Data is growing faster than ever before, becoming the foundation for every business decision and innovation. Enterprises depend on fast access to this expanding data to gain insights, optimize operations, and drive growth. However, as information multiplies, organizations face a new challenge — maintaining high performance and controlling costs.
Across industries, many enterprises rely on Elastic as their central data management and analytics platform. Whether it’s powering in-app searches, indexing content, or analyzing log data for performance, Elastic delivers the speed and scalability modern businesses need. Yet, this power comes at a cost — one that increases sharply as data volumes expand.
Elastic and the Growing Complexity of Data
Elastic is widely adopted to store, search, and analyze massive data sets across diverse use cases. Some organizations use it for application search and indexing, while others leverage it for log analysis, investigating infrastructure and security data to trace issues or uncover trends.
With the rapid rise of IoT, DevOps, and microservices, data generation has skyrocketed. Every device, sensor, and application now produces logs critical for system health and troubleshooting. Observability and Security Operations teams must analyze these logs quickly to identify problems and prevent downtime — all while managing enormous and constantly growing data sets.
This data explosion creates mounting pressure on IT teams to balance performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
The Balancing Act: Performance vs. Cost
As organizations grow, so does their Elastic deployment. Logs from distributed systems multiply, and storage requirements can easily reach hundreds of terabytes. The demand for longer log retention — particularly for security and compliance reasons — only adds to the strain.
Enterprises using Elastic Cloud often face escalating costs. They pay for the infrastructure resources consumed, data retention duration, and ongoing cluster maintenance. On-premises deployments, while avoiding some cloud expenses, come with their own challenges, such as resource management, infrastructure complexity, and ensuring consistent performance.
For many organizations, cloud-only solutions aren’t viable due to data residency, sovereignty, or regulatory requirements. As a result, enterprises increasingly seek hybrid or on-premises solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity with the control and cost efficiency of local infrastructure.
Optimizing Elastic with Smart Storage Choices
Balancing performance and cost starts with Elastic’s Data Tier feature — and choosing the right storage for each tier. Elastic divides data into hot, warm, cold, and frozen tiers, allowing organizations to align storage performance and costs with their data access patterns.
- Hot Tier: Data accessed frequently and requiring millisecond query times.
- Cold Tier: Data accessed occasionally, where seconds-long query times are acceptable.
- Warm Tier: Data that’s less frequently used but still valuable for short-term analysis.
- Frozen Tier: Historical data accessed rarely but still searchable on demand.
By intelligently pairing each Elastic tier with the right Pure Storage solution, organizations can achieve optimal performance and cost efficiency.
Pure Storage Solutions for Every Elastic Data Tier
Pure Storage provides high-performance, scalable, and efficient solutions purpose-built for Elastic workloads.
For hot tiers, where low latency is essential, Pure FlashArray//X delivers unmatched performance and reliability. It’s ideal for smaller clusters with intense data processing and real-time analytics needs.
For larger Elastic clusters that demand both throughput and scalability, FlashBlade//S over NFS offers exceptional performance for high-volume, low-latency workloads.
As data cools over time, it becomes less frequently accessed. By offloading this data to more cost-efficient tiers, organizations reduce operational costs without sacrificing search capabilities.
Cutting Costs with Cold and Frozen Tiers
Cold and frozen data tiers enable businesses to significantly reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining performance for less frequently queried data. Elastic’s searchable snapshots make this possible by using the same mechanism as backups — allowing organizations to query historical data stored in S3-compatible object storage.
This approach eliminates the need for replica shards, reducing storage consumption by up to 50%, which directly cuts storage costs. Offloading historical data to these lower-cost tiers decreases the load on hot nodes, reducing compute demand and operational complexity.
However, traditional low-cost object storage solutions often fall short in performance, limiting the full benefits of cold and frozen tiers. That’s where Pure Storage redefines the landscape.
Introducing FlashBlade//E: High-Performance Object Storage at Disk Economics
In 2023, Pure Storage launched FlashBlade//E, an all-flash, capacity-optimized object storage platform that brings flash performance to cost-sensitive workloads. This innovation bridges the gap between affordability and speed, offering performance comparable to disk-based systems — but with the reliability and scalability of flash.
Organizations can now confidently use FlashBlade//E as the foundation for their cold and frozen tiers, ensuring fast, efficient, and cost-effective access to historical data. This setup provides seamless integration with Elastic’s searchable snapshots, enabling enterprises to maintain visibility across all data — no matter how old or infrequently accessed.
Simplifying Elastic Architecture with Pure Storage
With Pure Storage, organizations can simplify their Elastic architecture and enhance overall efficiency. By strategically pairing FlashArray, FlashBlade//S, and FlashBlade//E across Elastic data tiers, IT teams can:
- Achieve consistent, high-speed query performance.
- Scale cost-effectively as data volumes grow.
- Reduce compute and infrastructure overhead.
- Maintain compliance with data residency and sovereignty requirements.
- Enhance data resilience and availability with simplified management.
Pure Storage’s solutions help enterprises move away from traditional, complex, multi-layered infrastructures toward a streamlined, high-performance environment designed for the realities of modern data analytics.
Future-Ready Data Strategy with Pure Storage and Elastic
As digital transformation accelerates, data will continue to expand in both volume and value. To stay competitive, organizations must rethink how they store, access, and analyze this data. The combination of Elastic’s scalable architecture and Pure Storage’s advanced flash technology offers a compelling answer to these challenges.
Pure Storage’s portfolio empowers businesses to modernize their Elastic deployments, balancing performance with cost efficiency while delivering lightning-fast insights. Whether operating on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid models, enterprises gain the flexibility to optimize their data strategy for the future.
Frequently Asked Questions:
What is Elastic, and why is it important for modern enterprises?
Elastic is a powerful open-source platform used for searching, analyzing, and visualizing large amounts of data in real time. Enterprises use it for log analysis, application search, monitoring, and security analytics to gain faster insights and improve system performance.
How does data growth impact Elastic deployments?
As data volume grows—especially with IoT, DevOps, and microservices—the infrastructure supporting Elastic faces higher performance and storage demands. This leads to increased operational costs, complexity, and scalability challenges, making it crucial to optimize both performance and cost.
How does Pure Storage enhance Elastic’s performance and efficiency?
Pure Storage delivers high-performance, all-flash storage solutions like FlashArray//X, FlashBlade//S, and FlashBlade//E that are designed to accelerate Elastic workloads. These solutions offer faster query response times, simplified architecture, and reduced total cost of ownership.
What are Elastic Data Tiers, and how do they optimize storage?
Elastic Data Tiers (hot, warm, cold, and frozen) categorize data based on usage frequency. By pairing each tier with the right Pure Storage solution, organizations can store frequently accessed data on high-performance tiers while moving older or infrequently accessed data to cost-efficient tiers.
How does using cold and frozen tiers help reduce costs?
Cold and frozen tiers leverage searchable snapshots that store data on low-cost object storage. This eliminates the need for duplicate data (replica shards), cutting storage use by up to 50% and reducing infrastructure and compute costs significantly.
What makes FlashBlade//E unique for Elastic workloads?
FlashBlade//E offers all-flash, capacity-optimized object storage at disk-level costs. It combines high performance with affordability, making it ideal for Elastic’s cold and frozen data tiers that need both speed and cost efficiency.
Can organizations use Elastic on-premises with Pure Storage?
Yes. Many enterprises deploy Elastic on-premises using Pure Storage to meet data sovereignty, compliance, and cost control requirements. Pure Storage solutions provide a cloud-like experience with the control and performance benefits of on-prem environments.
Conclusion
In an era where data defines business success, achieving both high performance and cost efficiency is essential. Elastic empowers organizations to extract real-time insights from vast data sets, but its true potential is realized when paired with the right storage infrastructure. Pure Storage revolutionizes Elastic deployments by delivering flash-driven speed, scalability, and simplicity without compromising affordability. With intelligent data tiering, seamless scalability, and cutting-edge solutions like FlashArray//X, FlashBlade//S, and FlashBlade//E, enterprises can unlock faster queries, reduce operational costs, and future-proof their data strategy.
