Pure Storage is continuing its mission to make all-flash storage systems more economically viable for traditional IT organizations with the introduction of a new entry-level array aimed at setting users on a pain-free path to workload acceleration.

Unveiled this morning, the FA-405 squeezes over 40 terabytes of capacity into a 1U controller that Pure pegs as ideal for use in top-of-rack and entry-level configurations. The machine is designed primarily for powering small-scale use cases such as individual databases or applications and pilot deployments of latency-sensitive workloads like virtual desktops. As customers scale their environments, it can be non-disruptively upgraded to one of Pure’s higher end systems.

Like the rest of the series, the FA-405 runs the fourth and latest version of the vendor’s Purity Operating Environment, which also made its debut today. The release introduces FlashRecover, a set of what Pure describes as tightly integrated capabilities for protecting against data loss locally as well as in geographically distributed networks.

FlashRecover automatically compresses data before replicating it to reduce bandwidth requirements and increase transfer speeds. It does the same with snapshots and unifies the two services in a single orchestration layer that Pure says allows users to manage data protection policies at different levels, from individual arrays to their entire environment, all through a single interface. That kills two birds with one stone, enabling increased manageability and reducing administrative overhead, benefits that can quickly add up in  large-scale enterprise settings.

Whereas incumbent vendors are only now adapting their product strategies, Pure has recognized software as a source of storage differentiation at the outset. “We crafted this recipe where we use off-the-shelf MLC [consumer-grade] flash and very fast data reduction, global in-line deduplication and compression that works at sub-millisecond speeds and shrinks the data we store so we can get the price point of all-flash down to where it is competitive with disk,” Scott Dietzen, the company’s CEO, told SiliconANGLE in an interview (see full segment below).

Lowering the barriers to flash adoption continues to be a major focus for Pure, but the firm has also developed high-end market ambitions. It’s now pursuing those ambitions with the new FlashArray 450, which offers up to 250 terabytes of usable storage space – twice as much as its best-selling FA-420 array – in a 16Gb Fibre Channel 2U controller sporting two 2.7GHz 12-core Intel processors and 512 gigabytes of memory.  The system is designed with performance-intensive virtualized workloads in mind.

image courtesy Pure Storage