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Mm Hi everyone. My name is Justin Emerson. I'm principal technology evangelist here at pure storage and I'm here to talk to you today about what's new with Flash Blade. Earlier today we announced our new Flash blade? S product which is our brand new platform for Flash Blade. But it's important understand the context in which we're bringing this to market.
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The first thing is that understanding the challenges that we at pure storage saw when we developed flash plate, right, what we saw was that workloads that we're generally using, machine generated generated data were growing And that this tremendous data growth was causing problems for customers in two key ways one, the cost and performance challenges of the public cloud and the failure of legacy
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platforms to innovate and really meet the needs of these new modern data applications. And in the intervening time, this problem has only gotten worse, Analysts are showing that the total amount of unstructured data is going to quadruple by 2026 and that many organizations are struggling with both the upkeep and the consumption of modern storage platforms.
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So when we developed flash Blade, we thought, what are the key tenants of a storage platform that can meet these challenges? Well, first we thought we should build something that as an architecture has unlimited scalability. It also needs to have true enterprise readiness, the kinds of uptime and reliability that people expect from a tier one storage platform.
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It needs to provide rich data services that allow people to do more with the data that they have and it needs to be simple to deploy and use like all of your storage is portfolio. And so over the last five years, we've delivered on a tremendous suite of innovative technologies within Flash blade, both from a hardware and a software standpoint. So we introduced the industry's first unified fast file and object platform by including both
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file and object protocols in a single system. We delivered one of the industry first storage based ransomware solutions called safe mode. And we pioneered the all flash backup space with rapid recovery. And in the time since we introduced flash blade, we've increased the scale of the platform by 60 fold and all of this focus on both hardware and software innovation together is no
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accident. Um, we're not alone in our belief that hardware and software together really does build better products, whether it's the phone in your pocket, the car you drive to work or the cloud services that they use hardware and software innovation together really drives not only efficiency but also scalability. And that efficiency is really key because here at pure storage we've been focused on
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efficiency since the very beginning with our original flash array product we thought wouldn't it be more efficient to use consumer S. S. D. S and then leverage software to do the intelligence rather than forcing that on what the time were called enterprise S. S. D. S. And when we saw the success of this approach, we said,
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why don't we take this a step further and actually design our own flash hardware and the first platform that leverage this technology actually was Flash blade, where we developed our own storage unit that was embedded inside of each blade. We then took that technology and we turned it into what we now call direct flash. And direct flash is now in every single flash array product from the flash array X to the
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Excel to the flash array C. Which we introduced with Q. L. C. Flash, which is the first time that an enterprise level product was shipped with Q. L. C. And so today we're introducing the newest addition to this lineage which is Flash Blade S. Flash Blade S provides businesses with speed, simplicity, scalability and sustainability for
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their unstructured data workloads. Um it's our all new next generation all flash hardware with our proven purity Flash blade software and now with the full payload of evergreen, both evergreen forever and our consumption based models Evergreen one and evergreen flex, Flash blade S represents a huge leap forward in terms of capability for Flash blade,
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it provides more than double the density, double the performance and double the power efficiency of our previous generation platform and we believe that this puts us out in the leadership position amongst any other scale out storage solution on the market today. What's also really exciting about this is that Flash blade? S can provide a single platform for all unstructured data workloads from both the
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highest performance and highest capacity requirements. Traditionally, customers might have looked at disk space or disk flash hybrid arrays in order to satisfy very capacity oriented workloads. And then might have looked at all flash systems in order to satisfy performance. But with flash Blade S we can target this entire configuration space.
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We can be both high performance and high capacity and we're doing that in three key ways. One, we're providing this high performance with all Q. L. C. That all que el semen. Flash media allows us to break down density and capacity barriers, giving us a tremendous amount of actual storage also at high performance.
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And these two things together provides customers flexibility without compromise so that they can deliver systems that can sit anywhere in this configuration space in terms of performance to capacity ratios. And this is only possible because we design hardware and software together to enable this kind of scale and efficiency. So, Flash Blade S is a new hardware platform. It's a new five U chassis.
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It includes a new generation of networking technology at 100 gigabit ethernet today. Uh and a new blade form factor where each blade can hold up to four direct flash modules. And this new chassis holds up to 10 blades. The blades themselves have updated connectivity to the mid plane. They now use mainstream soccer mobile Cpus that will allow us to more rapidly innovate on new
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hardware generations and it provides us flexibility in the models that we deliver, which I'll talk about in a moment. And then the biggest change is that we've disaggregated compute and storage. So within each blade there are four direct flash module slots and each blade can have from 1 to 4 direct flash modules and today we're shipping those in 24 or 48 terabyte drive
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sizes. This means that it's possible to configure systems with different amounts of blades and different amounts of drives which is what gives us the tremendous flexibility to deliver. To deliver solutions at different performance and capacity ratios. You can scale flash blade as both by adding blades or by adding direct flash modules to existing blades or both.
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And this next gen platform gives us a tremendous increase in scalability. We can now fit almost two petabytes of raw capacity in a single five U. chassis. It improves reliability because it now de couples resiliency from availability, meaning that now that the drives are are modular and disaggregated from the blades, it now gives us the ability to service those components into um
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independently. And lastly, the simplicity that this provides for customers hasn't changed. We still focus on building a simple, easy to use, easy to deploy platform in a chassis form factor with blades and that doesn't change. But what does change is the options that customers have for scaling performance and capacity independently.
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So I mentioned that with our new platform we have more ability to deliver different solutions and today we're delivering to different types of blades. Were delivering the S- 200 which is designed for ultimate efficiency and we're delivering the S- 500 which is really a step function increase in performance for flash blade. Both of these can hit the same capacity points, But the S- 200 focuses on a deeper level of
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compression while the S- 500 forgoes that for higher performance with additional CPU cores and memory. All of this is powered by purity FB four dot oh the latest release of our purity FB software which is the software to find heart of flash played S. It provides customers with additional visibility into what's going on with the system while maintaining the same kind of simplicity
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that they've been used to with flash plate. Um, it also provides us the ability to innovate faster. Going forward to accelerate the delivery of features and functionality to customers which of course are always delivered as part of our evergreen subscription to innovation which is now available in its full fledged form on flash blade for the first
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time. So not only do our customers get always improving data services and world class customer experience. The highest rated for any enterprise storage platform with regards to net promoter score but also includes always modern infrastructure. So now with Evergreen forever for Flash Blade? S customers can expect included non disruptive hardware upgrades at regular intervals similar
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to what we have delivered for many years on the flash array product line. And Evergreen forever really does make Flash Blade S a storage platform that gets better over time for your unstructured data needs. It allows you to deploy once an upgrade in place without scheduling downtime or data migrations for upgrades within flash blade? S. It provides full performance even during these
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operations. And with Evergreen forever you get modernized blades and media as the system evolves over time, we expect this new Flash Blade? S platform to have a multi generally generational lifespan of more than a decade and that provides customers a tremendous amount of investment protection in uh and in confidence that Flash blade estimate can meet their needs
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today and into the future we continue to target these use cases for flash played uh, modern applications like the kind that I mentioned at the beginning that really are extending the bounds of what is possible with regards to data. So these include ai machine learning, modern analytics and internet of things, rapid restore and ransomware recovery, manufacturing, high performance computing and
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electronic design, automation, and medical and enterprise imaging and genomics. With all that said, Flash Blade? S is simple, it's flexible, it's high performance and it gets better over time and that's why it's the last scale out storage platform you'll ever need. Thank you very much
