Flash storage company Pure Storage Inc. today announced the availability of File Services for FlashArray, a new storage service that provides access to native block and file services from a single, global pool of resources.

The company said this is a big deal because it’s the first block and file platform built from the ground up, on top of a unified architecture. By doing that, Pure Storage explained, customers will benefit from much simpler management at large scale.

A unified storage architecture is one that supports both block and file storage formats, allowing companies to store and present data in different ways. Such multiprotocol arrays have been around for a long time, but Pure Storage says they’re unable to deliver the flexibility or efficiency such a system has promised.

That’s because most arrays are initially built for a single use case — either block or file storage — with new protocols bolted on as an afterthought. By doing it this way, the complexity of managing such systems becomes a major headache when storage is scaled up.

What Pure Storage is doing is reinventing unified storage with a more modern, flash-based architecture that supports both block and file storage natively, as first-class services, so it doesn’t suffer from the same limitations as yesterday’s bolt-on systems. What’s more, it supports all common enterprise storage use cases, including VMware and NFS data stores, user directories and profiles, content repositories, data protection and backup.

By offering a more flexible pool of storage resources that supports both block and file, Pure Storage said, it can eliminate much of the complexity that’s associated with data growth on legacy unified arrays. With those older systems, administrators were required to preplan every storage update and request carefully to avoid breaking anything.

Analyst Steve McDowell of NAND Research told SiliconANGLE that traditional unified storage solutions force administrators to provision block storage and file storage separately, even on the same array. Doing so is a problem, he said, because it often leads to inefficiencies and wasted storage, and it can limit the administrator’s flexibility in adjusting to shifting needs.

Pure Storage Vice President of Product Management Peter Skovrup elaborated on some of the problems storage admins might face. For instance, if a virtual machine application requires more storage space, it can cause a lot of headaches. While the array has plenty of capacity available, the specific file system it’s located in may not have enough free space. Accommodating such an expansion therefore involves moving the application to an entirely new file system.

“The net impact of the volume size limitation is that you either need to leave a lot of headroom, or end up moving workloads regularly,” Skovrup said. “As a storage admin, you spend your time managing limitations rather than having the storage array do the job.”

That’s no longer the case with File Services for FlashArray, as its flexible and global pool of storage resources completely eliminates the need to preplan storage growth. Rather than bolt-on storage services, both File and Block services are served natively, providing access to the same underlying storage pool. Resources are consumed dynamically and completely automated .Now, administrators can simply use whatever resources they need, expanding both block and file storage on the fly.

“This approach fundamentally removes scalability concerns because there are no artificial limits,” Skovrup said. “No file system limits, just a global storage pool.”

The global storage pool is a single shared pool of resources designed for the all-flash era that can flexibly and non-disruptively expand as new resources are added. Block and File storage is consumed as needed, up to the full capacity of the array. Moreover, it offers a unified policy management system for both block and file storage that significantly reduces administration times, the company said. By unifying policy management, all operations can be learned quickly and applied to both protocols.

“While basic capacity planning still has to happen with Pure’s approach, it’s greatly simplified because everything is shared,” McDowell said. “This is a nice differentiator for Pure.”

One of the major benefits of File Services for FlashArray is that it introduces the concept of VM-aware storage that provides deeper visibility into the granularity of virtual machines, Pure Storage said. As such, storage admins can natively manage virtual machines on FlashArray, with VM-level statistics, snapshots, quotas and policy management.

McDowell said VM-granular controls greatly simplify the task of managing storage for virtual machines. Traditionally, doing so has always been quite complex, with admins required manually to covert the storage needs of each VM into a configuration that the underlying resource understands.

“Pure is removing that mental translation layer and embedding intelligence directly into the array,” McDowell said. “While the benefits Pure is delivering are seemingly low-level, they will be appreciated by IT administrators. Pure has always been about simplifying storage, and I think they’re delivering that here.”

Image: Pure Storage