Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array Reviews

I use this product for high-speed parallel storage, multi-user asset storage, and production storage. Basically, it's the high-speed tier of our production pipeline and backend.

The solution's performance and density are excellent.

Typically, there is a trade-off. You can have incredibly dense storage in a small footprint sometimes, but the trade-off to that is you need a lot of horsepower to access it, which ends up counterbalancing the small footprint. Then, sometimes you can have very fast access to a storage array, but that usually requires a more comprehensive infrastructure.

This kind of balance, to somehow fit it all into one chassis, in a 4U server rack, is unheard of. You have the processing proxy accessing the data and almost a petabyte of flash accessible.

It's a very small footprint, which is important to our type of industry because we don't have massive servers.

We have benefited from this technology because we were able to centralize a lot of workflows. There is normally a trade-off, where you can have very fast local storage on the computer, but in a collaborative environment that's counterproductive because it requires people to share files and then copy them onto their system in order to get the very fast local performance. But with Pavilion, basically, you get that local NVMe performance but over a fabric, which makes it easier to keep things in sync.

We have been able to consolidate storage and as part of a multi-layer storage system, it plays a very important part. For us, it cuts down on costs because we essentially get an NVMe tier that's large enough to hold everyone's data, but the other thing for us is time and collaboration. Flexibility is worth a lot to us, as is creativity, so having the resources to do that is incredibly valuable.

If we wanted to do so, Pavilion could help us create a separation between storage and compute resources. It's one of those things where, in some environments, such as separation is natural and in other environments, there's an inclination to minimize the separation between compute and data. But to that point, Pavilion has the flexibility to allow you to really do whatever you want.

In that sense, you have some workloads where compute is very close to the data, such as iterative stuff, whereas we have some things where we simply want bulk data processing. You can do any of that but for us, that type of separation is not necessarily something we are concerned with, just given our type of workflows. That said, we have that flexibility if necessary.

This system has allowed us to ingest a lot of data in parallel at once, and that has been very useful because it's a parallel system. It's really helped eliminate a lot of the traditional bottlenecks we've had.

Pavilion could allow for running additional virtual machines on existing infrastructure, although in our case, the limitation is the core densities in our hardware. That said, it is definitely useful for handling the storage layer in a lot of our VMs. The problem is that the constraints of our VM deployments are really in just how many other boxes we have to handle the cores and the memory.

The most valuable features are the NVMe flash array and the parallel architecture of the underlying system. Instead of having very large gateway nodes or very large servers that exist at the border of a lake of storage, the Pavilion approach is to have many mid-size to smaller server nodes, which can basically all access the main flash array. This means that there's no bottleneck going into that very high-speed array. It's a better size, given the size of the user requests.

Typically, Pavilion sizes its multi-node system in such a way that each parallel node can actually service requests from individual users and because there are so many of them, everyone can essentially do this in parallel. It eliminates the bottlenecks in that respect.

Pavilion provides us with flexibility in our storage, which is one of the reasons that we've applied this architecture. There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint. Ultimately, Pavilion ensures industry-standard protocols. They present their storage as just NVMe over Fabrics, so it's standard-conforming. That means you can basically hook it into anything you want. It means that you can run GPFS on it, and you can run anything that can talk to NVMe over Fabrics. This means that we can use the Pavilion box as a drop-in replacement for a conventional array.

The fact that this solution enables us to run block, file, and object storage is something that's very important. As the industry changes, there's a tendency towards that type of overall storage solution and there's a lot of competition in that space. It's nice to see Pavilion taking it very seriously. It's one of those things where our needs evolve on a day-to-day basis. While it may not be important now, it will become more important in the future and it's important that anyone in this segment takes that technology seriously.

We haven't deployed Pavilion's HyperOS 3.0 support for global namespace for files and objects yet, although I have used it in lab environments. I think it's very compelling and I'm very excited about it. Of course, with NVMe, we roll things out slowly. But luckily, we have excellent partners in the area like AIT, who has a lab deployment where we can actually test these features out. Really, HyperOS 3.0 is the result of a lot of feedback that we provided them as well as played a key role in how that was architected. So, it's nice to see our feedback reflected in the direction of the software and the hardware.

For us, in terms of what is very important, is keeping pace with the evolution of the new standards. For example, as PCI Express 4.0 becomes more ubiquitous, moving into PCI Express 5 is important. Having an architecture that can truly utilize 200-gig or maybe 400-gig networking, or having storage densities in line with what we would expect in a Gen 4, Gen 5 PCI Express, are things that as they come available, I hope that the vendor is looking at that going into the future. We need this because we're really at the point where our workloads are about to explode outwards.

I would like to see the management layer improved. HyperOS 3.0 is excellent, and this is important because one of the things that we looked at in the beginning, before HyperOS 3.0 had been released, was that this is an excellent technology and it's very versatile, but it would be great if we could run certain things on this box. It would be helpful if there were more ways to consume the APIs or if there were some ways to get into the hardware, get into the functionality of the system programmatically, or have flexibility where, for example, we just need to do quick namespaces, or something similar. We don't want to deploy an entire secondary storage layer on top of this. Rather, we just want to run something quick. Having a containerized system or having some sort of first-party support for basic storage functionality, or basic extensibility would be excellent for us. In many ways, these boxes are very malleable. It's a blank slate, but having a little more in terms of, if you want more directed use of it, having some way to really get at that, would be helpful.

We have been using the Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array for more than six months.

We have put this product through a lot and it is still running like it's new, so it's excellent, stability-wise.

This solution allows us to start small and scale up as we need to. That's something that we really like about its architecture. It's very modular, so we had a lot of flexibility in how we could size everything, and how we could deploy it.

We could start small and expand outwards, or we could start big and then add even more in the future if we needed to. When we talked about everything, part of what we discussed was starting with a few nodes in a box, versus starting with all of the nodes in a box. What we discovered is that when you need more, you just add them. Then, when the box is full, you just add another box.

Although we work with our partner for support, we do work directly with the vendor, as well. It's a close relationship just because Pavilion will coordinate with our local integrator. Pavilion's always been very active when we have questions, for example. It's nice to have that kind of dialogue.

We have not really needed support directly from Pavilion but in our experience, they are responsive and the support is excellent.

When we chose to implement Pavilion, we were augmenting our existing storage. We needed to add a very fast flash layer to our storage strategy. Our existing implementation was excellent and very robust, but what we started to need was a very high-performance, zero-tier layer. It became obvious that there needed to be something different, and that is where Pavilion came in.

I oversaw the planning setup and deployment, and the whole process was excellent.

We worked with an integrator and they started by setting everything up in their lab. We were able to access everything and the changeover was fairly rapid. With an excellent integrator, it's really a minimal deployment. 

For a system with this performance, being such a powerful system and such a big part of our infrastructure, it was a very painless deployment. It felt similar to adding a few servers to our computer capacity versus adding an entire storage layer.

We spent between one and two months in the planning. There were a lot of delays because this was happening right around when COVID was starting, so it's hard to pin down exact timelines just because there were a lot of periods of time where we couldn't go back into the office. However, when our integrator was finished with it, they came in on a Monday and we were all finished on Tuesday night.

For us, the process ran in parallel. We identified certain functionalities, certain items, that the Pavilion would now be taking over in terms of the responsibility of our workflow. We really developed everything, and then had the Pavilion set up in parallel to our existing systems. Once it was in place and ready, we just did a switch-over.

We partnered with a company called AIT here in LA, and they are partners with Pavilion. They did an excellent job, essentially, getting everything deployed, where we were able to access everything that they had set up in their lab.

They are an excellent integrator.

Whether or not we have seen a return on the investment is hard to estimate because my team is a research and development/production group. Our goal is mainly innovating new production technologies for our industry, so for us, the return on investment is really just the rate at which we can iterate and innovate amongst our team.

In that respect, it's been incredibly good. In terms of affordability, I think it's very easy to justify this type of system because what you save in footprint, complexity, and labor, coupled with the boost in team efficiency and creativity, together justify the cost.

The licensing is fairly painless because Pavilion is not in the business of selling you NVMe flash media, which is something that we liked about them. Their stake in the whole thing is their box. This means that if you have a pre-existing relationship with another storage hardware provider and get your flash from somewhere else, their system is flexible and can work with all of these different solutions. There's a lot of flexibility in that you can choose which NVMe goes inside the Pavilion box, and you can choose how you layout everything and basically how you prioritize densities versus parallel.

The licensing fees are very reasonable.

This solution provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price. It's like having the local, direct-attached storage, but SANs typically require a lot of management. They're very hard to deploy in smaller and really fast-paced environments just because, by nature, they were architected for a different era, in terms of processing and requirements.

Pavilion essentially gives us the flexibility of the positive features of a traditional SAN without the massive human and capital expenditure, or the maintenance of it. At the same time, it gives us the positives of what we had traditionally associated with direct-attached storage in terms of performance.

In this respect, it has saved us time, money, and physical space. When you look at this, especially over a period of a few years, it's a very compelling approach for an industry like ours to look at.

We looked at a lot of other vendors. There's a lot of very compelling technology in the space, it's just that Pavilion was very interesting because they aren't reselling another OEM's parts. It's not to say that's bad, but Pavilion is focusing a lot on the innovation of first-party hardware, which is unusual in the space, but they're doing it correctly.

That is incredibly compelling because when it comes to innovation, we see a lot has been done on computing hardware and software, but we've really taken for granted the traditional paradigm of the SAN or the JBOD, essentially connected into a few servers, and that's your storage array. From there, Pavilion has come in with this very innovative new approach at the hardware level.

We chose Pavilion because they stand apart from their competitors in the sense that they currently have no equal, in terms of the tier of access. They have a very innovative system, which simply doesn't exist anywhere else. It's not just its metrics, it's the architecture that is truly innovative. It's a different approach, which happens to fit our needs quite well.

We don't have anybody who is dedicated full-time to the management of this solution because it really doesn't need it. We have people doing maintenance on it who are responsible for refining and adding when we need certain things added or taken away. But, it's a fairly robust system that really doesn't need a lot of care, which is good for us because it means we can allocate our resources elsewhere. We have support through the vendor partners, so if there would be an issue, we can have them come out and they'll take care of it.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to first look at your networking strategy and if you feel like that's something that needs to be addressed, the Pavilion is an incredibly good box. It's an incredibly powerful system but to get the full value out of it, you need the infrastructure to really utilize such a system.

If you're running on a 10-gigabit network, it's a great system but that's not where it shines. We have an incredibly high-speed network and we were able to get a lot out of it, but I would suggest making sure that you have the means of actually using something like this. It will do amazing things, just don't take for granted your core infrastructure, like your networking. Make sure that you have things in place because a lot of that relies on an excellent network layer and an excellent compute layer.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that networking is important. In a Windows environment, you can definitely take advantage of this type of system but it really shines in your Linux compute environments. Windows support is in development but it's just not at the same parity as Linux, currently.

In summary, this is an excellent system. I'm excited to see the new technologies as they come out, such as HyperOS 3.0. This is a very compelling next step in technology. As it matures, there is a lot of feedback to be had. As it stands right now, there are areas that can be enhanced and to see that they are being enhanced is very reassuring.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our use case is for internal company engineering operations and DevOps. Both our DevOps and engineering operations teams have a lot of compute and data-intensive activities associated with them.

Performance-wise, this product is faster than pretty much anything we've seen. In terms of the density and how it compares, what we have in-house is not very extensive in terms of other things we use, but in terms of our research and actually, what we have used, the density is much higher than anything else we've seen.

We can basically store the entire company's data inside of one unit, when the unit is properly configured. As it is now, it's equivalent to replacing three or four racks of equipment. The density is incredibly high.

This solution provides us with flexibility in our storage operations. It's software-defined storage, so we can allocate capacity however we want. It uses thin provisioning, which is convenient for us, and all sorts of other enterprise features that come with it that we haven't used quite yet. But, we can imagine we'll be taking advantage of them as the usage against the unit rises.

Our use case is primarily about performance, so consolidation has not saved us in terms of costs or capital expenditures. Our implementation of the product is an add-on to what's currently at the company. We've taken data out of the existing infrastructure and just moved it. The migration has allowed us to use it a lot faster, but we haven't gone through a consolidation exercise where we've gotten rid of the old equipment and now just depend on the new unit.

Absolutely, we are able to run more virtual machines on our existing infrastructure. With respect to storage management, we've reduced the amount of work that was required. In fact, we can eliminate most of the staff that has been dedicated to doing that in the old equipment. Now, we need very few people to administer the entire company using Pavilion. We can basically have one person manage all of the company's engineering data.

In terms of cost savings, in our situation, the cost we're saving is not headcount but rather, engineering time spent doing those kinds of activities. Where we may have had to spend a lot more time administering storage and IT equipment, we now have to spend much less time doing it, even though the headcount dedicated to IT is the same. Basically, opportunity costs have improved dramatically, as we've been able to assign staff to more value-added tasks.

We probably had three people spending between 25% and 50% of their time doing related activities, whereas now, we have one person spending perhaps 10% of their time.

We find it valuable that you can scale the capacity and the performance independently.

The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features.

In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented. That would get us more performance with a given number of line cards.

Their global namespace support is coming, and I believe it is based on NFS 4.1. We have a mix of both Linux and Windows usage in the company, and getting an NFS 4.1 client with Windows currently is difficult because I don't think that's supported. This is not an issue with the Pavilion product directly, versus more of the general environment. We would essentially like to see a Windows NFS 4.1 client supported so that we can take advantage of the Pavilion feature from both platforms.

Having a little more ease of use with the NFS global namespace vis-a-vis Windows would be an improvement.

We installed the Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array fairly recently, about four months ago.

The reliability has been rock solid so far. We've only had it for four months so that's not quite a long runtime, but it's been perfect so far.

This is a single product but you can configure the capacity or the performance independently. You can configure the capacity by adding more SSDs into the product, or you can configure the performance by adding more line cards.

This product allows us to start small and scale up, which is very important because we don't want to spend unneeded CapEx if there is no usage driving the extra capacity, beyond what we need.

If a product were implemented where the minimum configuration has much more capacity or performance than you need initially, you're committed to an outlay that you may not need for quite some time. It means that you make a larger CapEx purchase and then carry whatever OpEx licensing, year over year, for capacity and/or performance that you're not going to use for a while. In Pavilion's case, they allow you to start small and scale up, so we began with a minimal configuration that was suitable for our needs, and thereby we're not wasting or using funds until we actually need the additional capacity or performance.

Right now, we are still building out our engineering environment so it's being used lightly, but we have plans to use it quite heavily. In terms of scaling up capacity, that'll be a little bit hard to predict, but I could reasonably see us double the capacity. Perhaps in the worst case, quadruple it. With respect to increasing performance, we'll address it on an as-needed basis.

The service support has been excellent. Whenever we have had an issue, or for example, we haven't had an issue but whenever we have accidentally misconfigured something, the service organization has automatically been notified of that. In these cases, they've gotten back to us within 20 minutes to inquire about what's going on. At that point, we've realized our mistake, and we've been very happy with that.

Support is incredibly proactive and responsive. The reason that they're responsive is that the unit is monitored by their service center.

Prior to Pavilion, we had a solution that was implemented by our IT department, and it consisted of racks of hard drives distributed across multiple sites for backups and things like that. We switched because for our use case, we required a lot more performance, moving data from storage to the applications that needed it and back, because the applications that were using this data also generate a lot of data. The legacy solution was really not designed to do that.

I did not personally set it up but I have somebody who reports to me, and they said it was very straightforward. We had a deployment plan, although it was quite simple.

Everything was running within one or two days. This included bringing the unit up and having everything configured. Most of the time was spent applying the software updates. Once that was complete, it came right up and we put it online.

In terms of stability and any issues that came up during the deployment, there were none. Everything came up as advertised.

Our in-house team was responsible for the deployment. They were trained by Pavilion and the training was very straightforward in that they just use the unit.

It is too early in our build-out to judge whether we're getting ROI or not, but we fully anticipate that we will.

This solution provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price, although in our use case, we were mostly concerned about performance. As such, we were a little less sensitive to price. That said, for the performance we get, it's a lower cost than anything else we've researched.

With respect to pricing, my advice is that you should have an understanding of what your OpEx goals are and analyze the Pavilion offering in terms of those, to make sure you can support the equipment year over year. Then, the initial outlay for the equipment is probably going to be very company-dependent.

There are no costs beyond the initial outlay for the equipment and the annual maintenance, which is a combination of the capacity and the line card that you have in the system.

We've evaluated other solutions but the shortcomings of the others were that they did not scale capacity and performance as easily as the Pavilion solution did. The competitors also used SSDs and NVMe over fabric.

We are planning to use HyperOS 3.0 but we have not upgraded to it yet.

Our data ingestion rates have not been impacted one way or another, as it is not quite applicable to our use case.

This unit is so dense and the performance is so high that the advice I would give is that if performance is a critical factor for your use case, then you really ought to look at this unit. Performance and scalability are the two key things you really need to look at because scaling is incredibly easy to achieve. If that's important and you want to avoid a lot of costs in purchasing extra equipment and more networking as you scale up, and the same is true for capacity, then definitely give Pavilion a look because you really don't have to change anything to get that implemented.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We run a virtualized workload. Right now, we run everything on Pavilion, which includes our high performance databases and engineering tasks as well as Exchange and file shares. All that stuff runs on our Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array.

We use block storage for our VMware infrastructure and are a complete VM shop. All of our files servers run on VMs, which use block storage on the Pavilion device.

It comes down to the performance that they offer as well as the flexibility of bringing your own disk and replacing them on your own cycle. Those are the benefits that we get.

We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN.

We have been able to run a tremendous number of VMs on our Pavilion system. We haven't seen a change in staff. I wouldn’t consider any solution that I have to bring on additional staff to support. It is mostly about cost savings in hardware, and a happiness factor for all our users that everything will work so quickly.

The performance on it is stellar, but what most attracted me to the solution was the bring your own disk idea. With traditional SAN storage, you are buying their technology and name, but the disks are just commodity disks. When you open up an HPE SAN or a Dell EMC SAN, and you start pulling the drives out, they are the same kind of drives that you can buy on Amazon all day long. However, they add an extra zero to the cost at the end; they are ten times or more what you would actually pay to buy these things yourself. They just flash them with a special firmware so their SAN will recognize and use them, preventing other similar disks from working in it, then they charge you a premium. 

With Pavilion’s BYOD technology, as long as you have some high-performance disk (and it is a well-known disk in the marketplace) you can buy your own disk and populate your array however you want. This means that you don't have to buy a new storage array when the price of disk falls, or disk becomes more condensed, or when there is a paradigm shift in the technology that allows them to make these things cheaper. So, every couple of years, we can replace the disks in the SAN without replacing the SAN itself, and it is tremendously cheaper to do it that way.

It is extremely important that Pavilion offers flexibility in terms of storage and density. I have gone through many cycles in my career where I bought a SAN. The seller would talk a good game about how the SAN was expandable, but all that meant was that I could buy an additional SAN in the future and make them talk on the same network. That is not what anybody wants. They just want to be able to replace the older technology with something newer, not bolt something else on and take up more space in the data center.

The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint.

I might have been one of the very first customers of Pavilion. 

I have had no issues with uptime. The device has been responsive. It has been reliable hardware. I have not had a single unexpected disk failure. I am very happy with the reliability of the device.

We really only have two network technicians that need to touch it. If you have the password for it, then you can get in and manage it. It is fairly easy to understand because it has an intuitive interface.

It certainly exceeds our expected capacity for years. Right now, our device is populated to about a fourth of the total volume of the inside of the array. So, we are running at about 25 percent of the device's capacity. We are mostly focused on having dense drives so we are more nimble. However, I expect to survive another 10 years, and in the IT space, having equipment survive that long is incredible.

The technical support is absolutely stellar. They have the best tech support that I have ever worked with. There is no queuing system. When you call them up, somebody answers. They will block out time and work with you on downtime issues. You don't have to, "Press one, if you have a camera, press two, if you have a printer." There is none of that stuff. They do one thing, and they do it well.

I was researching some bleeding edge stuff with NVMe over Fabrics and came across only three companies who had ventured into this space. Pavilion was the only one who had a product at the time. Pavilion was really the first to market with their NVMe over Fabrics technology. I was looking for a SAN which could meet the performance that I needed. We were coming from a Fusion-io background, so we had a number of systems that had internal storage using Fusion-io cards. At the time, those were the fastest things that you could possibly get. You couldn't get more performance than Fusion-io, but we really needed to move towards a centralized storage solution. Therefore, I was looking for something that wouldn't be a step backwards in performance, and Pavilion's NVMe over Fabrics technology was really the only thing in the market that could meet the performance demand.

It has been a few years since I installed our first system, but I don’t recall having any issues with the setup. We just needed to mount it up, give it some IP addresses, and populate the thing with storage. It took a minute or so to recognize everything. We created the volumes for storage, then we presented them to ESX. We were up and running in less than an hour. 

Back when I looked at Pavilion, a lot of SANs had special SAN management software that you had to install on your computer in order to make it work. Some of this stuff had dependencies, like old versions of Java, Flash, or other aging technologies. One of the things that I liked about Pavilion was that all their management was on the box through a web interface. That was something that made me extremely happy, coming from a background of managing HPE SANs and Dell EMC SANs, where you really couldn't do much through the web interface. Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array could be completely managed in the web, e.g., a local interface that I could pull up in a web browser. That is what I needed.

I don't know if they still do this, but Pavilion was a very white glove solution for us. We were involved every step of the way, but we had on-hand support for deploying the device. Pavilion has excellent customer service.

Over the life of the device (four years), Pavilion has probably saved us a half million dollars instead of replacing it with something else.

It has saved us money over other solutions. We have no direct ROI per se. It is not like the SAN pays us to run. We need to have one. It is cheaper than our other options. So, it was an immediate ROI. We bought it and it is cheaper than the other things that we could have done.

This is hardware. They have a singular array that you can populate with your own disk, or you can buy the disks through them. For controllers, you pay for the components inside of the SAN, but there is only one chassis that they work with.

Pavilion provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price. This has allowed us to continue a very rapid growth of our business.

Because we were one of the first customers, we have slightly different deals than a lot of the people who are coming into it now. I believe their target model was more a lease kind of situation rather than a purchase situation. I know that it appeals a great deal to financial customers, people who work in banking industries, etc.

I looked at other solutions on paper, but Pavilion was really the first to market. They were the only company who actually had a product. Everybody else had a product in development. When I contacted Pavilion, they were like, "Yeah, we know your name. We would love to do business with you. Would you like a device to test with?" I said, "Yeah, send me one." They created it and brought it here, then they set it up for us. They did the demo, and we were extremely happy.

There was nothing in the market at the time that could compare to their speed. So, the speed was absolutely there.

Pavilion is my preferred SAN solution. We have two Pavilion devices in our environment now. We do not have any plans to deploy other SAN storage. Though, that really depends on the growth of the business and if we need more data centers. If we have to make another data center somewhere, then we will absolutely be buying another Pavilion for that location.

I recommend the solution strongly. I am happy with everything about the solution, except for the rail kit. I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.