Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 07 Dec 2016
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the market's leading independent solid-state array vendor, has announced the introduction of its NVMe-Ready Guarantee. Pure Storage guarantees every newly purchased FlashArray//M can be upgraded to full NVMe through its Evergreen Storage program.
NVM Express, or NVMe, a next-generation memory-class protocol for CPU-to-flash communication, is poised to drive a shift across the storage industry to NVMe architectures. Leading industry analysts forecast that NVMe, which is enabling the next generation of flash performance and density, will become the leading interface protocol for flash by 2019. A critical mass of consumer devices has already shifted to NVMe, and the enterprise will not be far behind.
"NVMe protocol is set to dominate enterprise flash, because it allows much greater performance than the SAS and SATA interfaces used currently in data centre flash drives. SAS was designed for disk, but NVMe was designed both for flash and the new solid-state, non-volatile memories that are waiting in the wings," said Tim Stammers, senior analyst at 451 Research. "Pure's FlashArray//M systems are already future-proofed for this change, and that is a very unusual and important aspect."
NVMe is faster and more parallel than the existing Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) storage protocol, and offers 64K parallel queues in comparison to a single SAS channel, which enables direct communication paths to solid state drives (SSDs). This massive parallelism eliminates the "serial-connection" bottleneck - enabling significantly higher performance for coming technological advances, including massively multi-core CPUs, super-dense SSDs, new memory technologies and high-speed interconnects.
"Seven years ago, we saw the potential of flash as an industry standard. We have reached a similar inflection point with NVMe, and enterprises will need to be prepared for the shift to take full advantage of technological improvements in 2017 and beyond," said Matt Kixmoeller, VP of Product, Pure Storage. "Any organisation buying new storage today needs to be NVMe-ready to protect its investment. By proactively engineering for NVMe, Pure has widened the gap between purpose-built arrays and legacy retrofits, and is best positioned to lead the industry transition to NVMe."
In anticipation of the now inevitable shift to NVMe, Pure Storage engineered FlashArray//M to be NVMe-ready from the beginning, starting more than three years ago. Every FlashArray//M ships with dual-ported and hot-pluggable NVMe NV-RAM devices, engineered by Pure - an industry first when released in 2015. Additionally, the FlashArray//M chassis is wired for both SAS and PCIe/NVMe in every flash module slot, which enables the use of SAS-connected flash modules today as well as a transition to NVMe in the future.
Each of the slots within the FlashArray//M chassis is capable of using NVMe and SAS-capable flash modules, and controllers are non-disruptively upgradable to transition internal and external networks from SAS to NVMe. The Purity Operating Environment is optimised for NVMe with massively parallel and multi-threaded design, as well as global flash management across the entire flash pool. As a result, customers will be able to convert any FlashArray//M to NVMe-enabled controllers and capacity without a forklift upgrade or disruptive migration.
Upgrades to NVMe-enabled controllers are planned to be generally available prior to 31 December 2017. The full terms of NVMe-Ready Guarantee are available on request.
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