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Cumulus VFX, a premium visual effects (VFX) provider having worked with the likes of Netflix and Foxtel, has grown rapidly since its founding in 2010, gaining a global reputation for quality and reliability in the VFX world.

Visual effects are at the center of modern film production, and managing the sheer volume of information required to produce photorealistic imagery presents a growing challenge to the industry. With the rapid growth of its global client-base, Cumulus VFX faced critical storage capacity challenges, a common problem in the industry as the amount of technology and data applications continue to grow.

To manage heightened demands, and ultimately support its rapid growth, Cumulus VFX turned to Pure Storage and Agile Data Services, a leading supplier of new and used enterprise IT hardware and maintenance solutions, to build a future proof, enterprise-grade, integrated data storage environment based on FlashBlade, Pure Storage’s unified fast file and object storage platform.

Cumulus VFX now operates its entire production environment on a 7×52 TB FlashBlade – including current projects for Disney, Warner Bros and Bazmark. Benefits include:

• Improved Scalability and Performance: Cumulus VFX reduced the management time of applications from hours to minutes and, in some cases, even seconds with Pure Storage’s RapidFile Toolkit and its advanced Linux integration. Pure also supports Cumulus VFX’s management of applications like Houdini, Blender, Autodesk Maya, Silhouette FX, 3D Equalizer, and Adobe Photoshop. With improved speed and scalability, Cumulus VFX increased the number of rendering artists from 20 to 60.
• Enhanced Data Security: Due to the nature of Cumulus VFX’s business, an outage while executing massive workloads with developers could lead to catastrophe. Pure Storage enables enhanced data security as mission-critical data can be encrypted at rest.
• Reduced Data Center Footprint: Pure Storage’s FlashBlade, helping global organizations achieve up to 67% in direct energy savings versus competitors, enabled Cumulus VFX to minimize carbon emissions with higher rack density and improved performance.

Executive Insight:

“As an IT decision maker, there’s an obligation to put the most efficient, lowest impact solutions in place across our IT environment. What Pure Storage provides in four to six units would take competitors 96 units. Pure Storage not only ticked all the performance and technical requirements, but it had the best energy footprint. Cumulus VFX’s decision to move to Pure Storage FlashBlade was a no-brainer – the company is leaps ahead of the competition.” – Nicky Ladas, Chief Technologist, Cumulus VFX.

“The visual effects industry has highly demanding computing requirements with tremendous volumes of unstructured data. Companies like Cumulus VFX are right on the cutting edge of innovation and are doing Australia proud. Pure is delighted to be able to support the great work that they do with our unified fast file and object platform to tame all that unstructured data.” – Amy Rushall, Area Vice President, Australia & New Zealand, Pure Storage.

To learn more about setting new standards for planet-friendly VFX click HERE.

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The post Pure Storage Enables Cumulus VFX to Tame Explosive Data Growth appeared first on Digital IT News.

FlashBlade//E provides a better way to manage unstructured data growth efficiently, reliably, and sustainably with a best-in-class user experience and economics that enable customers to eliminate the last remnants of disk in their data center.

• Economical at scale: FlashBlade//E is offered at under $0.20 per GB including three years of service. The platform starts at 4PB and scales from there with reliable performance.
• Industry-leading energy efficiency: FlashBlade//E consumes up to 5x less power than the disk-based systems it will replace. The larger the system the greater the efficiency, helping organizations achieve their increasingly critical sustainability goals.
• Simplicity, reliability, and a non-disruptive future: FlashBlade//E is built to flex and grow on demand with 10-20x more reliability than hard disk based systems and evolving without disruption or forklift upgrades. With cloud-like simplicity, flexibility and predictable performance, FlashBlade//E remains simple to manage at any scale.

FlashBlade//E will be generally available by the end of April 2023. In addition to traditional purchase, customers will have the option to deploy FlashBlade//E through a new service tier of Pure’s Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) subscription, providing pay-as-you-go economics and a cloud experience with the control of on-premises deployment.

Industry Significance:

For global organizations, unstructured data capacity is expected to grow by 10x before 2030. For large-capacity, price-sensitive workloads that use current disk-based storage solutions, this growth is unsustainable.

Disk-based systems are a burden on many enterprises’ IT teams and budgets as they are challenging to manage, require massive amounts of power, take up large amounts of space and their components fail too often, causing disruption and risking valuable data. Ultimately, this diminishes the ability to derive business value from data. While modern file and object storage solutions are capable of addressing many of these challenges, they haven’t been a viable option for large unstructured data repositories that are price-sensitive – until now.

Executive Insight:

“With FlashBlade//E, we’re realizing our founder’s original vision of the all-flash data center. For workloads where flash was once price-prohibitive, we are thrilled to provide customers the major benefits Pure delivers at a TCO lower than disk.” – Amy Fowler, VP & General Manager, FlashBlade, Pure Storage

“As our customers’ unstructured data growth continues to accelerate, there is demand for more sustainable and scalable storage solutions for everyday workloads. We are excited to be able to meet this need with FlashBlade//E, providing the simplicity and power savings Pure is known for at an acquisition cost lower than disk-based solutions.” – Brian Bartell, Practice Manager for Primary Storage, WWT

“While the benefits of flash for high-powered workloads have been largely acknowledged, disk’s price point has limited broader perception of its full potential use. Nevertheless, the need for a modern platform to accommodate the rise in unstructured data at scale is evident. FlashBlade//E’s promise of a more cost-effective, energy-efficient and easier-to-manage approach to everyday workloads makes a compelling case for leaving disk behind. ” – Scott Sinclair, Practice Director, Enterprise Strategy Group

For more information on FlashBlade//E, visit www.purestorage.com.

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The post Drivers of Change Pure Storage IT Sustainability Report Details Global Initiatives appeared first on Digital IT News.

RSC is helping Meta’s AI researchers build new and better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, work across hundreds of different languages, seamlessly analyze text, images, and video together, develop new augmented reality tools, and much more.

RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for Meta’s next major computing platform, the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role.

Meta chose Pure Storage, the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service, as it needed a storage partner that can deliver robust and scalable storage capabilities to power RSC. With FlashArray and FlashBlade^®, RSC will have unparalleled performance to rapidly analyze both structured and unstructured data, underpinned by Pure’s foundation of simplicity, reliability, and sustainability.

Pure is a long-time technology provider for Meta, helping to design the first generation of Meta’s AI research infrastructure in 2017. Since then, Meta has continued to partner with Pure, and RSC is the latest example of how Pure is helping Meta achieve its AI research goals.

“The technologies powering the metaverse will require massively powerful computing solutions capable of instantly analyzing ever increasing amounts of data. Meta’s RSC is a breakthrough in supercomputing that will lead to new technologies and customer experiences enabled by AI. We are thrilled to be a part of this project and look forward to seeing the progress Meta’s AI researchers will make.” – Rob Lee, CTO, Pure Storage.

Pure’s portfolio enables large-scale AI workloads with high-performance, architecturally optimized solutions within the smallest and most environmentally friendly footprint, letting customers process massive amounts of data from structured and unstructured sources with speed, reliability, and efficiency. Solutions leveraged by Meta’s RSC include:

• FlashArray//C is a high-capacity, enterprise-ready platform that delivers hyper-consolidation, proven six-nines of availability, and consistent single-millisecond latency for the most demanding environments. Its unique QLC-based architecture allows the array to fulfill the strict performance, power, density, and space requirements of the RSC environment.
• FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced all-flash storage solution for consolidating fast file and object data. It brings a massively parallel platform capable of delivering ultra-fast performance to billions of objects and files.

To learn more, visit: Meta AI, Pure FlashArray//C, Pure FlashBlade

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The post Portworx PX-Backup Enables Cross-Cloud Data Protection appeared first on Digital IT News.

Built to address the unique nature of Kubernetes, PX-Backup 2.0 by Portworx provides IT teams at enterprise-scale organizations with the secure, self-service experience necessary to efficiently and successfully protect modern applications. New features and capabilities include:

• Secure Self-Service with Role Based Access Control (RBAC): PX-Backup 2.0 provides granular role-based access controls that integrate with corporate authentication systems like LDAP and Active Directory to enable a secure, self-service experience. Customers can now map users and user groups to specific roles, while administrators can control the permissions and level of user access in PX-Backup.
• Improved Data Protection Intelligence with Backup Activity Timeline Dashboard: A self-service dashboard providing daily and monthly graphical views of backup activities and statuses. Users can now obtain an at-a-glance view of all backup jobs in progress, and can easily filter and view the jobs on an hourly or daily basis.
• Better Usability with Application Grouping: Improved usability by making the Kubernetes application, as opposed to a pod, or object, a primary filter to setup and manage backups. As a result, users can optimize views for applications instead of individual resources and can scale the user interface for hundreds of namespaces and thousands of resources.
• Extended Ecosystem Support: Broad backup and recovery support for ecosystem Kubernetes offerings, including VMware Tanzu and Microsoft Azure by leveraging native CSI integration. Now PX-Backup can protect applications running on these platforms, even if a customer is not using PX-Store.
• Availability in Cloud Marketplaces: PX-Backup can be purchased from the AWS Marketplace and IBM Cloud Catalog with unified billing.

Data protection is increasingly critical, yet many organizations struggle, particularly in complex, distributed Kubernetes environments where traditional, server-based data protection methods can’t scale effectively. In fact, approximately 75 percent of IT professionals wrongly believe that container-based applications can be backed up in the same way as individual applications, according to Enterprise Strategy Group¹. As a result, enterprises are at risk of significant process delays, unplanned downtime, and possible data loss in the event of common operational failures.

“Protecting Kubernetes applications in highly dynamic environments requires a completely different approach – one that has container granularity, is Kubernetes-aware and multi-cloud. With PX-Backup 2.0, enterprises can protect their mission critical Kubernetes applications with a secure, self-service experience designed specifically for these modern complex environments.” — Murli Thirumale, VP and GM, Cloud Native Business Unit, Pure Storage.

PX-Backup 2.0 and PX-Backup in AWS Marketplace will be available by the end of May 2021. To learn more, visit:

• Introducing PX-Backup 2.0: More secure and scalable than ever
• Protect Kubernetes applications with PX-Backup on IBM Cloud

Image Licensed by Adobe Stock

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With its open architecture, IBM Cloud Satellite builds on IBM’s deep industry expertise and can help enterprises across a variety of industries including telecommunications, healthcare, banking, insurance, travel and transportation, transform into digital-first organizations. The need to modernize mission-critical workloads is intensifying. According to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, 74% of CEOs interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic believe cloud computing will most help their organization deliver these results over the next 2-3 years. We see a cornerstone of this transformation is in edge computing. The continued proliferation of edge devices is expected to shift the amount of data that resides at the edge compared to within central data centers. As this transition takes place, IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to bring cloud services to where clients’ data already resides — and help them bridge to where they want to go.

Portworx by Pure Storage is part of IBM’s ecosystem of partners fueling hybrid cloud environments by helping clients manage and modernize workloads from bare-metal to multicloud and everything in between with Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. IBM Cloud Satellite is engineered to give clients the flexibility to bring their applications to environments where their data resides while leveraging the security of IBM Cloud.¹

IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to help clients address security, privacy and data sovereignty requirements based on their data governance requirements and address the client’s local regulations and compliance obligations by enabling them to deploy and manage applications with consistency for specific markets. IBM Cloud Satellite offers high levels of control over critical data delivered via IBM Cloud – the industry’s most secure and open public cloud for business.¹ Moreover, it offers high levels of control over critical data and centralized policies to ease migration. Those cloud services can therefore be co-located with their apps and data

“With the pace of cloud adoption accelerating, companies are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud to allow them to innovate more efficiently, while maintaining high levels of security and control,” said Harish Grama, general manager, IBM Cloud. “To help facilitate this momentum, IBM is investing $1B in its ecosystem initiative over the next three years to support ecosystem partners and speed the development of platforms such as IBM Cloud Satellite. Collaborating with ecosystem partners like Portworx by Pure Storage can help offer a wider set of clients new ways of bringing IBM Cloud to where their data resides.”

Portworx provides a uniform data services platform for cloud-native applications running across hybrid cloud Satellite locations. Data encryption of the Portworx data volume is designed to secure data at rest, irrespective of the Satellite location of these volumes whether on-premises or on the cloud. Additionally, Portworx provides high availability and cross-cloud data protection to run mission-critical stateful applications on Kubernetes and OpenShift with the reliability, performance and security associated with a traditional enterprise-class storage solution, as well as the agility, speed and automation you expect for cloud native applications. Customers can purchase Portworx from IBM.

“Portworx’s collaboration with IBM on IBM Cloud Satellite recognizes the value we place in providing IBM Cloud customers with access to Kubernetes storage, data protection and data security platform solutions, regardless of location,” said Murli Thirumale, Vice President and General Manager, Portworx by Pure Storage. “Whether it’s on-premises, the public cloud, or both, Portworx works across data center environments to enable customers to embrace hybrid cloud for demanding enterprise workloads.”

For more information on how Portworx provides container and data management for Kubernetes, visit portworx.com/ibm/.

Image Licensed by: Pixabay.com

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The latest updates, delivered through Pure’s Evergreen subscription model, further the company’s vision for a Modern Data Experience. The key enhancements are:

Comprehensive File Portfolio Redefines Performance and Simplicity Across Ever-Broadening Use Cases

• Today’s news extends FlashBlade’s industry leadership with new native SMB support. This provides simplicity and multi-dimensional performance for very high throughput and IOPS with low latency to support multiple workloads simultaneously, files of any size, and sequential or random I/O access. Customers can accelerate Windows applications with a rich set of existing data services, including Replication, File System Rollback, and SafeMode Snapshots for rapid ransomware recovery. Validated solutions include healthcare PACS applications and SQL Server Backup at speeds higher than 1TB/min for SQL farms that demand fast backup and recovery.
• FlashBlade’s new Cross-Protocol File Security design allows access control interoperability between SMB and NFS users while preserving access control lists for both in addition to complying with federal security mandates.
• FlashArray’s scale-up architecture balances performance and capacity, delivering  operational file services for VDI, file server consolidation, user home directories, and file sharing. File capabilities in FlashArray enhance the value of inherent features such as  deduplication and compression.

Comprehensive Ransomware Protection and Security across File, Block, and Cloud-Based Apps

• FlashBlade and FlashArray are now both strengthened by SafeMode snapshots, delivering a complete portfolio of protection tools to ensure data is always safe and recoverable in seconds. Immutable snapshots and Policy-based Retention protect companies against the risk of lost revenues, ransom payments, and brand damage associated with ransomware attacks.
• FlashBlade, the industry-defining Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO) platform, provides enhanced object security with S3 simple user policies, enabling access control at the user level. Granular, user-level performance monitoring meets a critical requirement for real-time visibility into the most active users and unified APIs/SDK improves the automation experience across FlashBlade, FlashArray, and Pure1^® with unified REST APIs and Python SDK.

Improved Disaster Recovery with ActiveCluster over Fibre Channel: ActiveCluster delivers stretch clustering solutions for critical applications over any fabric. ActiveCluster is integrated with Pure1 Cloud Mediator, which removes the need to manage a cumbersome third-site witness and enables a third recovery site to be added anywhere in the world.

Breakthrough Tier 1 Application Performance: As the first to market with NVMe over Fabrics, Pure continues to accelerate its market leadership as it delivers an all-NVMe architecture for Flash, Direct Memory Modules, replication, and now support for both NVMe over Fibre Channel and Ethernet. Support for NVMe can reduce application latency by up to 50% by reducing latencies to hundreds of microseconds.

Third-Generation of FlashArray//C Makes Hybrid Storage Obsolete: The new releases of FlashArray//C40 and FlashArray//C60 demonstrate Pure’s rapid pace of innovation and extend a flash leadership story that is still unmatched in the industry. While other vendors struggle to bring QLC to market, FlashArray//C can now replace legacy disks in deployments of all sizes, ranging from departmental to data center consolidation.

“Pure is named a leader in the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays and positioned highest and farthest in both vectors because we are chipping away at the complexity baked into legacy storage that is simply not designed for the digital age. Our vision for a Modern Data Experience empowers organizations to innovate by providing a dynamic, cloud-based storage experience that is flexible, on-demand, and delivered as code.” — Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer, Pure Storage

Long-Standing Pure Portfolio Customer: Royal Bank of Canada

“Pure is always one step ahead of the market and the latest updates to the Purity software across FlashBlade and FlashArray show that we’ve made the right choice for our business. With Pure, we have been able to achieve 100% uptime in our environment, which is critical to our banking operations.” — Antonio Puccio, Director of SAN Storage, Royal Bank of Canada

Only Pure’s subscription services come ready with all-inclusive licensing, allowing customers to adopt new innovations without disruption, downtime, or the requirement to re-buy capacity. As part of the Evergreen Storage subscription model, these new features require no additional licenses or support costs and ensure zero added complexity.

Today Pure also announced file replication capabilities on FlashArray with Komprise.

Availability:

The new features in Purity for FlashArray are available immediately and in Q1 for Purity for FlashBlade.

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“Flexibility, simplicity and performance are the cornerstones of Pure’s technology,” said Shawn Hansen, FlashArray General Manager, Pure Storage. “Together with Komprise, innovating in robust file replication will extend our market leadership in unified enterprise storage.”

Komprise Asynchronous Replication for FlashArray Files replicates file data seamlessly to provide a safe, consistent recovery point for disaster recovery scenarios. Key capabilities include:

• Granular Data Replication: Since file data sets can be very large, customers can choose whether to replicate entire shares or specific managed directories. Replications can also be scheduled to fit customer needs.
• Streamlined Management: Manage multiple FlashArray replications with a single intuitive console. Automate enterprise-scale replications using APIs.
• Increased Availability: Minimize data loss with a consistent replication copy always available. Replicate to another FlashArray with speed and agility.

“File data is growing fast and enterprise IT organizations need a simple, reliable, efficient way to protect file data against ever-changing threats and disasters,” said Kumar K. Goswami, CEO Komprise. “By expanding our strategic partnership with Pure Storage we are now able offer an integrated data replication solution that leverages the performance and efficiency of Pure along with the intelligent data management simplicity and scale of Komprise.”

Availability and More Information
Komprise Asynchronous Replication is available now – contact your Pure representative for details and read the press release: Pure Provides New Levels of Performance. For more about the Komprise and Pure Storage partnership and to register for a webinar on the new solution, visit komprise.com/pure.

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