Pure Storage Block & File And Avalanche Technology On Data Centers In Outer Space

This article looks into a recent announcement on integrated block and file access for its FlashArray as well as recent blogs and a white paper from Avalanche Technology on storage and memory for data centers in outer space.

Pure Storage announced general availability of its File Services for FlashArray. The company says that this is a storage service enabling organizations to access native block and file services from a single, global pool of storage resources. Pure says that this system is based upon an architecture where block and file are both native.

Pure says that With the FlashArray Unified Block and File Platform, customers get:

● Global Storage Pools: With today’s release, Pure Storage delivers a flexible global storage pool that eliminates the complexity associated with data growth on legacy unified arrays. Before, administrators needed to pre-plan every storage update and request. Now, they can simply use what they need, across block and file, with non-disruptive expansion on the fly and unlimited file system sizes.

● Unified Policy Management: Pure Storage now eliminates the multi-layered management required by legacy storage platforms, giving administrators precise management of the specific storage service they want to deploy and control. By unifying policy management, all operations can be learned quickly and applied to everything, both block and file.

● VM-Aware Storage Capabilities: Pure Storage has introduced VM-Aware Storage, the industry’s first way to give deeper visibility at the granularity of the virtual machine. The granular visibility and management Pure now brings to file is also available to VMs with VM-aware Storage. Administrators can natively manage VMs on FlashArray, including VM-level statistics, snapshots, quotas, and policies.

● Broad Support for Common Use Cases: Pure Storage supports all common use cases, including VMware and NFS data stores, user directories and profiles, content repositories, data protection, and backup.

Avalanche Technology, a maker of standalone solid state MRAM memory, has been making a big push to sell to the aerospace industry. In a recent series of blogs and a recent white paper on Data Centers in Space they said that military as well as commercial space organizations are moving from single vulnerable expensive satellites to a distributed system of smaller, simpler, less expensive, shorter lived, distributed satellites. The image below gives an idea of just how many satellites could be involved in near future distributed satellite systems.

With more satellites more data will be generated. Avalanche gave an example. The amount of data gathered at any time is proportional to the number of satellites. With 100’s or 1,000’s of satellites the amount of data gathered is huge and most satellites won’t be able to transmit that data to ground immediately. Avalanches says that, the result is that data buffers become a permanent feature of each satellite.

An example of this New Space architecture is the expansive constellation of micro satellites being deployed by SpaceX, which can communicate with one another using RF or lasers and the link to ground still limited to RF. With a whopping 100 terrestrial base stations in the SpaceX network, the communication and related data offload situation is improved, but the bottleneck largely remains, requiring the data to remain in orbit. Given this, the data in orbit now needs to be fused, processed, and acted upon in situ and then can be discarded, allowing it to avoid the communication bottleneck.

For support of applications requiring analysis of patterns, such as weather, geological mapping, etc., we need to keep the data long-term for local analysis, providing an excellent case for a Datacenter in Space. We have spoken in past articles about digital storage and data centers in space. From the Avalanche white paper this is how the company sees the evolution of data centers in outer space.

AI and other advanced data processing is expected to be an element of outer space data processing. This requires lots of memory and storage to keep the data trained by machine learning models. Both the space-based data center as well as the storage buffer on individual satellites will need radiation hard non-volatile memory, and that is where Avalanche comes in since MRAM memory is resistant to radiation. The image below shows the company’s vision for using MRAM as L4 cache in space data center satellite and data collection satellites as well as some SSD or HDD storage.

Pure Storage is offering integrated block and file access on its FlashArrays, enabling improved use features. Avalanche Technology shows how MRAM and other storage technologies will enable data centers in outer space to support constellations of satellites.