Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

I last worked with it last year. There was a hospital that was using it for ransomware remediation. It was all about immutable. I was consulting and helping a little bit with that. 

It was all on-prem. They had multiple of them. We did a lot of replication, making sure the replication was right and the snapshots were good and immutable as per design.

The whole idea was to be able to recover the hospital in the event they got hit with ransomware and taken over. The whole idea of Pure worked very well because you could take a snapshot multiple times a day. If somebody comes in and basically grabs your data from you, you can delete that and put back the one before they got here. That's what I loved about the whole opportunity.

The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great.

It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that.

My storage background is more EMC-based. Way back, I worked with Hitachi. I have worked a little bit with Pure Storage more recently. I can't go and profess to be an expert of Pure.

I found it to be cool and great. I really did. The replication was simple and easy. I would recommend Pure all over the place.

My understanding is that it's pretty straightforward. I like to reference these things as LEGOs and building blocks. Pure seems to go this way. Basically, if you want to add storage, you're dropping in a tray. The tray is coming with the storage and some intelligence. You're building up as you go, and I love that.

I haven't called them.

I've been seeing a lot more, but previously, I was all about EMC. EMC backed my VMware environment, which was extensive and had built-in disaster recovery. Today, if someone asks what I would go for and buy, I'd say that I'm just going to go with Pure.

I wasn't involved in the initial setups, but I have been involved in some reviews of that. It is very straightforward and simple. I was a storage admin for years with EMC, Hitachi, HP, and Sun. Things have evolved so much that it's simple. It's really good.

I don't know what they spent, but from a practical standpoint and for the engagement that I was involved in, the return on investment would be very good. That's because you would be able to go and set up your environment and architect it in such a way that ransomware becomes nothing. It helps in that situation. When somebody attacks you, they want to get your storage or your data. With the capabilities of Pure and some other vendors, you can go and architect in such a way that the impact of a ransomware attack or breach is minimized. That to me is worth its weight in gold.

I didn't have the responsibility to do that in the past. I always just stuck with EMC, which always was easy and simple for me, but things evolved. Like the whole analogy to LEGOs, I move towards that. When you're building storage, you have to worry about performance. Flash drives and all the rest of the stuff are going to give me a certain amount of performance, but as I add more storage, my performance has to go and cover more of an ecosystem. There is more data on there. When you have these LEGO ideas where compute and storage come together as a shelf, you're actually increasing everything at once, which is brilliant. On top of that, they've got all really nice security features, immutable storage, and things like that. 

I love this solution. I would actually buy it. As a matter of fact, I recommended that somebody buy it just the other day. I'm really sorry that I didn't buy more Pure when I had the buying in my responsibilities. I should've bought more. I didn't see it years ago the way I saw it last year.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We have a case in one of the biggest banks in Kazakhstan, and they use it for some very fast detecting tasks. It's used for big data analytics.

FlashBlade is absolutely stable. As in all products from Pure Storage, they offer some best quality and are stable. They are quite good in terms of the hardware, in the software. 

We don't face any trouble during the installation process or handling maintenance. 

Based on the user experience, we expect that they will not have any issues in the future, we hope.

The product is scalable and easy to expand.

If you need high throughput the FlashBlade is the best solution for you. It is the only one on the market that can provide 15GB per second from one node. And if you have another node, it will be 30GB per second. So the throughput performance is excellent for FlashBlade. It's not about the capacity, not about the features - it's about the throughput differences.

I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now. They have compression. They also don't have the duplication. They have only compression and it's not very good. 

We had a POC for about six months, and we have sold it for two months. 

The stability is very good. It's reliable and the performance is good. The hardware has been great.

It is for sure scalable. If a company needs to expand dit, it can do so. It's not a problem.

We currently have three clients on the solution. Two are in a POC and one is commercially live. 

We asked support for some assistance in the past - especially the very first time we used it. The product was new for us. We asked service support for assistance and I can say they're quite good. They were very quick to respond and they have great competence in the product. They provide instructions to the engineer and I see sometimes they connect remotely if it's necessary. I can't say that anything bad about it. They are quite good, actually.

The installation process is very simple and straightforward. It's not difficult or complex. 

The implementation itself only took one to two days or so. 

The maintenance process isn't hard at all. It's very easy.

You only need one engineer to handle deployment and maintenance.

They don't have a license at all. They have some software products like Portworx, and they sell the license for those. however, the FlashBlade and X FlashArray don't have a license at all. It's included in the system; you don't need to buy it separately.

We use cloud and on-premises deployments.

I would recommend the product to others, however, it depends on the task. The task is very important, especially with FlashBlade, as, for some applications, it's not ideal. Some people think you should be very careful and size it first, and talk with the vendor first to understand the task, the application you going to deploy on the FlashBlade. If it matches and you get support and recommendations from the vendor you definitely should use it. I can honestly say, they are quite honest in this case. Pure Storage, if they see that your task is not good for FlashBlade, they will say it to you, "Sorry, but your task is different and you have to think about some other products. Maybe X, maybe Y." So are they not going to push you to buy this hardware that doesn't suit your purposes.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

We're using Pure Storage FlashBlade for backup purposes. We're also planning to deploy the product for the big data environment.

What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features.

An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced.

The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems.

I've been working with Pure Storage FlashBlade for four years.

From a stability perspective, Pure Storage FlashBlade is very stable, and the technology is great, so I have no doubts about the product, stability-wise.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is a scalable solution, but it's less scalable than VAST Data.

The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade has been getting worse. Previously, support was very good, but as Pure Storage grew as a business, the quality of support has worsened.

As a partner, I serve the customers, and I deal with the Pure Storage FlashBlade support team a lot. In the past, an experienced engineer would be assigned immediately whenever I open a ticket. Nowadays, I deal more with level-one engineers, so issue resolution takes longer. The support team now takes up more time in terms of understanding the problem, so the quality of support for Pure Storage FlashBlade has worsened.

I'm a new partner for VAST Data, and I don't have much experience with it yet, but I've used PureStorage FlashArray. I can't compare Pure Storage FlashBlade with PureStorage FlashArray, but I can say that Pure Storage FlashBlade is stable, strong, fast, and modern, and it's an enterprise-class object storage product.

The deployment of Pure Storage FlashBlade took less than one day.

You can get ROI from Pure Storage FlashBlade, depending on the use case. The product has a specific ROI for fast restoration. Its ROI would also be different when you're using it for data management. For machine learning or AI purposes, you'll also get a different ROI from Pure Storage FlashBlade. As a backup solution, you can expect ROI from it in four years.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

I've evaluated VAST Data.

I'm a partner of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

My rating for Pure Storage FlashBlade is eight out of ten.

My advice to anyone planning on using Pure Storage FlashBlade is that it's a very important storage solution, and I would especially recommend it for data management platforms. Pure Storage FlashBlade will serve you well when you need to make data decisions and when you want better performance. I would also recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade for business intelligence environments.

It's just a file IO and we've used it for training AI systems. We also use it for network boot for a number of our diskless machines, and it's proven rock-solid on that front, as well.

The number one aspect of FlashBlade is performance. 

The ability to move large amounts of data through a training array is pretty much unparalleled. 

The scalability has been great.

It's put together in such a way that it's very simple to configure and maintain. Things like data replication are easy to set up and monitor. 

The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good.

In our case, we are mostly performance-focused. We don't require a laundry list of features. It's sort of a double-edged sword, however. On one hand, the lack of all these features makes it a lot easier to configure and manage. Yet, if you need those features, it might be a negative. For us, it's elegant. 

The solution is expensive. 

The solution is stable and offers very good performance overall. From a performance perspective, it's pretty impressive. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches.

The scalability of this product has been amazing.  We have scaled out some of our FlashBlade environments to get numbers we couldn't come close to with other solutions.

The technical support has been good. We are satisfied with the level of support we have received.

I've used a lot of technologies over the years from NetApp to Dell and others. This product is more or less in a class by itself when it comes to its performance and its scalability.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's simple to configure and maintain. A company shouldn't have any issues with it in general.

We also have FlashArray and we have specialists that support each. The look and feel between the two platforms are similar. You can bounce between them fairly readily. I have the same administrator supporting the FlashBlades as I have to support the FlashArrays.

It's a premium technology. The solution does not come cheap. It's pretty expensive.

For FlashBlade I'd probably rate it a ten out of ten as so far it has been amazing. 

We use Pure Storage FlashBlade for backups.

It's a very good product.

It is very easy to use, and it is very fast.

The integration with S3 needs some improvement.

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

What FlashBlade can do with S3 buckets needs to be improved. Other things, such as NFS, are simple to implement, but S3 can benefit from improvements.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashBlade for three years.

I am totally satisfied with the stability of Pure Storage FlashBlade. It is very stable.

At this time, we don't have plans to increase our usage.

Technical support is great. The support is very fast.

We are also using FlashArray.

We have limited deployment of Flashblade.

I was not present for the installation, but I believe that it is simple. I don't think that it is complex.

One person is needed to deploy and maintain this solution.

We have evaluated various solutions and recently migrated from Dell EMC with the Cloud and Pure Storage Systems. The migration was done two years ago.

I would highly recommend Pure Storage and FlashBlade in particular.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a nine out of ten.

This solution is mainly used in a very performance-sensitive environment for enterprise software storage.

The main feature I have found to be product replication.

There could be improvements in public cloud integration.

In the future, one innovation could be for them to make an embedded backup system.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

The stability of the solution is really impressive.

The scalability is possible, however, if they could make the process faster to the cloud it would be better.

The technical support is fantastic.

The installation was extremely easy.

The fact that the solution is extremely stable and it works really great each dollar spent on this solution is worth it.

The price of this solution could be made more affordable.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is it can be very effective only in proper use cases, not in every use case.

I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to interface the backup of the image and file management.

It performs well and it is also very fast.

There is low latency.

I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabyte.

I have been working with Pure Storage Flash for approximately three years.

This is a stable solution. I have not had any issues with the stability of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is very scalable.

Currently, we have two customers who are using this solution.

Technical support is okay. There is no improvement needed.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It took approximately 20 minutes to deploy.

We are integrators. We were able to implement this solution ourselves.

It's expensive. The price should be reduced.

Licensing fees are paid yearly.

For those who are interested in using this solution, I would recommend it.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten.

I am a reseller.

The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services.

It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release.

I have been working with Pure Storage FlashBlade for three years.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is very stable and very reliable.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is very scalable.

Technical support responded very quickly, and they are very professional.

We have always used NetApp FA Series. When compared with Pure Storage FlashBlade, I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade. It's easier to set up, easy to expand capacity, and very easy to upgrade.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is very easy to set up.

I feel that the price could always be lowered. It would be nice.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using this solution. It's good in machine learning and virtual machines.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a nine out of ten.