Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Portworx Enterprise comparison

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Portworx Enterprise

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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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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Paulo Jose Bosco Otto

Consultant at PBOservicos-Informatica

A solution backed by strong customer support, that is stable and scalable

As a company managed in a Kubernetes environment, being trusted by a Kubernetes vendor, Red Hat creates barriers against using other certified solutions that work. Because IBM is a competitor of Pure Storage, things seem to be getting worse. I don't have plans to use Portworx Enterprise in the future because, at the moment, I am working with Ondat, and I have to follow NetApp's direction on that. When evaluating Portworx, one should make sure their company has already chosen Pure Storage. Still, if they are evaluating the solution on Ondat or Dell or other platforms, they should get a roadmap statement from Pure Storage, that they will continue to develop storage hardware diagnostics. I rate Portworx a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

"It's very easy-to-use."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."

"The main positive impact that Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has had on my company over the years is increasing performance; our checks show it is three times faster than VMware, making us extremely happy and motivated to keep using it."

"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"Its technical support is excellent."

"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."

"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"The best thing about Portworx is the Stork, they have called the VPS (Volume Replacement Strategy) and they also have topology awareness, and these are the three features I like."

"Portworx virtualizes the aspects of the underlying block storage. That is good because they can also use block storage for their future deployment instead of just NFS."

"A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, providing crucial data services and features required for enterprise applications."

"Portworx is a simple solution. It's similar to Pure Storage products. They're all easy to use and install. You need to have a little expertise with containers to use Portworx, but it will be no problem for you if you understand containers."

"I like that you have a small dedicated file system that is fast and resilient for containerized workloads."

"The solution is user-friendly."

Cons

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

"Documentation management could be improved"

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service and technical support of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct a three, as there were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions."

"There is a lot of room for improvement. I would like to have more tools to monitor the function and problems."

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"I think the vendor could provide more training for new users who may not be familiar with containers."

"It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchasing backup separately."

"I would like to see a more native mapping to mainframe-type systems."

"The documentation could be better."

"They have not integrated Portworx with Ondat since they are too focused now on Pure Storage APIs and not on users like us."

"The integration has room for improvement."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"The price could be cheaper."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

"The solution is expensive."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"It has two offerings. One is free, which is limited to only five nodes. The other is enterprise, which is a bit pricier."

"The price is competitive, but it is too expensive when paired with Red Hat IBM."

"The price of Portworx Enterprise is high."

"I'm not sure how the licensing was broken out, but I don't think our offering of the Portworx was more than USD $20,000."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	3

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Overall, I find the cost of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct to be affordable for the on-prem Windows pure solution, b...

What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recomme...

What do you like most about Portworx Enterprise?

A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, provid...

What needs improvement with Portworx Enterprise?

It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchas...

What advice do you have for others considering Portworx Enterprise?

I would recommend ensuring that you perform regular backups, specifically the TX backup, which is essential for Portw...

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Compared 17% of the time

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Compared 43% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Cloud Software Defined Storage

Download Portworx Enterprise product report

Also Known As

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MS Storage Spaces Direct

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Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure 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.

Microsoft

Portworx is the solution for running stateful containers in production, designed with DevOps in mind. With Portworx, users can manage any database or stateful service on any infrastructure using any container scheduler, including Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm. Portworx solves the five most common problems DevOps teams encounter when running stateful services in production: persistence, high availability, data automation, security, and support for multiple data stores and infrastructure.

Pure Storage

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

NIO, GE Digital, DreamWorks Animation, Lufthansa, beco, NEW CONTEXT

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Portworx Enterprise