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Cohesity SmartFiles vs Qumulo comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
Cohesity SmartFiles
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.5
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (19th)
Qumulo
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
NAS (6th), File and Object Storage (10th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
SM
Evangelist / CTO at fgnext
Enables effective data management with reliable backup and recovery
Cohesity SmartFiles aids in data management with features like full-text search through indexed documents. The architecture supports backup, ransomware awareness, and data management on a converged platform, offering triple-protocol access (NFS, CIFS, and S3) while facilitating gradual improvements in access rights management. It allows for redundant setups, with automated backup and recovery options in a cloud environment.
reviewer2536608 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
UI has simplified pixel data insights and cost savings while hardware lifecycle still needs work
There is an option I would like to see. Instead of installing a separate Grafana server to get the telemetry data, why can we not set up the same capability in the UI itself? Then we could choose the retention period of the log and get everything inside the Qumulo dashboard itself, rather than installing a separate Grafana server, because we need to maintain a separate server to collect these metrics. There is one more needed improvement I noticed. If you compare Qumulo to Dell Isilon as a vendor, a patch update with Dell Isilon covers the hardware as well. In Qumulo, however, you have to maintain the hardware lifecycle and the software separately. This means every time you update your server, you have to update two entities: one is the hardware and the other is Qumulo. So it might be quite challenging. A great deal of time is also involved for an engineer to do both of these things, so I do not think Qumulo can directly integrate with the hardware so that we can update the Qumulo software together with the hardware patches. Right now, I do not have any other improvements needed for Qumulo that I have not mentioned yet.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Pure Storage is seen as a visionary company with leading edge technology."
"It does everything they say it will do: It's very cost-effective compared to other big players, integrates very well with VMware, is tiny so we're saving power and space in the data center, and it's really easy for us to manage."
"It has improved the way our organization functions by improving the resilience of our infrastructure by quite a bit."
"The best features Everpure FlashArray offers are the speed and dependability, which are the main features that we get from Pure; it is faster than its competition, and we do not have any documented downtime from it ever."
"It’s easy to set up and support is excellent."
"It has been quite satisfactory in performance and scalability."
"It is fast and reliable. It works."
"This was our first all-flash storage enclosure, so we saw huge boost in performance for all of our servers."
"Cohesity SmartFiles aids in data management with features like full-text search through indexed documents."
"The most valuable feature of Qumulo is the ability to share files and reliability."
"Qumulo has positively impacted my organization with the scalability of size; we were at one petabyte and we were able to increase it to two petabytes, and increasing our storage from one to two petabytes was a smooth process and it was easy to increase size."
"All in all, it's a very good product, resilient, with good performance and scalability that is pretty easy."
"It is a very stable product. I never faced any issues."
"The feature that I like most is the analytics part of the file system."
"I rate customer support for Qumulo as excellent, giving it a 10 for its top-tier service in response, resolution, and overall attention to customer needs."
"One of the best things I love about Qumulo is the performance and the support available."
"The best feature I saw in Qumulo is that the UI itself is pretty easy to use."
 

Cons

"Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged."
"Many high-end platforms from other vendors like Dell EMC or Hitachi, their backend has Active/Active architecture, unlike Pure Storage FlashArray which doesn't utilize an Active/Active architecture on the backend."
"A noticeable area for improvement is the support for object storage."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"Users must remember that running DataProtect and files on the same cluster could threaten access if there is a platform failure. It's not suitable for applications needing high I/O or low latency."
"In the next release, I would like to see the ability to have more control at a terminal level of the file system."
"The support for iMac and protocols should be improved, not all features are available."
"I have not seen a concrete return on investment with Qumulo, as the project scope does not allow me to assess metrics such as money or time saved."
"There is plenty of room for improvement. In the future, I would like to see non-disruptive updates."
"Qumulo should continue to expand automation and orchestration capabilities."
"The solution could improve availability and improve data protection or data services such as compression of deduplication. In a future release, we'd like to have more cloud API integrations."
"The price of the software is a bit expensive, so a reduction in cost would make it more competitive."
"One aspect of Qumulo that I hoped to see improved was its software upgrade process, which did see significant progress during my usage. Initially, upgrading the software resulted in several minutes of system downtime. However, by the time I departed last summer, the downtime had reduced to mere ten seconds. Although I am unsure if Qumulo has yet achieved a completely outage-free upgrade, I simply performed the upgrades early in the morning before the marketing department began its workday, so any downtime was inconsequential."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"FlashArray is expensive, but the quality justifies the price."
"It is cost-effective because after buying a subscription, they provide a service to upgrade hardware for free. They are providing so many features. When you consider the features provided, it is cost-effective."
"We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature."
"It's a good price point and it's a solid product for the price."
"It's priced higher than the market."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
Information not available
"The price of Qumulo is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is in the middle range compared to others. We look at the price per terabyte."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity SmartFiles?
SmartFiles is an economical solution, priced per terabyte on the backend. Initial setup and licensing costs align wit...
What needs improvement with Cohesity SmartFiles?
Users must remember that running DataProtect and files on the same cluster could threaten access if there is a platfo...
What is your primary use case for Cohesity SmartFiles?
Our customers use Cohesity SmartFiles ( /products/cohesity-smartfiles-reviews ) in conjunction with Cohesity SpanFS (...
What needs improvement with Qumulo?
Qumulo can be improved but not necessarily; it was fairly smooth to set up, and the support is great and easy to mana...
What is your primary use case for Qumulo?
My main use case for Qumulo is asset data storage. When I was working at Mercury Filmworks, we used Qumulo to store o...
What advice do you have for others considering Qumulo?
I would rate Qumulo a nine on a scale of 1 to 10. I rate it a nine because the cost is what keeps it from being a ten...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
1. Acer 2. Adobe 3. AIG 4. Airbus 5. Allstate 6. Amazon 7. American Express 8. Aon 9. Apple 10. ATT 11. Autodesk 12. Bank of America 13. Barclay's 14. Bayer 15. BlackRock 16. Boeing 17. BNP Paribas 18. Cisco 19. Coca-Cola 20. Comcast 21. Dell 22. Deutsche Bank 23. Equinix 24. ExxonMobil 25. Ford 26. GE 27. Google 28. HP 29. IBM 30. Intel 31. JPMorgan Chase 32. Kroger
County of Riverside Sheriff Department, Hyundai Mobis Automotive North America, University of Arizona, UCSD - San Diego Supercomputer Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Sinclair Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Kaiser Permanente, Deluxe Creative, Vexcel Imaging, University of Florida, The Madison Square Garden Company, Arizona State University, Cinesite, San Diego Padres Baseball, Johns Hopkins University - School of Medicine, IHME, EllieMae, Washington State University.
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