TALK: Zhangxi Tan, Mon April 4th at 2pm in Wozniak Lounge (430/38 Soda)

4/4/16 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Speaker: Zhangxi Tan

Title: FlashBlade – The Cloud-Scale All-Flash Data Platform

Abstract: Pure Storage FlashBlade is a recently announced all-flash rack-scale storage platform designed to store the biggest, the fastest unstructured data of today and tomorrow. FlashBlade is an elastic scale-out system that delivers all-flash performance to multi-petabyte-scale data sets at economics of less than $1/GB usable. It is a true co-designed hardware/software system, which scales flash storage from 90TB usable to over 1.6PB usable in only 4 Rack Units. Performance is outstanding at 15GB/s. Energy consumption is less than 1,800 Watt at peak load. The technology has been validated by real customers, such as the Mercedes AMG Formula 1 team, Shutterfly, MentorGraphics and etc. This talk focuses on technical internals of FlashBlade’s full-custom design. We will also share our experience and lessons learned building state-of-the-art all solid-state datacenter storage systems.

Press coverage of FlashBlade:
New York Times: As a Data Deluge Grows, Companies Rethink Storage
TheRegister: Good-on-paper FlashBlade: We’ve seen the hardware, we’ve touched the blades
Bio: Zhangxi Tan is one of the first a few engineers of the FlashBlade product. After receiving his PhD from the Berkeley ASPIRE lab, he joined Pure Storage in late 2013 as a founding engineer working on the FlashBlade product. The FlashBlade team was originally founded as a stealth mode startup in the company, and for most the existence of this team was kept a secret. The team operated in a different building and was setup and behaved as a true stealth mode company.