Pure Storage Upgrades Flash Array for Healthcare Analytics

June 14, 2017 - Pure Storage announced upgrades to its FlashBlade product line, including the release of its all-flash S3 object store upgrade, which is aimed at big data and advanced healthcare analytics.

The company aims to help accelerate traditionally slow object storage as it becomes a more practical cloud storage option for data intensive analytics.

AE Business Solutions President Rick Gordon explained in a statement that organizations need a solution that supports a data intensive analytics infrastructure as real-time analytics becomes a goal.

"As evidenced by our customer’s ever-expanding needs, this new update opens the potential of FlashBlade to large-scale, performance-intensive organizations,” Gordon stated.

Healthcare organizations are seeking a better way to retrieve data that is traditionally stored in file systems. The growth of big data analytics requires entities to consider a different way to store large volumes of data.

Object storage manages data as objects, instead of files or blocks. Objects are kept in a storage pool that does not have a hierarchical structure.

Object storage instead uses unique identifiers that allow data to be stored anywhere in the storage pool. Storing data using object storage gives healthcare organizations more possibilities for data analytics and offers a scalable infrastructure.

Object storage is becoming increasingly popular in healthcare, Key Information Systems Director of Cloud Service Clayton Weise told HITInfrastructure.com.

“Object storage provides an inexpensive way to store vast pools of data, multiple petabytes up to exabyte scale within a single space,” Weise explained. “The data stored using object is always accessible, unlike tape where I have to know the serial number, track the tape, and physically retrieve it.”

“Data in object stores is always accessible,” he continued. “Object storage makes data retrieval far more convenient.”

Organizations adopting big data analytics are seeking more scalable storage solutions as applications become larger and more complicated. Deep learning, artificial intelligence, and other heavy workloads require robust platforms to run successfully.

Pure Storage also announced updates to its all-flash data storage solution, FlashBlade, to offer organizations expanded data storage on-premises and in the cloud.

The company’s upgraded data storage option improves upon the previous model. Back in January, Pure Storage announced the general availability of its FlashBlade solid-state array storage appliance, in 8.8TB and 52TB capacities.

The improvements will let organizations manage up to 75 blades in a single deployment, along with a 17TB blade that can be added to existing 8TB and 53 TB configurations. Organizations can scale out and distribute their data up to eight petabytes across 75 blades.

"Modern computing frameworks have given rise to increasingly complex, high-performance analytics and valuable data," Pure Storage VP of FlashBlade Par Botes said in a statement. "With FlashBlade, our mission is to make big data into fast data with an all-flash platform that is big, fast, and simple to deploy – and one that provides value across all industries and segments.”

“Today, we continue to deliver on that promise with brand new innovations that organizations and existing customers need to gain next-level insights from their data."

The storage upgrade lets organizations scale up their on-premises deployment as needed. This allows for better system integration and less incompatibility among IT systems because they can be run off the same hardware.

Pure Storage plans to continue the development and expansion of its FlashBlade solution in response to the evolving and increasingly complex nature of data intensive workloads.

The healthcare industry stands to benefit from flashed-based storage as big data analytics continues to gain traction. Value-based care incentives encourage organizations to adopt analytics strategies, but a lack of scalable storage can hinder progress when it comes to retrieving and using the data.

Healthcare organizations should consider flash-based arrays because they are designed to scale up to accommodate high scale data growth.