Cloud-only strategies have given way to hybrid computing solutions that allow businesses to pick and choose between on-premises and cloud storage. With security an ever-present concern, keeping rarely accessed and sensitive data on-prem just makes sense. Yet in an ideal scenario, hybrid brings the speed, agility, and cost savings of cloud down into the data center.

It was with this goal that Pure Storage Inc. and Vertica Inc. announced a partnership that matched the separated storage and compute of Vertica’s Eon Mode cloud analytics platform with Pure Storage FlashBlade’s fast object storage and elastic scalability.

“There’s been a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the traditional Hadoop type architecture … [to] solutions that allow them to scale the compute and storage pieces independently,” said Gabriel Chapman (pictured), director of FlashBlade product and solutions marketing at Pure Storage Inc. “Therefore, the FlashBlade platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to Eon Mode.”

Chapman  spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. They discussed trends in storage and how the combined attributes of Vertica Eon mode and Pure Storage FlashBlade enable a cloud-like experience on-premises. (* Disclosure below.)

An engineered solution with focus on fast file and fast object

Fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are taking, according to Chapman. And with FlashBlade, Pure Storage is showing the way with a unique architecture.

“It’s not like we’re just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system like you would with the traditional commodity off-the-shelf hardware design,” Chapman said.

He describes the platform as “primarily a chassis with built-in networking components.” An internal fabric interconnect links each of the individual blades, each of which has its own compute that drives the Pure Storage flash components inside.

This makes the platform an engineered solution built with a focus on scalability and maximizing parallelization, which are key for fast file and fast object, according to Chapman. Customers can currently scale from just seven blades up to 150.

“That’s the kind of scale that customers are looking for, especially as we start to address these larger analytics pools,” Chapman said. “They are multi-petabyte data sets; you know, that single addressable object space and file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale up storage platforms are able to deliver.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Vertica Big Data Conference. Neither Vertica, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Gabriel Chapman