What do you like most about Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array?

We run a virtualized workload. Right now, we run everything on Pavilion, which includes our high performance databases and engineering tasks as well as Exchange and file shares. All that stuff runs on our Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array. We use block storage for our VMware infrastructure and are a complete VM shop. All of our files servers run on VMs, which use block storage on the Pavilion device.

I use this product for high-speed parallel storage, multi-user asset storage, and production storage. Basically, it's the high-speed tier of our production pipeline and backend.

This is hardware. They have a singular array that you can populate with your own disk, or you can buy the disks through them. For controllers, you pay for the components inside of the SAN, but there is only one chassis that they work with. Pavilion provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price. This has allowed us to continue a very rapid growth of our business. Because we were one of the first customers, we have slightly different deals than a lot of the people who are coming into it now. I believe their target model was more a lease kind of situation rather than a purchase situation. I know that it appeals a great deal to financial customers, people who work in banking industries, etc.

The licensing is fairly painless because Pavilion is not in the business of selling you NVMe flash media, which is something that we liked about them. Their stake in the whole thing is their box. This means that if you have a pre-existing relationship with another storage hardware provider and get your flash from somewhere else, their system is flexible and can work with all of these different solutions. There's a lot of flexibility in that you can choose which NVMe goes inside the Pavilion box, and you can choose how you layout everything and basically how you prioritize densities versus parallel. The licensing fees are very reasonable. This solution provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price. It's like having the local, direct-attached storage, but SANs typically require a lot of management. They're very hard to deploy in smaller and really fast-paced environments just because, by nature, they were architected for a different era, in terms of processing and requirements. Pavilion essentially gives us the flexibility of the positive features of a traditional SAN without the massive human and capital expenditure, or the maintenance of it. At the same time, it gives us the positives of what we had traditionally associated with direct-attached storage in terms of performance. In this respect, it has saved us time, money, and physical space. When you look at this, especially over a period of a few years, it's a very compelling approach for an industry like ours to look at.