Data lakes are a key component of many organizations’ data and analytics platforms, and for good reason. They offer simplicity, scalability, and flexibility for both unstructured and structured data. All data lakes are underpinned by object storage, and S3 is one of the most popular object storage standards in the world.
Pure Storage® FlashBlade® is an all-flash scale-out file and object storage platform that supports S3. Many Pure customers are already seeing the rapid restore benefits that FlashBlade has to offer. The good news is that with SQL Server 2022, organizations can double the value they see from FlashBlade by not only using it as a rapid restore target but also leveraging it as storage for a data lake with SQL Server 2022. The key SQL Server feature that enables this is S3 object virtualization. Simply put, SQL Server 2022 enables data in either delimited text or parquet format to be queried directly using either external tables or the OPENROWSET function within a T-SQL statement.
FlashBlade S3 and Azure: The Best of Both Worlds
S3 data virtualization in SQL Server 2022 opens the world of all-flash-powered data lakes to data services in the Azure cloud via on-premises Azure data gateways. Any Azure service that can use data sources via the Azure data gateway in the form of a SQL Server table can use data in an S3 bucket on FlashBlade
FlashBlade//S
FlashBlade//S™ is the next-generation incarnation of the software and extends on the leadership position of FlashBlade in several key areas. Compute is now decoupled from flash storage. This not only brings a Pure Evergreen™purchasing model to FlashBlade but also gives organizations the choice between blades optimized for performance and capacity and the ability to upgrade flash modules independently of a blade’s compute resources and vice versa. In addition, FlashBlade//S offers increased scalability and performance over the previous generation model.
Summary
FlashBlade//S extends Pure’s scale-out object and file storage leadership position. SQL Server 2022, when used in conjunction with FlashBlade, increases organizations’ return on investment twofold by making data lake and hybrid data platform use cases possible.
