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Article • • 4 minute read

Pure//Accelerate Digital 2020 Highlights

On June 10th, Pure Storage kicked off the //Accelerate Digital Conference. This article will highlight key take aways and announcements for the year.

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Techies love to attend our favorite OEM conferences each year, and one of my personal favorites is always Pure//Accelerate. 2020 has been a year of firsts for all of us, and this year Pure Storage did not disappoint with its first 100 percent digital conference. Pure pulled together a great assortment of sessions with tech leads, keynotes (including boxing superstars) and comedic relief as well. 

Speaking of firsts — let's dive into the content and recap the announcements.

 A message from the CEO

It would not be a true //Accelerate experience without Pure Storage's CEO Charlie Giancarlo kicking us off with a recap of the business relating to the state of the world, Pure's go to market this year and beyond. Pure is still leaning in heavy on the modern data experience initiative kicked off last year. The announcements this year only strengthen that messaging.

Charlie talks about flexibility and resiliency in the multicloud age. Key highlights from Charlie's message include:

  • Pure's simplicity to help customers deploy and adopt quickly.
  • Digital transformation in the modern world.
  • Hybrid cloud and automation acceleration.
  • Simplicity, consistent and cloud-like experiences for customers.
  • Modern data experience highlighting Pure as a Service (PaaS) — Pure Storage as a Service model.

 Announcing agile data services on Purity //FA6.0

Most of us Pure fans know that the Compuverde acquisition was made in 2019, and we have all been excited to see mature NAS protocols make their way into the Purity operating environment. I have to tip my hat to Pure engineering for the approach they've taken. They have deeply integrated the File services offering as a core component of Purity. Engineering took the harder path to production to give our customers a more viable "true to Pure Storage" experience with file services at the core of the Purity OS.

Purity 6 file services

Pure also took the ActiveCluster zero RPO and RTO product to the next level to help enable customers with more stringent disaster recovery needs that span different geographies agnostic of latency between systems. 

 Major features relating to Purity //FA 6.0

File on FA

WWT and Pure have been beta testing Purity 6.0 for several months. In this release, Pure has done a great job integrating a mature file services offering into the FlashArray product. This long awaited feature will give Pure storage a true unified file and block offering on the same storage system. If you have NFS, SMB and Block workload requirements, Pure Storage FlashArray products can now service those needs from one unified platform. If you have questions please reach out to talk about file services on FlashArray products.

GA release of file supported features:

  • Enterprise SMB and NFS.
  • Cross-protocol access.
  • Trusted domain support.
  • Global deduplication and compression.
  • Snapshots.

ActiveDR

The second major feature is ActiveDR which provides continuous replication with near-zero recovery point objective (RPO) to enable a new global disaster recovery solution to FlashArray customers. ActiveDR uses some of the foundational features of Purity ActiveCluster agnostic of the more stringent latency requirements.

ActiveDR GA Release features include:

  • Near-zero RPO
  • Fast recover/failover time
  • Test failover without losing RPO
  • No journals to manage
  • Pre-connect hosts
  • Test failover, failover, reverse, failback
  • No additional licensing or software

DirectFlash Fabric enhancements

Pure has long supported NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) using the RoCEv2 protocol. This feature can be tested in the WWT Flash Lab, and we are excited to see that Cisco UCS and VMware vSphere 7.0 now have supported drivers for RoCEv2. This DirectFlash Fabric interoperability initiative will be imperative as customers adopt DirectMemory or SCM in FlashArray //X products, like VMware vSphere 7 with RoCE, UCS and Pure Storage FA //X.

As we continue to navigate our way through 2020, it's no secret that OEMs have gotten creative, leveraging the digital landscape necessary to support business initiatives across the globe. This is a high priority to get messaging and announcements out to the masses. At WWT, we are no stranger to this need and have built out our digital platform to enable customers to experience the latest in the technology industry from the comfort of their own home or office.  

If you are interested in testing any of these new Pure Storage announcements or integrating Pure Storage solutions with your favorite compute, virtualization or data protection suite using WWT's digital platform, please reach out to our team.

Technologies