Manager of Platform Software at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
MSP
2021-03-22T09:50:00Z
Mar 22, 2021
This solution provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price, although in our use case, we were mostly concerned about performance. As such, we were a little less sensitive to price. That said, for the performance we get, it's a lower cost than anything else we've researched. With respect to pricing, my advice is that you should have an understanding of what your OpEx goals are and analyze the Pavilion offering in terms of those, to make sure you can support the equipment year over year. Then, the initial outlay for the equipment is probably going to be very company-dependent. There are no costs beyond the initial outlay for the equipment and the annual maintenance, which is a combination of the capacity and the line card that you have in the system.
Manager of Production Systems at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-03-18T09:46:00Z
Mar 18, 2021
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.
Network Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2021-03-10T22:21:00Z
Mar 10, 2021
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.
Network Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Mar 10, 2021
We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN.
Please share with the community what you think needs improvement with Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array. What are its weaknesses? What would you like to see changed in a future version?
Network Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Mar 10, 2021
The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint.
Manager of Production Systems at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Mar 18, 2021
For us, in terms of what is very important, is keeping pace with the evolution of the new standards. For example, as PCI Express 4.0 becomes more ubiquitous, moving into PCI Express 5 is important. Having an architecture that can truly utilize 200-gig or maybe 400-gig networking, or having storage densities in line with what we would expect in a Gen 4, Gen 5 PCI Express, are things that as they come available, I hope that the vendor is looking at that going into the future. We need this because we're really at the point where our workloads are about to explode outwards. I would like to see the management layer improved. HyperOS 3.0 is excellent, and this is important because one of the things that we looked at in the beginning, before HyperOS 3.0 had been released, was that this is an excellent technology and it's very versatile, but it would be great if we could run certain things on this box. It would be helpful if there were more ways to consume the APIs or if there were some ways to get into the hardware, get into the functionality of the system programmatically, or have flexibility where, for example, we just need to do quick namespaces, or something similar. We don't want to deploy an entire secondary storage layer on top of this. Rather, we just want to run something quick. Having a containerized system or having some sort of first-party support for basic storage functionality, or basic extensibility would be excellent for us. In many ways, these boxes are very malleable. It's a blank slate, but having a little more in terms of, if you want more directed use of it, having some way to really get at that, would be helpful.
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This solution provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price, although in our use case, we were mostly concerned about performance. As such, we were a little less sensitive to price. That said, for the performance we get, it's a lower cost than anything else we've researched. With respect to pricing, my advice is that you should have an understanding of what your OpEx goals are and analyze the Pavilion offering in terms of those, to make sure you can support the equipment year over year. Then, the initial outlay for the equipment is probably going to be very company-dependent. There are no costs beyond the initial outlay for the equipment and the annual maintenance, which is a combination of the capacity and the line card that you have in the system.
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.
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.