Continuous Access for File, Powered by the Everpure Platform

We’re proud to announce Everpure™ ActiveCluster™ for file—bringing synchronous replication, continuous access, and transparent mobility directly into the unified data plane—will be released in the second quarter of this year. With ActiveCluster for file, you can keep your most important file data sets continuously available across sites—with the same simplicity, efficiency, and resilience that customers have trusted from ActiveCluster for block since 2017.

What is ActiveCluster?

When Everpure first launched ActiveCluster, it took the storage world by storm. For the first time, enterprises handling demanding block workloads could deploy synchronous, always‑available, always‑up‑to‑date volumes to hosts without multi‑day projects, specialized infrastructure, custom scripts, or specialist consulting. It was revolutionary.

What sets ActiveCluster apart, both then and now, is its simplicity and flexibility. Setup takes minutes instead of hours or days. Once deployed, it provides a zero-second recovery point objective (RTO) file solution that doesn’t require application teams to take any action and offers resilient, always-on services to their end customers—even in the event of a site-wide disaster spanning hundreds of miles or kilometers. 

We’re applying the same philosophy to mission‑critical file data sets across organizations of any size.

Introducing ActiveCluster for file

Powered by the Everpure platform, ActiveCluster for file extends ActiveCluster architecture to file workloads, so you can deliver continuous access and true mobility for the shares, home directories, and file‑backed applications your business runs on. It’s designed to help you shift from managing hardware to managing data.

We designed a solution in opposition to the traditional, hardware-focused approach of legacy storage that eliminates:

• Static, point-to-point architecture: Availability is bound to controller pairs and defined at individual arrays, trapping data in specific silos.
• Complex operations and risk: Complex hardware relationships require human knowledge and intervention to manage failovers and upkeep. Being tied to the hardware makes refreshes disruptive and introduces risk. 
• Pre-cloud operational models: Hardware-centric replication does not allow for mobility without manual intervention, which requires complex planning, establishing replication relationships, and mount and remount coordination.
• Lack of policy-driven standardization and SLA control: Configuration is hardware centric and one off, not data driven. SLAs are managed through manual settings and rigid, all or nothing constructs, with no granular, policy based enforcement or automatic adjustment.
• Lack of mobility due to zero data context: Moving data becomes difficult without understanding where future data should be deployed and how application data maps to underlying hardware.

ActiveCluster for file creates a stretched, synchronous file service that acts as an on-demand, fleet-wide utility across two locations, rather than relying on dedicated, costly hardware. Writes are committed at both sites, and the global namespace ensures users and applications see a single, consistent view of their data. Maintenance, upgrades, and even unplanned events become infrastructure details, not business‑level incidents.

Crucially, ActiveCluster for file is a native Purity data service, not a bolt‑on stack. It’s built into the same modern, flash‑native file architecture that powers the rest of the Everpure Platform, so you get high availability without bolting extra complexity (and cost) onto an aging design.

Figure 1: Value created with ActiveCluster for file, an app-to-data solution. 

How ActiveCluster for file stays active

During planned maintenance, the platform can shift I/O without requiring users to remount shares or change paths. During unplanned disruptions, failover is automatic and transparent, with the same file paths and handles remaining valid before, during, and after the event. ActiveCluster for file coordinates SMB file locks and leases on the active array and transfers that state during failover, so applications keep their sessions and I/O semantics intact rather than retrying or reconnecting. We’re delivering the industry’s first SMB continuous availability shares across arrays for a file service that simply works and is always available, regardless of whether there has been a site‑wide failover.

Because the control plane understands workloads—not just volumes or arrays—it can make decisions with finer granularity. Instead of failing over entire sites, aggregates, or SVMs, you can align protection with realms, tenants, or specific applications, reducing the blast radius, utilizing network and storage infrastructure efficiently, and avoiding unnecessary disruption. Failover works across any arrays for the ultimate reliability.

Leveraging the power of Everpure Fusion

ActiveCluster for file is fully integrated with Everpure Fusion™ as the intelligent control plane that turns availability into a policy, not a per‑array configuration exercise. You define SLAs—such as zero RPO, target sites, and performance requirements—once in Everpure Fusion, and the platform automatically provisions, stretches, and protects file workloads across your fleet to meet those objectives.

As environments evolve, Everpure Fusion continuously maintains those policies, handling placement, non‑disruptive mobility, and failover logic behind the scenes, so storage teams aren’t constantly rebuilding replication relationships or revalidating complex topologies. In practice, that means ActiveCluster for file delivers synchronous protection and continuous access as an outcome of Everpure Fusion policies, giving you fleet‑wide, workload‑level business continuity without the day‑to‑day configuration overhead.

If you want file availability to move at the speed of the business, you need an operating model where SLAs are first‑class citizens and the platform takes responsibility for enforcing them. That’s what ActiveCluster for file and Everpure Fusion can deliver together.

Figure 2: How ActiveCluster for file and Everpure Fusion combine to deliver an intelligent control plane to manage all your data, regardless of where it lives.

ActiveCluster for file, powering your Enterprise Data Cloud vision

Most file high‑availability architectures were designed decades ago, in a world of 16‑bit address ranges, 1.44MB floppies, and spinning disks. These historical architectural underpinnings prevent legacy storage vendors from fully utilizing leading-edge storage technologies to deliver the flexibility and adaptability that modern businesses require. 

ActiveCluster for file and Everpure Fusion start from the opposite end of the equation: SLAs and workloads, not hardware and runbooks. Where traditional file HA is locked to specific controller pairs and stretched clusters, we use a unified, software‑defined control plane to deliver availability as a fleet‑wide policy. It’s a software-defined data silo killer.

ActiveCluster for file extends the Everpure Platform to deliver on the Enterprise Data Cloud vision with a solution that is:

• Software‑defined and Everpure Fusion‑first, with availability driven by policy and enforced fleet-wide, not wired into specific hardware pairings
• Workload‑centric, empowering you to align SLAs to the way your business actually consumes data—by application, tenant, or realm—rather than broad, site‑level constructs
• On-demand, delivering “any array, any time cloud operations” with both sites contributing to production performance and protection instead of leaving a secondary system idle as insurance
• Operationally simple, with setup measured in minutes, no extra mediation appliances to maintain, and no need to constantly re‑validate complex replication relationships

By bringing the proven ActiveCluster model to file workloads, Everpure is ending the trade‑off among availability, simplicity, and cost for one of the most critical layers of your environment. Service level agreements stop being an aspiration you have to translate into dedicated hardware. They become guarantees governed by policy and translated into data sets across your enterprise data landscape.

Everpure enables enterprises to stop managing siloed storage arrays and start managing data.Everpure enables enterprises to stop managing siloed storage arrays and start managing data.