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Next-Gen FlashBlade//S Delivers Peak Performance for Unstructured Data

7:46 Video

Next-Gen FlashBlade//S Delivers Peak Performance for Unstructured Data

Enhance AI, HPC, and analytics with faster throughput, Evergreen upgrades, and future-ready object storage with S3 over RDMA.

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[MUSIC] Hello everyone. I am Karthik Srinivasan, Director of Product Management, and I have with me Justin Emerson,

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Principal Field Solution Architect for Unstructured Data. Today, we are thrilled to share some new groundbreaking enhancements we are introducing to FlashBlade?.

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True to our commitment to hardware and software co-innovation, these upgrades touch all areas of FlashBlade, enabling customers to cope

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with the massive onslaught of unstructured data brought about by this new era of AI-driven computing. Today, organizations need a simple high-performance solution

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to maximize the value gained from their file and object data. ɫ�ش�ý FlashBlade features a unique, modular architecture that enables organizations

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to unlock new levels of power, space, and performance efficiency using our DirectFlash? technology and scale-out Purity software. Justin, tell us a little bit about the

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new changes to FlashBlade and why it matters to customers. Thanks, Karthik. I'm so excited to be able to share some of the enhancements coming to FlashBlade,

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which serves some of the most demanding workloads from high-performance computing, quantitative trading, genomic sequencing, cyber resilience,

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analytics, and of course, artificial intelligence. Our customers' need for performance and efficiency grows ever higher, and we're rising to meet that demand.

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FlashBlade was designed as a bladed architecture to simplify scale-out storage for all users. And with the launch of

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FlashBlade//S? back in 2022, we promised customers the same Evergreen? experience that FlashArray? has enjoyed for more than a decade.

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I'm incredibly excited to announce our first Evergreen Blade Upgrade for FlashBlade//S, the S200 R2 and the S500 R2. The FlashBlade//S R2 family offers

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customers a major step function increase in performance, in density, and in efficiency. On top of the industry-leading capabilities,

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FlashBlade//S already delivers. So Justin, why does this really matter to our customers? Well, the world's most demanding customers trust FlashBlade//S

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with their most business-critical unstructured data workloads. These workloads need consistent performance, robust data features, rock-solid reliability, and

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enterprise-grade security. With the FlashBlade//S R2 family, we're making enhancements to all of these different areas, delivering customers even better outcomes

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for the applications that drive their organization's success. With the myriad improvements in CPU, memory, and networking, plus our latest

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generation DirectFlash Modules, FlashBlade//S R2 performs up to 50% better in many workloads and up to double the performance in write-bound workloads

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compared to the original FlashBlade//S when it launched three years ago. That sounds amazing. What can customers expect in terms of how much this new hardware generation

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can improve their application outcomes? Well, these new blades will provide better time to insight for AI training and inference, shorter time to market for cutting-edge

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semiconductor technology, more genome sequence per day with the same infrastructure, and faster compile times to accelerate software development.

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You know, the only truly finite resource is time, and FlashBlade//S R2 helps our customers get more done in less time. That's great.

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What else can you share about the launch of these new blades? Well, Karthik, the best thing about ɫ�ش�ý has always been our

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Evergreen architecture. For existing FlashBlade//S customers, non-disruptively upgrading to FlashBlade//S R2 is as easy as replacing the blades.

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No data migrations and no downtime. And Evergreen//Forever? and Evergreen//Flex? customers will receive upgrades to the R2 family as part of their ever-modern benefit,

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just as we promised three years ago. Right. Our innovation around Evergreen is really the foundation for our success in the market.

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That's where the magic really happens. And SR2 is a great example of how FlashBlade modular hardware architecture is enabling these Evergreen

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outcomes for our customers. That's right, but ɫ�ش�ý isn't just a hardware company, we're a software company too. And I know we have

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some exciting capabilities that are coming soon for users of FlashBlade's object store. You are correct. As you know, the world is moving to

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becoming more AI-centric, and we've had a long-held belief that object storage will be a key mechanism that customers will use data.

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FlashBlade today is the world leader in high-performance object storage, delivering incredible throughput with very low latency for a lot of applications,

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analytics, and increasingly AI. That's interesting. How is object being used in AI? And what enhancements are we planning to do

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to help customers in this area? Great question. Object storage is gaining a lot of attention for AI training for the following reasons.

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You know, multi-modal AI environments that includes audio, video, along with text are set to grow. Most storage systems cannot manage such a variety of data equally well.

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Object is also seen as a better mechanism to store and manage data. Flat namespace, ability to serve large and small files are very key reasons.

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And at scale, there's nothing better than object storage that is more manageable. We want to be at the forefront of this emerging shift,

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and we're working on a few exciting projects internally to address this. Later this year, we plan to deliver S3 over RDMA support for FlashBlade//S, and we announced this

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at NVDIA GTC conference. What is S3 over RDMA, and what difference does it make for customers' AI environments? Current deployments use Object Store as

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repositories for data and checkpoints. These large data lakes are typically behind a very small, high-performance file system, which is accessed via

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NFS or RDMA by the clients. The objective of our project, S3 over RDMA, is to collapse these layers, making it really simple for our customers

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to directly access the data in these large data lakes, and avoiding copying data between multiple systems as they go through their AI processes.

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This accelerates training jobs for large AI systems. So how does S3 over RDMA work differently than normal S3 access? RDMA provides measurable

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benefits for AI ML applications in terms of the following. Improved throughput, data gets transferred via direct memory access,

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which speeds up the data transfer process. The second one is better CPU utilization by copy offload. Data transfers happen directly from the

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storage to the GPU memory, bypassing the CPU buffers. And the last one is reduced latency. RDMA transfers are handled directly at the network card layer,

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thereby bypassing the kernel and the entire networking stack. High-performance AI environments can benefit from the combination of Object Store's

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ability to manage large scale with RDMA's capabilities for high throughput data transfer. Well, that sounds awesome. When can customers take advantage of

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these new capabilities? Right. So S3 over RDMA is expected later this year and will be available to all FlashBlade//S customers

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through their Evergreen subscription, delivered seamlessly via a software upgrade. That's awesome. I can't wait for customers

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to get their hands on this and all the other great new features that are coming to the ɫ�ش�ý platform. And to learn more about all the new

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hardware and software enhancements coming to FlashBlade, check out purestorage.com/flashblade-s or reach out to your

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ɫ�ش�ý account team. Thank you and have a great day. Thanks everyone.

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