Announcing the General Availability of Purity//FA 6.8.6
We are happy to announce the general availability of 6.8.6, the seventh release in the 6.8 Feature Release line, including the SMB Continuous Availability feature, which guarantees zero downtime for customers' businesses during controller disruptions and upgrades, ensuring uninterrupted access to shared files.
Some of the improvements to Purity contained in this release include:
- SMB Continuous Availability preserves file handles to ensure uninterrupted SMB access during controller failovers and upgrades.
- Target Pods for Pgroup Replication allows customers to target a specific pod for protection groups, avoiding the clutter of snapshots replicating to an array’s root pod.
- CBS for AWS Write Optimization for Amazon S3 improves how its data is committed and managed on Amazon S3 and can significantly drop the AWS infrastructure operating cost, providing customers with write or replication heavy workloads with cost reductions of up to 50%.
- Allow NVMe Read-Only Volumes for ActiveDR eliminates restriction on promotion/demotion of pods containing NVMe-connected volumes, saving customers from unexpected command failures and time-consuming workarounds.
For more detailed information about features, bug fixes, and security updates included in each release, see the release notes.
UPGRADE RECOMMENDATIONS AND EOL SCHEDULE
We recommend customers with compatible hardware who are looking for the fastest access to the latest features upgrade to this new feature release. When possible, customers should make use of Self-Service Upgrades (SSU) to ease the process of planning and executing non-disruptive Purity upgrades for their fleet.
This 6.8 release line is planned for feature development through May 2025 with additional fixes coming in June 2025 to end the release line.
HARDWARE SUPPORT
This release is supported on the following FlashArray Platforms: Cloud Block Store for Azure and AWS, FA//X (R3, R4), FA//C (R3, R4), FA//XL, FA//E, and FA//RC (starting with 6.8.5).
Note, DFS firmware version 2.2.3 is recommended with this release.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank everyone within the engineering, support, technical program management, product management, product marketing, finance and technical product specialist teams who contributed to this release.
LINKS AND REFERENCES
