Pure Introduces Products For Post AI Training World

Introduction to Pure Storage’s Next Generation Products

At the Pure Storage Accelerate Event in Las Vegas, the company announced next-generation solid-state storage products with capacities up to 300TB and its Enterprise Data Cloud, a storage and data management system that is intended to simplify data management. These products should provide primary storage for heavy data workloads, including AI training and inference.

New Hardware Releases

Pure introduced new FlashArrays, a new FlashBlade, and new Direct Flash Modules. The FlashArray//XL R5 has raw storage capacities up to 1.9PB and can run up to 200% more transactions per rack unit. The FlashArray//ST is geared for high performance, providing more than 10 M input/output operations per second. The company also introduced a FlashBlade//S R2. The FlashArray’s have native S3 implementation and support block, file, and object storage.

Direct Flash Modules (DFMs)

Pure has doubled the storage density of the QLC Direct Flash Modules to 300TB. These are custom solid-state drive modules designed by Pure. The higher capacity in one drive results in higher energy efficiency and smaller rack space for a given storage capacity. John Colgrove, known as Coz, founder of Pure, told me that their DFMs have 1/10th the error rate of other SSDs. This is because they understand and can control the sources of errors better.

Enterprise Data Cloud

Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud provides unified storage access to data on-premise, in the cloud, or hosted. The Data Cloud is built up from layers of hardware and software. The evergreen architecture includes Pure Storage Flash Systems, their Blades and Arrays, and SLAs that the company says provide financial and operational flexibility by offering a hardware purchase with a consumption-based subscription with hardware replaced over time. The virtualized cloud of storage can manage 100’s of storage systems like they are one system.

Features of the Data Cloud

The control plane offers intelligent automation and orchestration of workflows, real-time observability, as well as predictive analytics and insights. The latter includes anomaly detection and cyber assessments. A variety of services can be run on the Data Cloud. Pure has partnered with Rubrik to enhance cloud security. Pure Fusion provides workload automation. CrowdStrike provides LogScale integration to enable immutable resilient storage. PureProtect VMware to VMware on-demand recovery is supported, as is AI Copilot for easy interaction of the Data Cloud.

The Post Training World

Patrick Smith, Field CTO for EMEA, led a customer panel where they discussed how with foundational models available through intensive AI training, these models can be fine-tuned and customized for particular applications that deliver an acceptable degree of accuracy for a particular application. Such fine-tuning of existing models rather than creating new models requires much less effort and energy to accomplish. This post-training world requires less intensive computing but is heavily dependent upon real-time data management and solutions.

Conclusion

Pure Storage introduced new hardware, including 300TB DFM, FlashArrays, and a new FlashBlade, along with its Enterprise Data Cloud for managing and protecting on-premise, cloud, and hosted data to enable a post-AI training world. These products and solutions are designed to provide primary storage for heavy data workloads and simplify data management.

FAQs

• Q: What is the capacity of the new Direct Flash Modules?
  A: The new Direct Flash Modules have a capacity of up to 300TB.
• Q: What is the purpose of Pure Storage’s Enterprise Data Cloud?
  A: The Enterprise Data Cloud is designed to simplify data management by providing unified storage access to data on-premise, in the cloud, or hosted.
• Q: What is the "Post Training World" in AI?
  A: The "Post Training World" refers to the increasing use of existing foundational models for AI inference solutions, which requires less intensive computing but is heavily dependent upon real-time data management and solutions.