Pure Storage FlashBlade alternatives and competitors

Huawei OceanStor Dorado is used for system backups.

The most valuable features are the five chips architecture and the purpose-built NVMe hard disk drive. Additionally, the IOPS feature is good.

The data compression and deduplication ratio of Huawei OceanStor Dorado is not as good as other solutions, such as EMC and Pure Storage. It is important when looking at capacity effectiveness.

The solution should be properly sized because if it is not there could be flexibility issues. The system should be sized properly and once it is delivered to the customer, they should ensure everything was done correctly.

When the US and China political issues come into play they have issues in qualifying the US applications with their new storage models. Many issues can arise. For example, customers might want to use Oracle hardware with their Huawei hardware to solve some of their use cases but the companies will not coordinate with each other. The political situation makes Huawei OceanStor Dorado not integrate well.

In an upcoming release, it would be a benefit to have better algorithms on data reduction, data compression, and data deduplication.

I have been using Huawei OceanStor Dorado for approximately two years.

Huawei claims if you choose their enterprise controller, such as the 8000, when you have a cluster of eight controllers, up to seven controllers can be down, and you can still be in operation. However, with their feature Metro Cluster that can be achieved by having 70 kilometers across two-site, you can have seven, nine.

The solution is stable enough as long as you do not do mistakes during implementation.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado has amazing scalability. As long as the specifications are correct in relation to the datasheets, there are no other storages that can provide a high level of scalability for scale-up and scale-out. 

It has the capacity of adding up to 16 or even 32 controllers. Both the EMC and IBM cannot add expansion boxes with their controllers but Huawei OceanStor Dorado has it in their architecture. You can have hard drives without adding the controllers.

The technical support is good. They have has shifted the support to their Dubai region. They now have proper infrastructure. They're Egypt's support and all the support agents are good in communication. Previously Huawei was having communication issues. The engineers were in China and they were having issues, but they have become much more professionals and they are ready to do RCA without any additional cost.

IBM does root cause analysis and I have seen Huawei support do root cause analysis which is a plus point.

In our implementation there are complications. I am not a technician but I have heard it requires eight hard drives to set up. For example, if customers are looking for NAS and SAN and want to have a small cluster of hard disk drives to enable both of these features. You can't do it because you need eight hard disk drives for a separate pool. For NAS, you will again need eight hard disk drives. You will need a total of 16 hard drives to make it a NAS and SAN storage system functional.

Huawei has very good pricing. They have some promotions that can be taken advantage of at certain times of the year, such as the end of December. They are providing aggressive pricing. In the Pakistan market, they are ready to beat any vendor in Pakistan because they want to grab the market.

I have evaluated products from many vendors, such as IBM, HPE, EMC, and Pure Storage.

I'm not sure exactly what features, attract customers, but Huawei is very popular in Pakistan. Huawei is taking share away from EMC and IBM and their hard disk drive, the NVMe, is not just a hard drive, but they have engineered it for the solution.

Some customers who don't like Huawei, say they're not coming up with Intel processors but only coming out with Kunpeng. This is not a negative point but some competition tries to create negativity for Huawei products.

All these storage solutions are only commodity hardware. Everybody is focusing on the cost per terabyte. A CTO should look at the capacity, cost per terabyte, SLA offered, and type of IT equipment offered. The performance key milestones, such as IOPS, the bandwidth of the storage, and which product is providing minimal latency. If these are the milestones a CTO wants to achieve. I think Huawei is one of the best products that can achieve all of these aspects other than pricing. I would recommend organizations to consider Huawei OceanStor Dorado.

I rate Huawei OceanStor Dorado a nine out of ten.

We are a distributor and this is one of the products that we resell. I work with the entire NetApp portfolio.

It is used by our clients as a block storage solution.

The most valuable feature is the QoS and its ease of use. The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it.

The replication works well.

They now have a 100GB network interface, which is nice because I was disappointed with the original iSCSI protocol. That was all that it supported and I found it to be a limitation.

For people using FC SAN, SolidFire is not an option because of the interface.

The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products.

Adding NFS or another file service would be a good feature, on top of the block storage. There are, however, already other solutions for this in the NetApp portfolio.

I began working with SolidFire two years ago.

I have a SolidFire grid set up and I find that it is a stable solution. I did have to replace a disk on one occasion, which is something that the technical support contacted me about. While I have not used SolidFire in production, I have not heard complaints about stability from any of our customers.

There are some rules that have an impact on scalability. If the existing nodes have a small capacity then a much bigger node cannot simply be added. The reason for this is that there needs to be sufficient capacity to provide redundancy in case one of the nodes is lost. This means that during the design of the system, there are a few things that have to be considered. If the rules are respected then scalability is not a problem.

Each time I have been in contact with technical support, it has been proactive. They always call me before I realize that there is a problem. They will call or send an email, at which point they will explain whether there are updates that you should consider installing.

We are connected to NetApp using Active IQ, and the support contacted me to say that there was a disk that was not behaving as expected, according to their metrics and analytics.  They sent me a new disk and we changed it, which was a very easy process. 

In a previous experience, I had a SolidFire platform in the lab, and I remember that we changed a motherboard on one of the nodes. It was not a problem and it was done without disruption. The data on the system was still available from the other nodes.

Overall, I have no complaints about the NetApp support around SolidFire.

I have experience with Pure Storage and NetApp is the better option. The software is similar and the Pure Storage has better performance but with NetApp, it is easier to scale up and scale-out.

Most of the time when we sell SolidFire, it is integrated with NetApp HCI. Together, they make up part of a whole package that includes servers, compute, storage, and network. SolidFire can be fun in standalone mode but most of the time, if we have a need for flash storage then we will use the EF-Series. We also have the AFF storage with ONTAP as an option.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to make sure that it is properly designed. There are always things that you need to be aware of when designing an efficient system.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use HPE Nimble Storage for VMware VMDK object workloads.

The first installation we did was at a mine in South America, Chile, in a place called Ike where the elevation was very high that spinning disks were failing, the meantime for failure was low. The main reason we put our first all-flash array was that it was solid-state which has no moving parts. This solution allowed our organization to operate in that location.

The management software that runs in the cloud is called InfoSight and it is very good. It is similar to machine learning software that monitors your hardware.

I would like to have more administrative rights, for example, root-level administrative rights to the underlying OS of the storage array. We want more access to the kind of underlying infrastructure of the storage array rather than relying on support. However, most companies are looking to have more managed solutions which is the opposite direction of what I want. 

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for four years.

We have approximately 5,000 virtual machines servers and over 100 storage arrays and they are placed all over our organization. We are using this solution extensively in our organization.

The technical support has been good in our experience. I have worked with the support quite a lot and I have not had any issues with their support.

We have used NetApp previously and our management preferred to use HPE Nimble Storage.

The installation is straightforward. The whole implementation took use approximately one day.

We did the implementation using an in-house team. The solution does not require a lot of maintenance. I have not updated the software in a year and when it is updated it is all done online with no downtime.

There is a one-time price for hardware, and with the software support, everything is included, such as software upgrades. The licensing of the solution is included in the cost of the hardware and the support is an extra cost. We have purchased support on an annual basis, but you can purchase support up front for up to seven years. We usually buy five years and near the time of the expiry, we sometimes extend it. 

I have evaluated Pure Storage and they are very similar to HPE Nimble Storage but are a lot more expensive. For ease of setup and cost perspective, HPE Nimble Storage is the better choice.

We are transitioning a lot of our hardware to Azure and we partnered with Microsoft on their cloud services. For our on-premise setup, we are doing a switch from traditional storage arrays to more of a VMware Cloud Foundation type of structure where we are using VMware vSAN instead of storage arrays.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and Qumulo is one of the storage products that we implement for our customers. Our customers have many use cases including storing office data, audio-video, graphics, and more. Our customer base is primarily in the media and entertainment business

The feature that I like most is the analytics part of the file system. It offers good insight into the process including what and where things are happening, including which users and what files are involved.

They have implemented the most important features and they're steadily enhancing it. The update schedule and roadmap are such that every two weeks, there are new features being released.

There is plenty of room for improvement.

In the future, I would like to see non-disruptive updates.

Switching our or replacing nodes should be easier to do.

We have been working with Qumulo for about two years.

Our customers for this product are small to mid-sized companies.

We have been in touch with technical support and I think that they're very good. They are very responsive and very knowledgeable.

We work with a variety of different products and vendors for storage solutions. We're selling Dell EMC storage, Unity, Isilon, Qumulo, Pure Storage, and more recently, Cloudian.

Compared to Isilon, they have only a subset of the features.

The initial setup is easy. The setup of the cluster itself, without the hardware installation, can be done within an hour. As long as somebody has the proper networking skills then it will be easy for them to set it up.

We have our own team of five people who handle the maintenance for our customers.

The mastery of the market in this space comes down to scale and from my perspective, Qumulo and Isilon are the only two products in the market. My preference is Qumulo and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using this product for performance and growth.

Every storage platform is a good product.

The only problem is that when you change to NetApp, it may have a large impact on your backups or something else.

When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance. For the maintenance, you need an external company to maintain the system. With Pure you have less maintenance which is a good item.

I think it could have better monitoring.

I have been working with the solution for 16 years.

This solution's stability is good. We have not had any issues.

It's a scalable solution. If we need more storage, we purchase an extra desk cabinet.

We have approximately 700 users in our organization. We have an additional 100 people joining our company.

Technical support is good. 

We have an external company to maintain our NetApp.

The initial setup is not complex.

When we changed to NetApp it took one to days to migrate everything.

The price of NetApp is very expensive, but we don't know how much Pure is, so we can't compare.

We are currently using NetApp and intend to change the storage next year. Our choices are between NetApp and Pure. We are a transport company, so part of the decision will be based on the price.

All storage vendors have good solutions now.

We are not using NetApp AFF, we are using NetApp with the disks and a bit of Flash.

We have a flash pool with our NetApp and we want to go to full Flash next year.

I would rate NetApp AFF an eight out of ten.