Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for storage management.

We needed a separate storage device because we have a large amount of data. The cost benefits of this storage have improved my organization. 

Has simplified storage because it is easy to use. It's plug-and-play. We don't need too much support or technical support to be able to start using it. 

There has been a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%. 

The most valuable feature for us would be that it's a good cost-benefit solution for storing large amounts of data compared to other solutions in the market. 

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.

It's stable.

Scalability is good. 

I'm not directly involved with the technical support but I haven't heard any complaints or any issues about it. The vendor helped us to install and deploy the solution. 

I would rate this solution a nine. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is because the servers are a little big. We have seen smaller products with the same storage capacity. We switched because we were looking for a solution that could meet our data storage and performance needs. We researched the costs for different storage solutions and Pure Storage was the one that fit our needs. Its cost-benefit was the most valuable part for us. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The vendor helped us to install and gear it. We had a good experience with them and didn't have any issues. 

Nowadays we have plenty of data storage solutions in the market. Pure Storage is very fast, very straightforward. The price was nice. I believe that in terms of at least storage needs, it filled its role very well.

The customer decides what he wants to do, and then we create a solution for them.

It's very easy to use.

At the moment, I can't think of anything that needs to be improved; however, the feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services. I know Pure has a company that's working on the cell system, but it's still not completely there yet.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashBlade for three years.

Stability-wise, it's fine; however, we have one system at a customer's site that has had a lot of problems over the last year — I think maintenance was required over seven times before everything was corrected. Now the system works fine, it's not a problem.

It's as scalable as we need it to be.

Their technical support is not an issue at all — they're great.

I have a little bit of experience with NetApp, but we don't sell the latest NetApp systems. In the past, we worked with NetApp — it's a good filing system.

For me, the initial setup is very straightforward. If there is something you have to change in the beginning, then you can just directly call support; however, as a partner, it's sometimes a little difficult to do. If we're doing some active cluster setups, then we always have to call support to integrate the active cluster — to enable the active cluster. That's something I think we could do by ourselves — that's something that could be changed.

The price is a little high, but I'm not the guy who is selling it to the customer — I only design the solution. Price-wise, somebody else's has to make a decision about it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

I would recommend this solution to other interested companies because it's extremely fast. That's the biggest reason why we recommend it to our customers. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for video editing. 

This solution has improved my organization in the way that we used to have a lot of spinning discs. There had to be multiple racks because of the capacity and performance required, now we can put it all in just a couple of Us. 

The ease of use of this solution has absolutely simplified storage for us. 

We've seen some good data reduction rates. We get about 4:1 at our data center. We're getting around 2:1 for the one that we're using for video editing.

Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features.

I like the information that we're getting out of the predictive performance analytics feature so far. We've only had it for six months so we need to get some more data. 

I would like to see better integration. 

Stability is rock solid. We've had them for years without any issues. 

It scales really well. 

Technical support is excellent. 

We knew we needed to switch to this solution because of the speed. We had these in our data centers and the speed was rock solid and we wanted to get these out to video editors. 

The initial setup was easy. It was done in ten minutes.  

NetApp and Pure Storage were the two solutions that we considered. The NetApp solution was more complicated. 

I would rate this solution a ten. We haven't had any issues with it, it's easy to use, and the speed is incredible. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to buy it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for the massively scalable flash storage that's close by on our on-premise service.

This solution has improved how our organization functions in the way that it has essentially made us not have to think about storage. That's probably the biggest selling point. Storage is boring and you don't want to think about it. From that point of view, it's provided a lot of benefits. It ticks the big boxes. It's fast, it's scalable, it's essentially zero-touch maintenance. All of those get us eighty, ninety percent of the way.

The biggest feedback is that none of the teams have noticed. I'm not getting negative feedback which is a big improvement from where we were.

Primarily, most of the features that we've used work out of the box. It's fairly simple if you just roll it out. We integrated it with our kubernetes cluster fairly painlessly but, also the flip side of that is that's where the pain point is coming from because we need a bit more control over it. That's been the frustrating aspect of it, but for the most part, it was plug and play.

The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us.

Regarding stability, I have no questions so far. We did a hardware upgrade of an older system and it just kept on ticking. I was quite impressed by the zero downtime.

We haven't pushed it to its limits. We're only at one FlashBlade so far. Being able to dynamically scale it as we added more storage was simply enough. I have no reason to believe it wouldn't be as painless when we scale up to multiple FlashBlades.

We've only had to use their technical support during run of the mill maintenance events like upgrading the firmware and exchanging the box. It was very helpful during the big upgrade. I had them on video call so we could do it in real time while we were in the data center.

We were just using a very homebrew, on-premise, traditional NAS-style storage solution that was quite a few years out of date already. We took the opportunity then to upgrade our infrastructure completely. 
The other solution we looked at was a startup that uses NBME fabric as their solution, but it's not zero touch. You have to configure a lot, you have to take a lot of care of it, so it just didn't appeal from that perspective. That's still why I think Pure Storage ultimately won our business just because it works out of the box.

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.

We implemented it ourselves.

I would rate this solution a solid eight to nine, it does tick all of the major boxes. Our main concern is just with the little customizations that we need.

If someone is considering this solution I would say that for the gap in the market that Pure Storage is going to fill, essentially updating NAS to the 2018s, they excel at that. If you have an existing solution that isn't performing then Pure Storage makes perfect sense to drop into a lot of enterprises.

We have been using it for data center consolidation. It is our primary source for data center applications: production, development, and test. 

It creates a much smaller footprint. Previously, we had a large data center with 30 racks with 12 racks of storage, and we are now down to one. So, a huge electric savings along with freeing our data center ports.

The most valuable feature is its  ease of use. We went from six different storage vendors down to one. The training for the operations staff and others that had to deal with this on a provisioning standpoint was much easier to do. The process was seamless and very easy to learn.

It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams.

I am very happy with the latency, availability, and reduction rates.

On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge.

We are looking at Pure Storage's capabilities to move off-premise into the cloud.

Stability has been rock solid.

Scalability has not been an issue. Performance has been great. It is just the capacity and dedupe part, which is a little light.

We used technical support during the install process, and they were helpful.

We switched to Pure Storage as a decision to get away from Dell EMC.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to set the IP addresses up and the rest of the initial parameters up, then go.

Our consultants did the installation with the help of Pure Storage's technical support.

We have mainly seen a reduction in TCO because of operational efficiencies. It used to take us a lot longer to get servers and storage provisioned. Now, the speed of the disk, plus the ease of use, has made great improvements.

We used a reseller for the purchase.

We were in a build a new data center mode, and Pure Storage was one of three option that we considered. Then, it became our final option.

The other options were HPE 3PAR Flash Storage and Dell EMC XtremIO Flash. While all three solutions are comparable in price, we chose Pure Storage because of politics. 

It works quite well for us, and I would recommend it.

From a standpoint of pure performance, it's moving. We've been very happy with it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for the database masking and testing. 

We have an improved the lifecycle of database testing and has improved QA in the space that we use it for. 

Storage has been simplified for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does. 

It's good to have a good way to back up high-performance type arrays like this,
especially if we could back it up on the back end versus the front side where things are impacted.

As a Pure Storage platform, the cost-benefit is hugely based on the deduplication and capacity. Otherwise, we would have had to have a bunch of arrays to support that capacity. The physical footprint of the array, the capacity that it's using, and the high performance are all things that we have seen benefit from.

The most valuable features would be the IOPS performance and the ease of management. 

In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready. 

We can add a bunch of compute, we could forever compute, but the array at some point comes to a screeching halt. I think if there's a way to make the flash array go wider that would be the better way to go in the long run.

We have had this solution for two years and we haven't had any issues with it. 

Salability does have its limits but we haven't had any limit or scalability issues in the area we use it.

We considered building our own solution but at some point, we realized that there was a higher risk to that. We ended up choosing Pure Storage because they could prove that other customers had successful implementations with minimal issues that was a huge plus. 

The initial setup was as easy as it can get. 

We used a reseller for the deployment called Trace 3. The consulting and integration of the whole solution was done by them and then turned over to my team. There was an issue that we didn't know how that was happening. It was more of an application team problem that they didn't come to us before starting all of that. 

In terms of performance analytics, due to our own fault, we tend to use a lot of capacity faster than we think. Because of our slow internal processing, we can't add capacity fast enough when we need it. We know it is capable of easily adding capacity.

I would rate this solution a nine and a half and I would definitely recommend this solution to a colleague at another company. It's very stable, efficient and it performs very well. 

This solution is deployed in our on-premises lab.

We are running VMware on Pure for improved performance. We have seen an increase in performance. We are using the VMware integrations developed by Pure to some extent, but I do not have specific details.

The most valuable feature of this solution is performance.

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

This solution is pretty stable. Since they are using it for a performance lab, it has to be very stable. 

Our scale is not that big because we have one array. It is not our primary source.

We have not engaged with technical support for this solution.

Performance needs are what caused us to replace our existing solution.

The implementation was done by somebody in our lab.

We qualified with NetApp and have evaluated other solutions, but this is the one that we chose. 

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to go by the business needs, as opposed to just choosing the fastest solution. In our area, we needed the fastest, which is why we bought it. However, there are other deployments within our company where we don't use Pure because we don't need the performance. Other options make sense. Base your decision on the value, and what makes sense.

This is a nice product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is our storage solution.

It improves our organization by making the management much easier to access and not as time consuming. It has made the management easy and simple.

We use it to monitor latency. The solution corrects the latency and makes it easier.

For space requirements, it helps expand what we are trying to use it for on the network, which is all positive.

It does a great job of capacity planning for us.

The management is its most valuable feature.

The predictive performance analytics are pretty good.

The simplicity of the solution is great.

The stability is pretty good.

The scalability is pretty good.

The technical support is pretty fast. Everything is good with the technical support.

We use Nimble. We found out that Nimble had a lot of latency issues, so we decided to switch to Pure Storage. Ever since then, everything has been running a lot more smoothly.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We will be upgrading our controllers soon.

We used a consultant with our deployment. The experience was pretty good.

It reducing our total cost of ownership by 10 percent.

I have not seen ROI.

Through past experience, we all decided that Pure Storage was a better fit for our environment.

The interface is a lot better than most other storage solutions. We have Nimble, as well, and I prefer the whole layout of Pure Storage over any other storage solution.

While Nimble is definite good, I would recommend Pure Storage because it is a pretty good system.

We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it.

I would rate it as a nine (out of ten). Altogether, it is a pretty good system. Everything is well setup: The management, interface, and everything else are all pretty good.