Abstract

The past decade saw the rise of “big data” – and storage solutions designed to allow Petabytes of data to be centralized and served for everything from data analytics to scientific discovery to movie rendering. These storage solutions were big, but often slow, as they took advantage of bigger and bigger hard disk drives, the last mechanical relics in today’s otherwise all-silicon data center. But with the rise of cloud-native applications, needs and expectations are changing. Big but slow isn’t good enough anymore, and the dramatic inefficiency of rows and rows of spinning disk in the data center just can’t keep up with the efficiency demands of today.

This industry experiences talk will discuss the design and implementation of FlashBlade, a new flash-based data platform. FlashBlade is an elastic scale-out system that delivers all-flash performance to multi-petabyte-scale data sets. It is a co-designed hardware/software system that scales to 1.6PB usable in only 4 rack units.

Bio: Alex Ho has been working on FlashBlade at Pure Storage since the project’s inception three years ago. Prior to that he was Director of Platform Engineering at Arista Networks for seven years. He also spent more than 10 years at Oracle, mostly in the RDBMS R&D group. Alex has degrees in computer science from Berkeley, Stanford, and Cambridge.