Pure Storage Non-Disruptive Upgrade (NDU) Demo

Pure Storage Non-Disruptive Upgrade (NDU) Demo

A critical core feature of any storage platform is being able to non-disruptively upgrade (NDU) the storage array for maintenance tasks, without causing disruption to connected hosts or running applications on the array. NDUs have been industry-standard in the disk-based array world for years, but unfortunately most newer all-flash storage appliances or arrays simply don't support them, meaning application outage windows for each upgrade.

The Pure Storage FlashArray supports online non-disruptive upgrades, and we demonstrate the process in this video. While simulating a production database generating over 1M transactions per minute, we'll perform a full firmware upgrade on the FlashArray, showing:
– the new software being installed on one controller
– re-booting that controller (all IO is handled by the other controller during this event)
– the new software being installed on the other controller
– IO failing-over and being handled by the other controller during this event

The entire process takes only a few minutes, and there is only a short (15 second) blip in application performance during the upgrade, during which time no IO timeouts or retries occur. It should be noted that this process is CLI-driven today, but will be completely automated in the GUI in future Pure Storage releases, and sections of this video have been sped-up to avoid waiting for the controller re-boots.