Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

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.

Our primary use case for this solution is backup.

We are running VMware on Pure because our old storage was very poor. Running on Pure helps because it improves our performance in general.

Using this solution has made our backups more reliable.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its reliability.

I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution.

This solution is very stable.

This is a very scalable solution.

Technical support for this solution has been great. They have been right on board with us.

We outgrew our old solution, which is why we implemented this one. We are traditionally a Dell EMC shop.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward. We didn't run into any major issues.

We worked directly with the vendor for the implementation and our experience with them was great.

Before choosing this option we also evaluated solutions by IBM. We chose Pure because we like their support model and we like their performance. The vendor came out and did a bake-off for us.

For anybody considering this solution, my advice is to ask the vendor for a bake-off, or a demo product, so that you can evaluate it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We use it for backups and replications of our IBM Systems.

It does a good job in-house, as an onsite solution.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression do a good job.

The speed could be improved.

We are on the low side for our storage. I wish we had purchased more.

We are looking to grow, so we will probably be adding more storage.

The tech support is pretty good.

It was setup before I joined the company.

The initial setup is pretty easy and simple.

We have done upgrades of our physical controllers.

Our licensing is renewed annually.

They are doing very well with the product.

We have integrated the solution with VMware. The integration process was user-friendly.

We use SolarWinds to evaluate our performance metrics.

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.

It is for our enterprise. The product is fantastic. 

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription.

Our latency has gone down.

We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to.

Speed is its most valuable feature.

The compression is amazing.

The support needs improvement.

I would rate the technical support as a five (out of ten). They need to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it.

My previous solution was EOL.

The initial setup was straightforward because Pure Storage set it up for us.

We have undergone an upgrade of our controllers, and the process was okay.

We did use a company for the deployment, and our experience was fantastic. We ended up buying the company.

I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional.

NetApp and Isilon were also on the shortlist.

The compression is true and does happen.

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. 

It helps our customers with their storage solutions. 

The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage.

Our availability is at nine nines.

• Deployment
• Cost per terabyte

They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution. 

I have been highly satisfied with the stability.

We are highly satisfied with its capacity management.

We have worked with the engineering team and professional services team. We have had no issues. They are excellent. 

Our customers asked us to change from our previous solution, HPE.

The initial setup is straightforward. Implementing Pure Storage end-to-end from procurement all the way through deployment, we have no issues.

We are the integrator.

Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO. The amount of reduction depends on how poorly they were previously doing at storage management.

Our customers have also seen ROI.

We also evaluate NetApp and Dell EMC. The reason that we chose Pure Storage was because the cost per terabyte was lower and customer demand.

Pure Storage should be the top contender for certain types of workloads.

We are using it for scratch space.

Most of our jobs require partial storage (or read/write). While it is temporary storage, it is doing a fantastic job. 

Its SSD to storage is its most valuable feature.

It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy.

I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features.

It is very scalable. I have gone from five blades to seven blades. While it did require some rebooting, it scales well.

We wanted to have a multi-vendor strategy. We already had two storage vendors and we wanted to more competition. This was where Pure Storage came in. We were looking for a SSD data storage or all-flash base, so that is where this solution fits in.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used an integrator for the deployment.

We are using it for our scratch space, and it works well for our use case.

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.

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 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.

We are pretty sensitive to response times and have been running storages before PR. We used to not have a great response time but once we moved to this solution it has saved total production storage usage. It has better overall performance. 

There is predictive analysis that PR provides us and the customer. It's useful for as to translate what is being expected. We can calculate and plan the capacity based on the predictive analysis.

Deduplication and response time are its most valuable features. 

I would like to see more deduplication. 

Has been pretty stable. We haven't encountered any issues. 

I like the scalability options. We recently expanded the storage and it's not straightforward but their team helped make it happen.

Their technical support is awesome. I would give it five stars. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good. 

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.