Scale. What does that mean for most organizations? To many, it means the ability to support the biggest, most beastly applications. To others, it means being able to support almost unlimited data and users. And in both cases, the definition is correct. Scale means being able to support all the needs of modern business—both scale-up and scale-out.
These needs have historically been met with massive, multi-engine systems that require expensive care and management. Meanwhile, cloud-based scale-out has been growing aggressively due to the ease of self-service. How can you provide the scale-out, self-managed experience of the cloud and scale-up needs for significant workload consolidation and performant applications—all while not costing your company a fortune?
Today, Pure announces the next-generation platform in providing this seamless marriage of scale-up and scale-out, building on the experience of the cloud and delivered wherever you need it—even behind the firewall.
As the newest member of our FlashArray™ family, FlashArray//XL delivers next-level performance at scale in a high-capacity, dense 5U storage platform that’s built for resiliency. 
With FlashArray//XL, you gain the performance to support your “big beast” applications and the scale-up to consolidate workloads on fewer arrays while still having room to grow. Like all FlashArray systems, it includes complete enterprise data services built in at no additional charge—including always-on data protection that’s savvy to ransomware threats and a cloud-like model for deploying new apps quickly and easily.
FlashArray//XL not only pushes the performance spectrum but also optimizes the density per rack unit, delivering up to 20% higher efficiencies than FlashArray//X. Industry-leading dedupe and compression algorithms, combined with the enhanced density on FlashArray//XL, enable massive space, power, and cooling savings like never before.
One of the key technologies that enable performance and rack space densification is our patented technology: DFMD. That’s DirectFlash® Module with distributed non-volatile RAM. In an industry first, we’ve moved all the physical NVRAMs to the drives themselves, enabling higher levels of performance and scale. Plus, all that saved space allows more drives in the enclosure, supporting up to 40 DirectFlash drives (96 when expanded using DirectShelf expansion shelves).
FlashArray//XL extends our best-selling FlashArray storage family to tackle more demanding workloads with higher performance, greater capacity, and even stronger resiliency. Where FlashArray//C is optimized for capacity and FlashArray//X is optimized for performance, FlashArray//XL is optimized for performance at scale. That means latency as low as 150 µs, throughput as high as 36GB/sec, and up to 70% performance boost over our //X90.
We’re offering two models: FlashArray//XL130, providing performance and capacity that’s a significant step up from our //X90, and the larger FlashArray//XL170 for your most performant applications and the ultimate in workload consolidation. Think massive SAP databases and tens of thousands of VM workloads.
Recent results from one of our early adopter customers showed outstanding performance results. Using a mix of read to write ratios, they measured an average of 70% IOPS increase with the FlashArray//XL170 (above //X90). With a 50:50 write mix, they were also seeing peak increases in IOPS of nearly 80%.
Just a few weeks ago, we also announced a major innovation, Pure Fusion™. Pure Fusion brings the cloud operating model anywhere by giving end users and developers on-demand access to the storage resources they need. It also automates complex and manual tasks like workload placement, mobility, and rebalancing. Today, we’ve taken one more important step in our journey by officially opening our Early Access Program to Pure Fusion.
Through FlashArray//XL and Pure Fusion, Pure can now offer unmatched scale-up and scale-out together. Our new FlashArray flagship, FlashArray//XL, provides the speed and scale that highly performant applications require, married with the cloud agility and limitless Pure Fusion scale. In short, it means giving you a competitive advantage to innovate faster and remove the bottlenecks and high cost of traditional storage.
And most disruptively, it means thinking of storage as a self-serve, on-demand resource, structured as storage as code. Imagine what you could do if you could simply scale to the infinite needs of your organization and its customers with the click of a button and deploy new innovations without manual work. Hardware managed like software.
Learn more about FlashArray//XL.
Sign up for early Pure Fusion access.
5 Effective capacity assumes HA, RAID, and metadata overhead, GB-to-GiB conversion, and includes the benefit of data reduction with always-on inline deduplication, compression, and pattern removal. Average data reduction is calculated at 5-to-1 and does not include thin provisioning. Pure excludes thin provisioning from the data reduction calculation as it unrealistically doubles the claimed data reduction.
6 Calculated using raw label capacity.
7 Some maximum capacity configurations may use Pure Storage DirectFlash Shelf or Pure Expansion Shelf. Weight and dimensions reflect fully loaded chassis. Expansion shelf height is 3RU.
8 64 Gb FC support will be enabled via 64 Gb SFP+ upgrade on the same HBA shortly after release.
