FlashStack with FlashBlade and AIRI Enable Customers to Establish a Range of Data Analytics at Any Stage of the Data Journey

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – July 18, 2018 — Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the all-flash storage platform that helps innovators build a better world with data, today announced FlashStack™ with FlashBlade™ to accelerate data warehouses. The company also announced that AIRI™ and AIRI™ Mini, the AI-ready infrastructure solutions from Pure Storage and NVIDIA, are now available with Cisco Nexus ethernet switches. Cisco and Pure Storage customers can now establish a spectrum of data analytics to turn data into innovation, no matter what phase in their data journey.  

In time, more data will live in “hot” or “warm” tiers, where value can easily be extracted. With this shift, organisations must leverage the latest tools of extraction, and the storage models that allow these tools to work most effectively and efficiently.

“Data is the lifeblood of today’s economy and the fuel for innovation. New cures, new industries, new possibilities will arise – all because of data. This new era demands a new data mindset and strategy,” said Michael Sotnick, VP Partners, Services & Business Development, Pure Storage. “For organisations to stand the test of time, they must understand how to innovate and differentiate through data.”

AI-Ready-Infrastructure  

Data is the fuel driving today’s AI revolution. While many pioneers have pushed the limits of what’s possible with AI within their own industries, the vast majority of enterprises have had to struggle to get started. Today, not all data’s value is easily accessible. Without fast, easy access, data becomes an organisation’s most expensive asset rather than its most valuable. AI needs to reach more enterprises faster, and provide value immediately. Pure Storage is working with Cisco to make this reality for customers with AIRI, the industry’s first solution to simplify AI-at-scale, powered by the NVIDIA DGX-1.

“The days where value is measured in dollar per GB have passed. Value is now measured in simulations per day. The industry focuses on outcome orientation because simplicity, performance and resiliency afford us the time to do so,” said Ed Horley, VP of Engineering at IT solutions provider Groupware Technology. “With AIRI, customers can begin their AI initiatives within hours and its simple scalable design allows it to grow with your AI needs. By eliminating these infrastructure complexities, customers can focus on what’s important - creating innovative products and services.”

AIRI is the industry’s first complete AI-ready infrastructure, architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA to extend the power of NVIDIA DGX™ systems. Powered by FlashBlade storage and NVIDIA DGX-1 servers, AIRI offers enterprises a simple, fast, and future-proof infrastructure. It is configured with four NVIDIA DGX-1 Systems, four petaFLOPS of deep learning performance, Pure FlashBlade 15x 17TB Blades, 1.5M NFS IOPS, and two 100Gb switches with RDMA.

AIRI Mini is powered by one Pure Storage FlashBlade, configured with 7x17TB blades, two NVIDIA DGX-1 servers, Cisco 100 GbE switches, supporting GPUDirect RDMA for maximum distributed training performance, and delivers two petaFLOPS of deep learning performance. All software comes included, so that data scientists can get started on their projects by simply turning the system on.

FlashStack Powered by FlashBlade

While some organisations are using Data Lakes or AI data pipelines, many organisations still deploy most of their mission critical work on a data warehouse. FlashStack powered by FlashBlade, purpose-built for Oracle Data Warehouse, is an integrated infrastructure solution validated by Cisco.

“While AIRI is the perfect fit for organisations that need to deploy AI, there are many organisations just dipping their toes into single server solutions,” said Matt Burr, GM of FlashBlade, Pure Storage. “For organisations that need an interim step between single-server and AIRI, FlashStack is the solution.”

There are three primary problems with existing data warehouse solutions:

• Performance – Data warehouse appliances historically have not kept up with data growth.
• Pricing – When compute and storage are coupled, as is with warehouse appliances, organisations end up buying too much of one or the other.
• Flexibility – An inflexible appliance is only effective for a single workload. Data warehouses aren’t protected for the future when data pipeline and AI are involved.

The new FlashStack, built on FlashBlade and engineered specifically to modernise the Oracle Data Warehouse, delivers more than 2x faster performance than the next-best system. Customers only pay for the amount of compute and blades needed for their project or initiative.

FlashStack for FlashBlade is ready for extension into modern analytics and AI when ready.

AIRI and AIRI Mini are available now through select reseller partners. FlashStack for FlashBlade is available now through all FlashStack certified reseller partners. Please visit our website for more information.

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About Pure Storage
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) helps innovators build a better world with data. Pure's data solutions enable SaaS companies, cloud service providers, and enterprise and public sector customers to deliver real-time, secure data to power their mission-critical production, DevOps, and modern analytics environments in a multi-cloud environment.  One of the fastest growing enterprise IT companies in history, Pure Storage enables customers to quickly adopt next-generation technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help maximise the value of their data for competitive advantage. And with a Satmetrix-certified NPS customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.

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Pure Storage, the "P" Logo, AIRI, Evergreen, FlashBlade, FlashStack, and Pure1 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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Press Contact
Joseph Beare, Pure Storage
jbeare@purestorage.com, +1 650.279.1717