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Pure FlashBlade for Telecom Service Providers Empowering data with high-performance unified file and object storage.

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Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................................3

Meeting Service Provider Needs .........................................................................................................................................3 5G .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ................................................................................................................................................ 3 Internet of Things .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 4 Immersive Content ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 4

FlashBlade: High-Performing Petabyte-Scale Data Storage ...............................................................................................4 UFFO for Modern Data and Applications ...................................................................................................................................................... 5 FlashBlade Applications ................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

FlashBlade Hardware ..........................................................................................................................................................6 Chassis................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 6 Blades................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Redundant Components for High Availability .............................................................................................................................................. 7 Hardware Components .................................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Purity//FB Software ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 8

FlashBlade Administration ..................................................................................................................................................8 Routine Administrative Tasks .......................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Management Automation Frameworks ........................................................................................................................................................12 Testing the Scale-Out Architecture ..............................................................................................................................................................12

FlashBlade: Service Provider User Stories ........................................................................................................................ 13

Next Steps ......................................................................................................................................................................... 14

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Introduction

Pure Storage® FlashBlade® is a unified fast file and object (UFFO) platform for modern data. UFFO storage is a new category of data storage that consolidates two traditionally separate storage paradigms—file and object storage—into one high-performance data solution. It enables service providers to replace a siloed collection of data warehouses, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, and direct-attached storage (DAS) devices with a single scale-out storage solution that delivers multi-dimensional performance at scale.

As the world’s first UFFO storage platform, FlashBlade tackles the most challenging modern data requirements facing service providers. FlashBlade delivers multi-dimensional file and object performance via a highly parallel architecture that is purpose-built for today’s workloads. This architecture is modern in design and built specifically to address today’s data challenges.

Note: A white paper with a more in-depth technical analysis of FlashBlade is also available under non-disclosure (NDA).

Please consult with your Pure account team for access to this document.

Meeting Service Provider Needs

Faced with eroding returns from traditional business models, internal challenges, and external threats, service providers need

to evolve beyond the role of connection providers to become dominant players in larger digital service ecosystems. As they

expand in this way, service providers will increasingly need storage to distribute data-intensive content and enable new

revenue opportunities, products, and services.

5G

5G will be a driving force behind a vast number of innovations incorporating edge, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence

(AI), and machine learning/deep learning (ML/DL). Service providers need to capture market share quickly and aggressively in

these areas, with solutions that can span full end-to-end 5G architectures (from edge to core, to cloud), often processing data

in real-time or near real-time.

5G introduces a greater need for a data-centric architecture and rapid data processing. FlashBlade is the “engine” for

processing data in a 5G world, and it can be orchestrated through APIs and plugins and managed through the Pure1® platform.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI and ML applications are only as effective as the algorithms that fuel them, and algorithms become more accurate and

relevant when trained on larger data sets. For service providers hoping to use such applications—for example, biometric and

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speech recognition, fraud detection, virtual assistants, predictive analytics, and maintenance—AI/ML workloads require data to

be orchestrated and aggregated at a massive scale. FlashBlade can accelerate AI/ML workloads, consolidate silos, and deliver

a single, scale-out storage platform that accelerates speed to insight.

Internet of Things

By 2025, there will be an estimated 21 billion connected IoT devices. Service providers have a massive number of potential

use cases and revenue opportunities for IoT applications, covering everything from security and analytics to smart homes and

cities, connected cars, network-based virtual-reality (VR) gaming, and digital twins. FlashBlade offers performance and scale

to aggregate all devices and render IoT data actionable by facilitating collecting, processing, and curating device data.

Immersive Content

Service providers will play a vital role as the providers of connectivity and networks for VR and augmented reality (AR)

applications. There is considerable interest in the potential of immersive content enabled by VR and AR technology, such as

virtual travel, gaming, film and TV, sporting events, attending classrooms or conferences, or for virtual retail experiences.

Already, many service providers are establishing partnerships with sporting leagues, music companies, game companies, and

content creators while also acquiring or developing their platforms to move up the value chain. By leveraging one, or several

major technology drivers, service providers can explore several immersive content use cases. These can include, for example,

network-connected AR/VR experiences enabled by edge and 5G; partnerships with e-sports and online gaming; and the

creation and distribution of data-intensive audio/visual content and media with optimized load times and resolutions. For

enterprise customers, this could also take the form of virtual retail and shopping experiences, interactive and rich media

marketing campaigns, or immersive brand/event storytelling.

The typical interactive VR application generates about 1TB of data per hour, which translates to large data storage

requirements. Pure Storage can provide the capacity, bandwidth, and delivery speed to edge data centers to support these

experiences.

The highly scalable FlashBlade system can meet service providers’ growing needs for handling new use cases effectively.

FlashBlade isn’t merely providing storage: It’s empowering your data.

FlashBlade: High-Performing Petabyte-Scale Data Storage

As data needs have evolved, so has storage technology—most notably from spinning disks to flash-based solid-state devices

(SSDs). Pure developed FlashBlade, a scale-out architecture designed specifically for flash, to meet growing needs for high-

performing, reliable, space-efficient, easy-to-own-and-operate petabyte-scale storage. A FlashBlade system is a unified file

and object data storage platform that can simultaneously host multiple file systems and object store tenants and make them

available to thousands of clients. FlashBlade eliminates the inconvenience and complexity of the data silos typical to service-

provider legacy data centers.

FlashBlade is a scale-out system—both performance and connectivity increase simultaneously when capacity is added, with

no service interruption or reduction in data integrity. Moreover, users with Evergreen™ service agreements can upgrade

hardware and software non-disruptively as technology evolves over their systems’ entire lifetimes. Five key FlashBlade

innovations make this possible:

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• High-Performance Storage Devices: FlashBlade systems store data in Pure Storage-designed storage units that exploit

the advantages of flash and mitigate conventional SSD shortcomings to provide fast access and long flash lifetimes.

• Unified Network: FlashBlade systems consolidate client, internal, and administrative communication in a single reliable,

high-performing network that makes a high degree of internal concurrency possible. The network supports both IPv4 and

IPv6 client access at Ethernet speeds of up to 100 Gb/s.

• Purity//FB: FlashBlade’s Purity//FB symmetric distributed storage operating system overcomes the load balancing

challenges common to conventional storage systems. Systems distribute workloads evenly among processing and I/O

resources regardless of clients’ data access patterns.

• Common Storage Substrate: A unified media organization and stored data format support fast concurrent access to files

via NFS, SMB, and HTTP protocols and to objects via the S3 protocol. FlashBlade can also replicate files and objects to

remote counterparts to protect data against disasters.

• Administrative Simplicity: FlashBlade systems perform most routine administrative tasks autonomously. They self-tune

and self-heal when components fail. They send regular status reports to Pure1, which gives visibility to their systems'

utilization, performance, and health, and uses fingerprints developed by analyzing historical data from the entire installed

base to detect potential issues and initiate remediation before problems occur.

UFFO for Modern Data and Applications

FlashBlade users can consolidate multiple file and object workloads on a single system. The systems offer concurrent access

to files via all supported protocols. Purity//FB supports the Network Lock Manager (NLM) protocol for coordinating data access

in clusters of application servers that share data via NFSv3. The software supports Samba-level SMB functionality. The multi-

tenant object store can accommodate billions of objects. Each object store service account (tenant) has a private object

namespace, wholly isolated from other accounts.

FlashBlade Applications

With a maximum of nearly eight petabytes of physical flash in 44U of rack space and ultra-simple administration, FlashBlade is

a natural fit for multiple applications, including:

• Modern Analytics: Organizations are recording billions of events from both traditional and new sources—events reported

by sensors, process steps, individuals’ movements, and actions, and so forth. With applications like Splunk, Elastic, and

Vertica, they correlate and analyze huge volumes of diverse items to derive valuable insights. FlashBlade systems have

both the capacity to store enormous amounts of data and the performance that enables analytics applications to deliver

timely results. Pure offers integrations as well as staff expertise for many analytics applications.

• Easy-to-Manage Multipurpose Storage: FlashBlade systems consolidate files, objects, virtual machine images,

containers, and backups in a single compact, reliable, energy-efficient, high-performing, easy-to-administer system.

Service providers can be challenged by the need to manage so many diverse data sets and the multiple storage silos they

require. FlashBlade simplifies the necessary skill set to effectively manage a variety of data storage needs by unifying

them onto a single platform.

• Edge Site Storage: FlashBlade is ideal for bringing high-performance storage to Edge locations. With its extreme storage

density, low power requirements, easy remote management, and non-disruptive expansion, FlashBlade is the perfect fit

for distributed edge sites with infrequent personnel visits and limited physical space.

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• Rapid Restore: It’s always an emergency when you need to restore backups to recover from errors or disasters.

FlashBlade’s native data compression, high read performance, and close integration with major backup-and-restore

products (Cohesity, Commvault, Veeam, Veritas, and others) combine to offer the shortest path to getting critical

applications and data sets up and running again.

• Ransomware Mitigation: Malicious attacks that encrypt critical data and hold it for ransom have unfortunately become

commonplace. FlashBlade systems include secure SafeMode™ snapshots to help minimize the impact of ransomware

attacks, even when a system’s administrative account has been compromised. FlashBlade ransomware recovery is

validated with major backup products.

• Document Repositories: Service providers find themselves deluged with digital objects. Individual documents are

typically small by digital storage standards, but their quantities make organizing them for convenient and rapid access

challenging. A FlashBlade system can accommodate billions of records, in either file or object form, according to

application requirements.

• Local Indexing for Data Stored in Public Clouds: FlashBlade systems are ideal for on-premises indexes and “thumbnails”

of larger data items stored in public clouds. High performance makes browsing and locating objects by searching on-

premises indexes fast and reliable.

FlashBlade Hardware

A FlashBlade system consists of between one and ten identical self-contained rack-mounted chassis. Multi-chassis systems

also include two external fabric modules (XFMs) that interconnect the chassis via highspeed Ethernet links, as seen in Figure 1.

Chassis

Each chassis contains power conversion and cooling devices, mounting bays for 15 blades, and two onboard fabric modules

that interconnect the blades and connect them to other chassis and clients, both via high-speed Ethernet links.

A single FlashBlade chassis containing seven or more blades is a complete system; its onboard fabric modules use Ethernet

links to interconnect the blades and connect them to clients. In multi-chassis systems, the XFMs connect the chassis to each

other and to clients.

Figure 1. Multi-chassis FlashBlade System.

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Blades

Each blade contains processors, Ethernet interfaces, NVRAM for staging incoming data, and either 16 or 48 tebibytes of

physical flash memory for persistent data storage. A chassis may hold up to fifteen blades—720 tebibytes if configured with

48 tebibyte blades. A fully populated ten-chassis system contains 150 blades with a maximum of 7,200 tebibytes (7.03

pebibytes) of physical flash. Part of the flash holds RAID checksums that protect data against loss due to read failures.

Systems offset this overhead by compressing data before storing it. The compressibility of data varies widely (e.g., documents

and other character-based data typically compress to a half or less of their full size, whereas digital media and other types of

binary data compress very little). In most cases, however, systems can accommodate more data than their physical flash

capacity would suggest.

Figure 2. A FlashBlade Chassis.

Redundant Components for High Availability

FlashBlade systems are highly available. They have no “single points of failure”—individual components whose loss would

destroy data or loss of access. Power, cooling, and internal and external network links are all redundant. Systems distribute

staged and stored data among multiple blades; they can sustain two concurrent blade failures without loss of staged or stored

data. They protect data on flash with multiple RAID checksums and data staged in NVRAM with triple mirroring.

Hardware Components

A FlashBlade chassis, illustrated in Figure 2, is a self-contained rack-mounted system capable of storing up to a petabyte of

fully-protected user data for fast client access. With current-generation blades, a 7-inch high (4U) chassis can accommodate

between 112 and 720 tebibytes of physical flash. Assuming a modest 2:1 compression ratio (typical of many unstructured data

sets), a fully populated single-chassis system may hold as much as a petabyte of RAID-protected user data along with its

metadata.

Under the Cover

FlashBlade compute/storage blades in the front of the chassis plug into a midplane that distributes power and Ethernet. Two

fabric modules connected to the rear of the midplane interconnect the blades. Each fabric module has four 40Gb/s Ethernet

ports for connecting the chassis to the client network, or in multi-chassis systems, to External Fabric Modules (XFMs) that

provide client access. Inter-blade communications, client access, and system administration all share this single network.

The FlashBlade chassis contains 12 cooling fans and four power supply units (PSUs). The maximum power draw for a fully

populated chassis is less than 2.5 kilowatts. PSUs and fans are redundant—two PSUs and ten fans can power and cool a fully-

populated chassis indefinitely, so a chassis can survive concurrent failure of any two of these components.

Perhaps the most significant feature of the chassis design is future-proofing. As technology evolves and delivers more capable

and/or cost-effective hardware and software, the blades, fabric modules, and software can be upgraded non-disruptively

without interrupting service to clients. FlashBlade users can anticipate long system lifetimes with little or no downtime for

maintenance or hardware and software upgrades. Most importantly, upgrading never requires bulk data migration.

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Blades

Blade assemblies include a compute module and either one or three storage units. The entire blade assembly is a single field-

replaceable unit.

Blades can be added to a chassis at any time. If a blade is removed, Purity//FB software reconstructs the data it contains and

distributes it among the remaining blades. Systems automatically rebalance load when blades are added or removed. If the

blades required to retrieve or reconstruct all stored data are operational, a system functions with no loss of data or access to

it.

Purity//FB Software

Purity//FB software makes FlashBlade hardware into a scale-out file and objects storage system. Like all scale-out systems,

Purity//FB “divides and conquers”—it distributes client requests among a system’s blades for processing. Blades subdivide

each request into tasks that can execute concurrently, usually on different blades. Big data sets are particularly amenable to

the scale-out approach. In typical big data applications, many loosely coordinated clients access different files or objects

concurrently.

Common Approaches to Scale-Out Storage

To be effective, a scale-out storage system must utilize most of its resources most of the time, regardless of workload. At the

same time, it must obey the semantics of the file and object data models it presents to clients. Some systems partition

namespaces among processing resources (cluster nodes); others use distributed locking to coordinate access to data; still

others separate metadata and data into separate nodes. These approaches all have inherent limitations—in resource

utilization, in complexity that limits performance, and in “brittleness” that disrupts service when configurations change, or data

sets grow.

Purity//FB uses FlashBlade hardware efficiently regardless of client access pattern. It achieves concurrency by minimizing the

need to lock access to data items and utilizes the most direct paths possible between clients and the data they read and write.

System performance typically scales nearly linearly as blades are added to a system, in part because hardware resources are

added, but also due to the algorithms Purity//FB uses to distribute processing and I/O load among system resources.

FlashBlade Administration

FlashBlade administration consists of three types of activities:

• System Setup and Configuration: Specifying the data center environment (IP addresses, DNS, NTP, LDAP/AD

configuration, etc.) and creating client connections. These are typically installation tasks, performed infrequently

thereafter, usually in response to changes in the data center environment.

• Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Monitoring system performance, capacity, and “health,” and managing remote access

sessions. Monitoring is a routine administration task; remote access sessions are established in response to events or

conditions that require hands-on assistance from Pure Storage Technical Support. For integration with centralized

messaging frameworks, FlashBlade supports both SNMP (versions v2c and v3) and Syslog message forwarding.

• Managing Storage and Data: Creating, exporting (sharing), resizing, and deleting file systems; managing object store

service accounts and user access; configuring and managing snapshots and replication. These activities are typically

performed when applications, clients, users, or data sets are added or removed.

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Notably absent from this list are any tasks related to managing physical storage or network links. FlashBlade systems allocate

space, place data, schedule internal I/O, balance performance, ensure data integrity, and manage flash media longevity

autonomously, without administrative involvement.

Routine Administrative Tasks

The autonomic nature of Purity//FB greatly simplifies FlashBlade administration. FlashBlade systems place data, apply RAID

protection, and balance load, all without assistance. Administrators use either a browser-based GUI, a CLI, or scripts and

programs that invoke REST APIs to perform their tasks, which include:

• File System Management: Create file systems by specifying the name and maximum allowable size. Define export rules

for NFS, SMB, and HTTP clients and netgroups. Resize and destroy file systems as needed.

• User Permission Setup: Specify client and group/user access permissions and usage quotas. Configure AD and LDAP

servers and prepare AD accounts for situations in which dual NFS-SMB access is required.

• File System Snapshot and Replication Management: Specify creation and retention schedules for snapshots and

replication. Take ad-hoc snapshots when required. Restore file systems from snapshots. Manage failover/failback to/from

replication targets and redirect clients when a system fails or recovers.

• Object Store Management: Create and delete object-store accounts, users, and buckets. Recover or eradicate destroyed

buckets as needed. Manage replication of object buckets.

• Miscellaneous Tasks: Monitor system performance, capacity, and health, and respond to alerts. Perform specialized tasks

such as fast removal of large numbers of files and controlling Remoteassist sessions.

All these tasks support the user’s mission; none are about managing system internals. The GUI, CLI, and REST interfaces are

essentially equivalent—with a few minor exceptions, any administrative operation can be performed through any of them. In

general, the GUI is most suitable for individual interactions, the CLI for scripting, and REST for administering systems using

data center automation tools.

Administration Using the GUI

When an administrator logs in to the FlashBlade GUI, the initial display is a dashboard, an example of which is shown in Figure

3.

Figure 3. FlashBlade GUI.

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The dashboard’s five information panes present an overview of system performance and health:

• Capacity: Indicates storage used by files, objects, and snapshots. Shows the system’s overall data reduction ratio and an

estimate of additional similar data the system could accommodate.

• Recent Alerts: Lists the most recent alerts sent to designated watchers and Pure1 along with their severities.

• Replication Bandwidth: Displays recent history of bandwidth used by replicating file systems and objects to a target

system.

• Hardware “Health”: Represents FRUs graphically, color-coded to indicate the operating state (up, at risk, down) of each.

• Rolling Performance History: Summarizes recent system performance. Mouseover pops up detailed information for points

in time.

The dashboard is an easy-to-absorb overview of important system metrics. Administrators can view the information in greater

detail by selecting one of the detail views listed on the left pane. For example, the Health view displays either a graphical

representation of system components or a lifetime list of alerts. Similarly, selecting Storage displays the default Array view

(Figure 4 on page 11) showing the numbers of system objects (file systems, snapshots, object store accounts, and file and

object replication connections to other systems). Selecting the view’s File Systems tab (Figure 5 on page 11) displays a list of

file systems and their administrative properties—maximum size, space consumption, data reduction ratio, and protocols

enabled for access.

Administrators use the GUI to perform management tasks. For example, clicking the Create File System button on the Storage

pane (Figure 5, upper right corner) displays the Create File System wizard shown in the explosion. The administrator uses the

wizard to name the new file system, specify its provisioned size (maximum amount of unreduced data the system may store in

it), and enable the protocol(s) to be used to access it. Selecting a protocol tab (NFS in the Figure 5 explosion) opens an

embedded panel used to specify protocol-specific options.

The Storage pane’s Object Store view displays a similar dialog for creating service accounts and authorized users, and for

generating user access keys and secret keys. All GUI panes contain action buttons for performing administrative tasks. The

FlashBlade User Guide describes wizards and their uses in detail.

Other detail views display information at similar levels of detail. The Analysis pane, for example, has views that display storage

consumption and system performance (IOPS, data transfer, and average latency) history for selectable periods ranging from

five minutes to a year. The Health pane’s two views display a more detailed representation of hardware status and a lifetime

history of alerts, respectively. The Settings pane displays system configuration parameters, such as NTP server IP address,

Phone Home and Remote Assist status, the system’s SSL certificate parameters, and email addresses of alert watchers.

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Figure 4: GUI Storage Pane Default View.

Figure 5. Using the GUI to create a file system.

Administration Using the CLI FlashBlade CLI commands name the objects they manage prefixed by pure. Each has one or more subcommands that specify

actions and acts on one or more objects. Most commands include options— parameters that affect the command’s action. For example, the command: purefs create --size 100G newfs creates a file system. The command (purefs) indicates an

operation on file systems. The subcommand (create) indicates the operation. The object (newfs) is the administrator-

specified name of the file system to be created, and the option (--size 100G) indicates that the system should allow no

more than 100 gigabytes of data (before compression) to be stored in it.

Simplicity is the hallmark of CLI administration. Commands are self-documenting; each offers two levels of help, one that

illustrates the command format and lists its subcommands and a second that illustrates and explains the syntax of each subcommand. Also, a pureman command provides Unix-style man pages for CLI commands.

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FlashBlade CLI commands can be categorized as:

• Administrative (e.g., purearray, pureaudit, puredns, purenetwork, etc.): These manage the system. They include

system and network configuration, administrator account control, troubleshooting, and coordination of Remote Assist

sessions.

• Informational (e.g., pureblade, pureconfig, purehw, etc.): These display information about system hardware state and

configuration.

• Data management (e.g., purebucket, purefs, pureobjaccount, pureobjuser, purequota, etc.): Manage file systems and

object store accounts. They create, resize, destroy, and eradicate file systems, manage object store service accounts,

buckets, and users, and configure replication.

The categories are not mutually exclusive; most commands have both administrative and informational subcommands. For example, the puresmtp command has both informational (list) and administrative (setattr) subcommands. The former

lists a system’s email relay host and sender domain; the latter is used to specify or change them. Similarly, pureobjaccount

has both administrative (create, delete) and informational (list) subcommands.

Note: Because new Purity//FB capabilities may add to the CLI command set, readers are referred to the most recent

Purity//FB User Guide for comprehensive treatment of the current CLI.

Management Automation Frameworks

The FlashBlade Management REST API provides simple interfaces for many Purity//FB management commands. Service

providers can easily integrate FlashBlade into their management automation frameworks. Pure provides full REST API

documentation. The API supports both files and objects stored on FlashBlade.

Python is officially supported with a REST SDK. Users can submit bug reports and feature requests for the purity_fb FlashBlade

Python SDK by opening a case with Pure Support or by contacting their Pure account team.

A FlashBlade PowerShell Toolkit is available. The Toolkit is an open-source PowerShell module with limited support by that

project's maintainers. Users can submit bug reports and feature requests to the project's maintainers.

Ansible users have access to the FlashBlade Ansible Collection, an open-source project with limited support from the Pure

Storage Ansible Team. Sample Ansible playbooks are provided.

Testing the Scale-Out Architecture

The most important measure of any scale-out system is linearity—the rate at which the capacity to do work increases when

resources are added. Linear growth of performance along with capacity was a key FlashBlade design goal from the outset.

Figure 6 shows the results of an early saturation throughput test with a single-chassis system. The figure illustrates two key

points:

• Linear Performance Increases: As the number of blades increases from the minimum of seven to the fully populated 15

blades, each added blade increases read performance by just under 1 GB/s and write performance by about 300 MB/s.

After nearly 4 years of product evolution, performance is somewhat higher per blade, but still linear.

• Read and Write Performance: The graph shows that read throughput is over three times greater than write throughput.

The difference is inherent and is due in large part to the difference in processing intensity for reads (locate data,

decompress, verify, deliver) and writes (ingest data, compress, stage, buffer).

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Figure 6. FlashBlade Performance Linearity.

For metadata operations that do not transfer data (e.g., getattr), internal testing by Pure Storage engineering shows slightly

over 1 million NFS IOPS per chassis. Both data transfer and metadata operations scale linearly with the addition of blades and

chassis.

As with all synthetic data, these values should be viewed with caution. In practice, performance can vary widely based on the

number of concurrent client connections, data access protocol (e.g., stateful SMB has generally higher overhead than

stateless NFS), and the data access pattern (e.g., workloads that create and write new files or objects usually outperform

those that predominantly overwrite existing ones). Pure storage advises potential FlashBlade users for whom performance is a

concern to run benchmarks that consist of actual applications using production data wherever possible.

FlashBlade: Service Provider User Stories

High-performing file servers exist, as do high-performing object stores. FlashBlade is unique, however, in delivering both

services simultaneously at levels of performance second to none. Moreover, FlashBlade is not just about performance. Its

reliability, volumetric efficiency, and administrative simplicity have made it easier than ever for service providers to store file

and object data and derive value from it, using FlashBlade as consolidated storage for all their data-critical applications. And

integration with public cloud storage services and major backup products simplifies archiving and recovering from IT disasters.

Since the system’s introduction, FlashBlade users have deployed hundreds of systems in a variety of production applications.

Service Provider users have realized significant benefits using FlashBlade. Several of these user stories are outlined below.

• A major global service provider deploys FlashBlade to deliver a high-performance, cloud-native Amazon S3 software

development environment, running Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, and other applications and frameworks. The FlashBlade

solution proved vastly more performant while being less expensive and more secure than a public cloud solution,

accelerating their adoption of agile development methods, a shift to microservices, and modernization of business-critical

apps. The operational simplicity will allow the service provider to achieve a goal of a 200:1 developer to operator ratio.

• A global connectivity and media provider deploys FlashBlade to support Vertica in EON mode. FlashBlade has increased

both the performance and concurrency required to improve data quality. The ability to disaggregate compute from storage

enables easy and targeted scaling of resources as needed.

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• A large wireless carrier leverages FlashBlade to support a Datalogue environment for more agile analytics. FlashBlade

provided the needed high-speed and parallelism to drive GPU acceleration leading to real-time insights. As a result, the

carrier developed a new operational methodology that allowed them to save $100,000 a day in third-party costs.

FlashBlade also provided the carrier with a unified fast file and object platform to collapse five different use cases onto a

single platform. They are also avoiding the complex storage renewal processes of their previous storage provider, as well

as the unpredictable costs.

• A global voice and data provider deploys FlashBlade as part of their critical data protection strategy. FlashBlade provides

a high-performance, high-bandwidth backup target protecting their mission-critical SAP environments. The exceptional

read performance of FlashBlade ensures that files and applications can be recovered rapidly. In addition, FlashBlade

secure SafeMode snapshots offer mitigation against ransomware attacks by providing immutable backup images.

• A regional wireless and broadband internet carrier maintains its edge against much larger competitors by rapidly moving to

container-based software development, next-generation data analytics, artificial intelligence, and more. FlashBlade’s high-

performance file and object storage is a crucial part of this strategy, allowing the carrier to look further ahead and develop

new features significantly faster. With a limited IT organization, the carrier is delighted with FlashBlade’s ease of use and

the ability to avoid burdensome hardware refreshes and data migrations. Only FlashBlade offers a single platform to

support multiple use cases from data backup to analytics and AI.

With the ability to “start small” and expand capacity, performance, and connectivity simultaneously by adding blades and

chassis as applications and their data sets are added, FlashBlade offers investment protection as the long-term big data

solution for both today and tomorrow’s service provider applications and IT environments.

Next Steps

To further explore the FlashBlade user interface and to experience its simplicity, you can take a free Test Drive. To deploy a

proof-of-concept FlashBlade unit in your data center, please contact your Pure Storage account team.