Pure launches ObjectEngine cloud dedupe, plus inter-rack NVMe

Pure Storage has announced an S3-capable data protection appliance called ObjectEngine that runs as a datacentre appliance or in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, and the availability of NVMe-over-fabrics across datacentre racks in DirectFlash Fabric.

ObjectEngine comes in two flavours: on-premise hardware is ObjectEngine//A and consists of 1U nodes with central processing unit (CPU) and cache for metadata while ObjectEngine//Cloud is an AWS-native software appliance.

ObjectEngine is an inline data deduplication appliance that ingests data from on-premise backup software that can output in S3-readable format – such as CommVault, Oracle, Veritas, Veeam – with the cloud as a target.

The product is pitched as a contemporary cloud-era take on disk-to-disk-to-tape, dubbed flash-to-flash-to-cloud in which Pure-supported workloads are protected on- and off-site as deduplicated datasets that can be re-hydrated for use on-premises or in the cloud.

On-premises OE//A270 nodes have claimed throughput of 25TB/hour for backup and 15TB/hour in restore. Meanwhile, OE//Cloud brings a claimed 100-plus TB/hour backup and 11 nines availability, with internal cloud replication.

Currently support is only for the AWS cloud but the addition of Microsoft’s Azure is planned for “later”, according to chief technology officer Alex McMullan.

ObjectEngine is the product of Pure’s acquisition of StorReduce in August 2018 and its porting to the company’s hardware and software environment, including in the cloud.

It joins a portfolio of cloud-oriented products introduced last year by Pure Storage that include Cloud Block Store for AWS, which offers Pure Storage capacity in the cloud and brings storage interoperability between on-premise and public cloud deployments; plus, CloudSnap for AWS, which is a suite of cloud replication services built into Pure’s FlashArray hardware.

Meanwhile, Pure Storage has extended the reach of NVMe flash and NVMe-over-fabrics (NVMf) within its FlashArray//X product offering. It has offered NVMe drives within its hardware since 2017 and in 2018 added the capability to connect hardware within datacentre racks with NVMf.

With DirectFlash Fabric NVMf connectivity is now possible between datacentre racks with a claimed end-to-end latency of 250μs. Pure Storage claims this as DAS or PCIe performance across the fabric.

NVMf schemes use a variety of protocols. In this case Pure uses RDMA over Converged Ethernet.

Distance limitations are those imposed by Ethernet (which adds 5μs per mile), said McMullan, who said it is expected that hardware would be “physically in proximity”.

Future plans, said McMullan, include the use of storage-class memory in Pure arrays and NVMe-over-TCP/IP to allow very high performance flash traffic to be routed and therefore to traverse different subnets to access, for example, different datacentres or multiple public clouds.