Unified file and object storage: Three suppliers and their approaches
Summary
Pure Storage’s converged file and object product range – FlashBlade – is aimed at pretty demanding workloads in terms of volume but also performance, so the word “fast” figures heavily in its branding. With FlashBlade, they have in mind what would have been secondary use cases in the past, such as artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML)/analytics/high-performance computing (HPC), image-heavy workloads such as healthcare imaging and engineering, and even backup data that may need rapid restore. “Organisations are dealing with rapidly growing amounts of unstructured data generated by modern applications,” says Amy Fowler, VP FlashBlade at Pure Storage. “FlashBlade offers consolidated storage with a natively built unified fast file and object platform with no bolt-on architecture and provides flash performance equally for all unstructured data,” says Fowler. “Its targeted use is to allow for migrations from file-based systems over to S3, so essentially giving an NFS access method into data that now lives in S3 while the source application is migrated.” NetApp’s limited object support in terms of scale is quite clear.