


Everpure Storage FlashBlade and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct are robust storage solutions competing in the enterprise storage category. FlashBlade seems to have the upper hand in performance and ease of integration, while Storage Spaces Direct is advantageous in cost-effectiveness for Windows infrastructure.
Features: Everpure Storage FlashBlade is recognized for its impressive performance scalability, ease of integration, and high throughput. It simplifies storage management and supports data-intensive workloads efficiently. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct provides built-in redundancy and fault tolerance, enhancing data availability. Its caching and mirroring capabilities significantly boost storage performance.
Room for Improvement: Everpure Storage FlashBlade users seek better cloud integration, more affordable pricing, and enhanced documentation. Additionally, there's interest in improved deduplication and simplified support services. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could improve its GUI management tools and licensing transparency, as well as address network and integration challenges.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Everpure Storage FlashBlade offers robust technical support with proactive monitoring and quick response times, though service quality issues are noted as the company grows. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct benefits from easy integration into Windows environments, although support experiences vary in consistency and effectiveness.
Pricing and ROI: Everpure Storage FlashBlade is often seen as expensive, justified by its high-demand environment performance and comprehensive software package. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct offers better affordability as part of the Windows server environment, which can result in significant cost savings. Both solutions demonstrate ROI through operational efficiencies, with Storage Spaces Direct favored for budget-conscious deployments.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
Our current workload, particularly the SQL use case, would not be possible on mechanical storage, and the ease of use for the small team for the array is important for supporting that workload.
Pure Storage FlashArray integrates with APIs and other systems.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
While our systems will be out of life in a few years, I believe that in that time, the payback from Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct will save us money on virtualization and storage costs, making it extremely beneficial after six years of use.
I see some ROI in Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, such as saving time and money, and I estimate these savings to be about 30%.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
I would rate the technical support an 11 out of 10.
The support from Pure Storage is excellent.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
Their technical support has been perfect lately, so I would give it a 10.
There were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions.
Microsoft focuses on Azure as a cloud service.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
The solution is highly scalable, particularly when there is a need to expand capacity.
Theoretically, we can do controller upgrades and get into a larger chassis, but there was a limit to how far we could go without needing to do a full migration.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
There are between 5 and 10,000 people using it in our organization.
The scalability of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has been extremely good, allowing for both vertical and horizontal expansion.
It has limitations; it's configured for eight servers per site but can be scaled to 16 servers.
The scalability of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is limited.
For stability, I rate it a ten out of ten.
We have continuous 99.9% uptime and do not experience any users reporting performance issues due to latency.
The vision Pure Storage FlashArray offers through the GUI is clearer; we can discern the status, what is cabled, and how direct flash is enabled.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has been incredibly stable as long as it is configured correctly; incorrect configurations lead to surprises, which is common with any product.
Storage Spaces Direct is stable enough, however, there can be some glitches.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
One way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade.
The licensing for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could be improved to be clearer, as calculating license requirements requires significant expertise; even Microsoft resources do not provide the full picture needed for licensing, leaving gaps that become evident once we move to deploy solutions.
One year ago, I had a problem, and it was difficult to identify and solve due to a lack of tools.
The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and there are problems regarding performance that need to be addressed.
They're expensive.
While they say it's free, we actually pay for support upfront.
Some smaller organizations may find it slightly expensive, but for enterprises, when considering performance, future hardware investments, and overall benefits, it is a very cost-effective solution for mid and enterprise organizations.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making it good for us.
I find the Azure Local to be a bit expensive, especially due to hidden costs associated with additional tools needed for monitoring and alerting.
Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct.
FlashArray's integration with the Pure One instrument provides a centralized platform for efficient management of all arrays.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
It handles internal data migration seamlessly in the background without going offline, achieving a hundred percent uptime.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade's scalability is one of the most valuable features, and importantly, it always works, allowing for seamless upgrades.
The redundancy and fault tolerance features of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct have helped maintain data integrity and availability in my company by providing multiple copies through three-way mirroring, delivering hardware performance needed for our applications, which is crucial.
For caching, I use disks with more total bits written, which protects the main storage because writes are combined.
The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 63 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 36 |
| Large Enterprise | 143 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
| Large Enterprise | 21 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
Everpure Storage FlashArray delivers simplicity, speed, and performance with ease of management and data reduction capabilities. Its resilience and seamless upgrades complement its integration with VMware, while predictive analytics and proactive support enhance reliability.
Everpure Storage FlashArray leverages a flash-based architecture for improved storage efficiency, reduced footprint, and outstanding data management through deduplication and compression. Users appreciate its single pane of glass management and Evergreen model. It supports VMware environments effectively, offering predictive analytics for better operational insights. The system is noted for its user-friendly management and proactive support, ensuring minimal downtime while delivering resilient storage solutions.
What Key Features Does Everpure Storage FlashArray Offer?In industries like finance, banking, and healthcare, Everpure Storage FlashArray supports high-performance storage needs focusing on virtualization and database environments. Employed for VMware workloads, disaster recovery, and storage provisioning, it ensures application performance in private or hybrid cloud setups while enhancing management of virtualized environments.
Everpure Storage FlashBlade offers reliable and high-performance data management with ease of use, speed, and scalability. Its seamless integration ensures efficient data handling and management, addressing diverse industry needs.
Everpure Storage FlashBlade is designed to cater to demanding operational requirements, delivering high performance and low latency. Its simplicity in management, along with effective data replication, enhances usability. Predictive performance analytics, inline deduplication, and disaster recovery capabilities further enrich user experience. Despite its strengths, improvements are needed in public cloud integration, UI complexity, and documentation. Users suggest enhanced deduplication and hybrid solutions, better configurations, dashboard metrics, and S3 integration. Feedback also highlights the need for features like snapshots, expanded file storage, and performance upgrades.
What are the most important features of Everpure Storage FlashBlade?In data center consolidation, media management, and PACS archiving, Everpure Storage FlashBlade meets specific industry needs. Companies in banking and healthcare leverage cost-effective performance and scalability for efficient data access, supporting AI training, big data analytics, and enterprise workloads with high IOPS requirements. Media and entertainment entities use it for video editing and storage management, benefiting from seamless NAS, file, and object storage.
Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.
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