Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery.

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

Now you can only put block storage on the storage array. 

It would be nice if you had the same features in the file-based solution on the same box. This would mean you can have all of the storage types in your enterprise on the same box.

I have been working with Pure Storage Flashblade for four months.

It's a stable solution. We currently have all the large databases running on that platform. So everyone in our organization is using this solution. We have approximately 3,000 employees.

It's a scalable product.

Technical support is excellent.

Previously, we worked with EMC XtremIO. 

We decided to switch because it is less complex and very simple to implement in relation to XtremIO from EMC. You don't need any appliance to make it a Metro Cluster. 

In the past, we had a Vplex from Dell EMC. This is an appliance you put above the XtremIO storage, which is not needed in Pure Storage. It is in the same box you have.

The initial setup is very easy.

We require a team of two to maintain the solution.

In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little.

If you are looking for a new storage array, Pure Storage is, what I call 'the new kids on the block' who don't need to pull legacy systems with it. 

It's the right choice because the former storage we had, VNX and XtremeIO boxes, were about 40 height units in one closet. Now we have a four height unit for the entire storage array, that contains six times the volume of our old storage environment. 

It's a much lower footprint than before.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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. 

We primarily use the solution as a platform of NAS for users that use NFS devices.

The solution is very easy to manage.

Overall, the product has great performance.

The initial setup is pretty quick.

We've found the pricing to be okay.

Technical support has been great so far.

The stability of the solution is reliable.

Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes.

That means there are some features that just arent yet available on the product. When we ask for customization or certain features, we'll get a response saying "it's not available yet" or "that's in the pipeline". We have a complicated enterprise, therefore we need more features, perhaps, than the average user, and in this sense this product is limited.

We're on a dark site. We don't have internet access. This isn't great for FlashBlade, which needs to be connected to the internet. It's a website, so it needs to be connected in order to provide reports. Therefore, reporting isn't available to us.

We'd love a better dashboard that offers more accurate metrics. We'd like more details about what is happening on the system, so we can notify the clients as necessary.

I've only been using the solution for three months. It hasn't been too long.

The solution is quite stable. We don't have any issues with it crashing to freezing. It's reliable as far as I can tell.

We've only been using the solution for three months. We haven't really tested scalability. It's my understanding that it is scalable however, I don't have any first-hand experience in the matter.

We've contacted technical support in the past. So far, we've been quite satisfied with their level of service. They've been very good to us.

We used to use Hitachi NAS, which is a much more robust product. It's been on the market for a while, so it definitely has a few more features than this solution.

I would describe the process as pretty straightforward. It's not too complex. 

It only takes a day to set everything up and deploy it.

The pricing of the solution is reasonable. It's not too expensive. We've found it to be pretty fair and we haven't been surprised by any costs.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We'd recommend the solution to others. It's worked well for us so far. Of course, it would depend on a company's use case and what they need to achieve.

For our customers, they're mainly using it for a backup repository and for NFS data storage.

One customer we're working with in particular is using FlashBlade along with another solution called an object engine. They're using that to revamp how they store their backups, then store them onsite. They can push stuff up to S3 and then archive into Glacier, so it reduces their onsite costs.

The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on.

It's not complex. Everything's included in the licensing. You pay for a terabyte of storage. You don't pay for it if you want to upgrade to a bigger driver. Your support is set constantly in the Evergreen model. You also get free refreshes, etc. All of that in combination gives everybody an easier feeling of how they're going to go forward and what their known costs are further on down the road with Purity.

The solution needs better SMB support. For SMB 3.0 for example, I would expand their footprint to sell FlashBlade, etc.

The solution is very stable. It's easy to upgrade. You don't have any downtime for it.

In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does.

I've only needed to use technical support once and they were very good.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's pretty simple. 

There's a limited number of commands and ease of plugging it in. There's not a whole lot of configuration to set up inside of the solution. If you do want to set something like Active Cluster, it's a few clicks and some simple steps. It's not very complex at all.

For deployment, mainly, they'll come in initially as a test. Then it moves into production quickly. From there they'll start deploying it into HA. They'll have two separate items running an Active Cluster at this point. There's a lot of consolidation that goes onto it. They'll start pulling systems off of other things onto the solution.

The initial deployment takes a day or two tops depending on how much you're going to teach the customer.

In the licensing model, everything is included. You don't buy a separate license for Active Plus.

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. 

Customers typically also evaluate EMC and NetApp. The primary reason they choose Pure is probably the ease of use and cost.

We use a hybrid deployment model. Most of the new data backups to the private cloud and then we can push it off to the public cloud for archiving. The cloud provider we're most likely to use is AWS.

Our customers also run VMware on Pure. I'd say in general, the solution helps IT departments. It allows consolidation in virtualization.

The main drivers around VMware on Pure for our customers are the speed, ease of use, and the Evergreen model for their licensing or support.

The joint solution, VMware on Pure, makes it easier for them to consolidate. They have smaller footprints out of their racks because it's all slashed, so they do not have a bunch of spinning drives. It's faster. It's easier for them to use. They don't have to buy their terabytes any more. They like the evergreen model because of the support.

Any integration to the vCenter helps in our deployment of VMs. You don't have to go out to the Pure interface and do anything you can do inside the vCenter.

My advice to others thinking about implementing the solution would be to look at them long and hard before you make a decision because they're definitely worth looking at.

I would rate FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

I use Pure Storage FlashBlade for object storage. 

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

Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration. 

I have been working with the product for a year. 

I rate the product's stability a ten out of ten. 

Pure Storage FlashBlade is very scalable, and I rate it a ten out of ten. 

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers good proactive support. 

Positive

I rate the tool's deployment an eight out of ten. It takes one hour to complete. 

I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten. 

We have enterprise clients for the product. I rate it 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.

Our use cases vary but usually we use the solution for cloud-based solutions. We use it for containers, which provide security on premises for our customers to test environments. Most of our customers are medium to large enterprises based in Bulgaria where we are located. We are resellers, distributors and system integrators. We have a partnership with FlashBlade. 

I think the most valuable part of the solution would be the seamless integration. The fact that they all use the same platform for connectivity, regardless of the physical position of the place. From the customer's perspective, this is the easiest product that I've tested, it's seamless.

It's difficult to find something that could be improved. The new version of the Purity operational system will be released this week and we've been told a lot of improvements have been made so we'll have to wait a few days and see what they're talking about.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

This is a stable solution. 

It's very easy to scale out and to scale up. 

The technical support is good. I've been to the support center in Ireland. I've been doing this kind of work for 10 years and this is the best support line I've ever encountered. Very little maintenance is required although every solution requires troubleshooting if something is not running right. Usually the system reports any issues before they occur and sometimes the customer doesn't even know that he or she has a problem. The support line responds very swiftly, within 30 or 40 minutes. It's all automated.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It's takes about half an hour to deploy. Everything is usually web based and very thoroughly described. The company I currently work for is a reseller and system integrator so we usually do the integration. If the customer would like to do it, they can do it themselves. They're usually quite surprised at how easy it is to deploy. 

This solution is on the more expensive side but it's usual for niche products with a lot of compatibility and features, so the price is right.

There is a 30-day trial period for the product and there is no penalty for the customer if they don't like it. We rarely have issues with it. 

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

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.