Pure storage has announced flashblade // exa, which aims at Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) Workloads That demand extramely high throughput to graphics processing units (GPUS). That will serve customers between large enterprise users of ai and the hyperscales.
At the same time, Flashblade // Exa has also introduced a new architecture to a pure product line, one in in which metadata and bulk storage are disagged with different hardware and miserrent Hardwaare and Protocols.
All of which is in line with Pure's orientation towards Architectures used by the hyperscalesAnd comes hot on the heels of last week's revival that meta is the mystery hyperscaler that decaided to buy pure's directed modules (DFMS) for its Own Systems (see beLow,
According to Patrick Smith, Field Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage, Exa addresses Challenges in Storage for Ai That include gpu utilization, inconsistent performance generally, all specially with metadata, scalability and management complexity.
Exa Aims at a Performance Level Somewhat Higher Than Current Flashblade Products, Targeting AI Factories and GPU-AA-A-Service Providers Such as Coreweave, TENSTORNT, TENSTORNT, TENSTORNT, TENSTORNT, DATACRINT Foundry, as well as research labs, HPC users and Sovereign Cloud Projects. All of which, pure said, have performaance needs in the 1TBPS (Terabytes Per Second) to 50tbps throughput range, with 100PB (Petabytes) to multiple exabytes of capacity and support for thinking Tens of Thousands of Gpus.
Flashblade is pure's fast file and object family, although exa appears to be file access-only for now.
“It's next level in comparison to the flashblade s500,” said smith, citing flashblade Throughput per rack, and an increase of 20 times in the number of files handled under single namespace.
The novel architecture – for pure – that lays the ground for the new product, is disaggregation between the metadata and bulk storage data nodes. Metadata is stored on Flashblade Nodes – IE with Controller Hardware – and Connects to Customers' Compute Cluster via NFS V4.1 PALALLEL File Access and TCP. Meanwhile, Data Nodes Connect via Network File System (NFS) v3 (not parallelised) and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA),
For the first time, pure will offer this with pure-resounded Network Interface Cards (NICS) in customer-specified Commodity Non-Voolaty Memory Express (NVME) Storage servers, but later this year, pure dfms will be available for use with flashblade // EXA.
As mentioned, this is the first time pure has released a product with [artificial intelligence] Landscape, Increased Demand and Especially Increased Scale ”.
“And So, Coming out with a Platform that Allows Customers to Meet Thos Scale Demands in Terms of Performance and Capacity is somenting we Felt We Shouldn'T Wait on,” He added.
This disaggregation of metadata storage and bulk storage, as well as the independent supply of its flash modules, is in keeping with recent developments that Saaw it unveil meta as a aesha DFMS.
Around the turn of the year, pure announced Kioxia and Micron as Quad-Lave Cell (QLC) Flash Chip Providers for DFM MODULES For Supply to “A Hyperscaler” Customer. That customer has been revealed as meta, which has gone public with a blog post Detailing a shift from hard disk drives to QLC Flash.
That is for Workloads that Suit QLC's performance profile of highly sequential data and infrequent/low-intense writes due to its low write enduance, and must be qulc is “NOT SAT Price Competitive Enough for a broader deployment ”.
General availability of flashblade // exa will be in summer 2025. Nvidia certification And pure storage fusion integration.