Pure Storage’s engineering team has evidently been keeping busy in light of this week’s news that the company is debuting the second generation of its flash storage array. FlashArray 2.0 with the new Purity Operating Environment software packs several extra features that are promised to add much more value to the solution.

This latest release features a web-based GUI that simplifies a lot of admin tasks such as RAID configuration and provisioning, while adding analytics on top of it all to allow  historical performance assessment. A command line interface has been tossed in as well to make the platform more DevOps ready, according to the company.

Among other things FlashArray also supports VMware’s VAAI APIs, and the system automatically encrypts all the data it stores in such a way that doesn’t require the user to enter a key. Expanding on the data integrity part, the company included something it calls the Data Integrity Fabric: an automated function that analysis data for errors and heals them without admin intervention.

Lastly, there are a couple more things that are new with FlashArray 2.0. Multiple storage controllers can be clustered using InfiniBand so as to avoid downtime in case one shuts down, and the technology nicknamed FlashCare extends the product’s overall lifetime with better I/O management and other techniques.

“With XtremIO, EMC is reinforcing the coming sea change in storage. EMC is already #1 in both disk arrays and flash for the enterprise data center. In buying XtremIO, EMC is placing its next-generation bets on a storage architecture built from the ground up for flash and on deduplication as a means to reduce cost of and wear on the flash,” says Scott Dietzen, CEO of Pure Storage.

“This is overall great validation of the recipe that Pure Storage launched over two years, but today we remain uniquely focused on driving the cost of flash down below that of performance disk. No doubt competition in the all-flash category is going to heat up in the years ahead. Customers will be the big winners, in that they will be able to get a 10X in performance, space and power efficiency and simplicity for the same dollar they spend on mechanical disk today.”

The latest major update in the flash storage industry came from none other than EMC itself.  The storage giant acquired XtremIO for $430 million last week.  In fact, you can read Pure Storage’s take on the acquisition and its impact on the industry here.