When a company flashes big new fancy hardware, it’s easy to get lost in the speeds and feed. If you do that, you can lose sight of some of the larger implications. Chris Evans touches on this when looking back at the announcements from Pure Accelerate. At the show, Pure debuted FlashArray//X, with the marquee feature of being an end-to-end NVMe storage array. That’s interesting in it’s own right, but more significant is that this is an iterative step for the company, one that clearly plays into a longer term strategic vision. We can see this by looking back to 2015 for the FlashArray//M. This uses the same architecture, and allows for in-place upgrades without disruption or rewiring. Essentially the task of upgrading the //M is swapping a controller and SAS modules. This shows that Pure isn’t just chasing the latest hotness with NVME, and that the FlashArray//X is just the latest step in a long roadmap. It’s impressive execution.
Chris Evans comments:
Why is this important? As a storage administrator, the biggest issues to manage in the data centre are risk and availability. Reducing the impact of risk and increasing availability by providing in-place upgrades is a key operational consideration. The classic Forklift Upgrade is a massive pain, with implications to both cost and risk.
Read more at: Pure Storage – Seeding the NVMe Market
