and new backplane for workload rebalancing and failover. Defend against ransomware attacks with immutable SafeMode™ snapshots. And also, Equip your data center for scale and agility with FlashArray//XL managed by Pure Fusion™. Deliver storage-as-a-service in a multi-cloud world and eliminate bottlenecks of traditional storage solutions.

Know more about FlashArray//XL.

FlashBlade

Used by more than 25% of the Fortune 100, FlashBlade delivers cloud-like simplicity and agility with consistent high performance and control.

The fast file and object storage of FlashBlade goes beyond what traditional scale-out NAS can do. Get massive throughput and parallelism with consistent multidimensional performance. Simply add blades to scale capacity and performance.

FlashBlade’s scale-out metadata architecture can handle tens of billions of files and objects with maximum performance and rich data services. Purity//FB 3 supports cloud mobility with object replication and disaster recovery with file replication.

Experience AI-powered storage management with Pure1®. Deploying, updating, and managing FlashBlade is hassle-free thanks to automated APIs. Get high-performance native NFS, SMB, and S3 protocol support for all your modern file and object workloads.

Know more about FlashBlade.

FlashStack®

FlashStack from Pure and Cisco delivers cloud-like agility and pay-as-you-use pricing across hybrid-cloud environments. Stop compromising. Start small and scale fast, run any application, and upgrade non-disruptively. Quickly unlock new capabilities to achieve business outcomes while staying within budget.

Power your infrastructure using fewer resources through advanced automation. AI-based management oversees the on-premises infrastructure and delivers capacity-on-demand across multicloud environments. Reducing silos means less overhead with added savings.

You can choose from more than 25 pre-validated solutions to rapidly deploy and support any application or workload. Pay only for what you use. Scale compute, servers, and storage independently. Non-disruptive upgrades let you build capacity risk-free and on your schedule.

Improve time to market and customer response. Ultra-fast performance means you can run any workload at scale and consistently meet SLAs for critical applications. Flexible consumption and capacity on demand enable you to quickly adapt infrastructure to new use cases.

Know more about FlashStack®.

AIRI®

Jointly architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI extends the power of NVIDIA DGX A100 systems with the massively parallel, all-flash performance of Pure FlashBlade®. AIRI provides modern AI infrastructure to accelerate end-to-end GPU workflows.

With AIRI your teams can start model development and training workloads right away. AIRI’s fully integrated hardware and software stack supports NVIDIA GPU Cloud deep-learning stack, Pure RapidFile toolkit, Kubernetes orchestration, and a range of workflow tools.

AIRI is built with a complete software stack, enabling data scientists to get up and running in a few hours, not weeks or months. AIRI delivers the performance and flexibility to meet AI needs at any scale.

AI is a data pipeline that needs an integrated solution. Use AIRI to reduce racks of complexity into a complete solution so teams can focus on algorithms, not infrastructure. More compute translates to faster training. More data means higher accuracy.

The AI Breakthrough Awards have recognized Pure and AIRI as the “Best AI Solution for Big Data.” The first complete AI-ready infrastructure solution, AIRI adapts easily to business demand as AI models move from prototyping to deployment for any initiative or workload.

Know more about AIRI.

Now that you know everything that you need about Pure Storage Flash Arrays, contact us to provide your favorite one!