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All-flash storage vendor Pure Storage Tuesday expanded the software that accompanies its high-performance hardware with advanced clustering and quality-of-service capabilities.

The company also used its Pure//Accelerate 2017 conference, held this week in San Francisco, to unveil a number of hardware updates to its all-flash storage arrays.

The changes come as innovation in the software capabilities of all-flash storage has struggled to keep up with improvements in the sheer performance of the hardware, said Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of products for the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor.

[Related: CRN Exclusive: Pure Storage CEO Dietzen On Pure's Software Focus, Profitability Goals And HCI Views]

"Tier-one storage offers the highest flexibility and performance, but not the fastest innovation," Kixmoeller told CRN. "We want to end the compromise. We're bringing in technology to close the gap."

Pure Storage is doing just that with the introduction of its Purity//FA 5.0 software, the latest version of the company's software for managing data and services with its all-flash hardware, Kixmoeller said.

The biggest addition to the Purity//FA software is ActiveCluster, a new active-active metro stretch cluster capability that allows an application to run synchronously in two data centers up to 150 miles apart, or on separate racks within the same data center, Kixmoeller said.

For example, he said, a customer running Oracle Real Application Clusters on eight servers could have four of the servers in one data center and four in another. "If there's a disruption in one data center, the application keeps running in the other," he said.

Purity//FA 5.0's ActiveCluster deploys quickly with only four commands and does not require the addition of a third-party server or cloud to mediate between the two parts of the clusters.

"This is the last of the high-end resiliency services that we have not had before at Pure Storage," he said.

The quality-of-service capability of Purity//FA 5.0 can now be assigned on a per-volume basis, Kixmoeller said.

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Pure Storage Aims For The Enterprise, Cloud Storage Business With Major Software Updates - CRN