Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

The primary use case is for enterprise workloads. If there are high IOPS requirements and the clients do not want to compromise on performance, then we use Pure Storage FlashBlade.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage.

File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade.

If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs.

In the next release, I would like to see the inclusion of cyber resiliency.

I've been working with this solution for a year and a half.

It's a very stable product, and I'd rate the stability at ten out of ten.

It's very scalable. You can increase capacity without downtime. You can also upgrade the controller after two years with the Evergreen feature. This can also be done without any downtime.

We have deployed Pure Storage FlashBlade to enterprise clients in the banking, financial, and IT industries. Thus, there are over 500 users of this solution.

I would rate technical support at ten out of ten because all areas are monitored proactively. If there's an issue, then technical support staff will contact you immediately. You will have a really good technical support team available to resolve issues quickly.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy, and I would give it a rating of ten out of ten. The deployment can take two to three hours if the data center is ready and power is available.

It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle.

If you're using multiple storage products to meet business needs, my advice would be to replace them with one Pure Storage FlashBlade box. One box will be able to meet all your requirements because it has high capacity, IOPS, and performance, and has minimum latency.

Pure Storage FlashBlade's effective capacity is very high. For example, if you have 10 TB of raw capacity, then Pure Storage FlashBlade gives an effective capacity of around 90 TB.

Thus, I would give Pure Storage FlashBlade an overall rating of eight 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 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.

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.

It's just a file IO and we've used it for training AI systems. We also use it for network boot for a number of our diskless machines, and it's proven rock-solid on that front, as well.

The number one aspect of FlashBlade is performance. 

The ability to move large amounts of data through a training array is pretty much unparalleled. 

The scalability has been great.

It's put together in such a way that it's very simple to configure and maintain. Things like data replication are easy to set up and monitor. 

The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good.

In our case, we are mostly performance-focused. We don't require a laundry list of features. It's sort of a double-edged sword, however. On one hand, the lack of all these features makes it a lot easier to configure and manage. Yet, if you need those features, it might be a negative. For us, it's elegant. 

The solution is expensive. 

The solution is stable and offers very good performance overall. From a performance perspective, it's pretty impressive. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches.

The scalability of this product has been amazing.  We have scaled out some of our FlashBlade environments to get numbers we couldn't come close to with other solutions.

The technical support has been good. We are satisfied with the level of support we have received.

I've used a lot of technologies over the years from NetApp to Dell and others. This product is more or less in a class by itself when it comes to its performance and its scalability.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's simple to configure and maintain. A company shouldn't have any issues with it in general.

We also have FlashArray and we have specialists that support each. The look and feel between the two platforms are similar. You can bounce between them fairly readily. I have the same administrator supporting the FlashBlades as I have to support the FlashArrays.

It's a premium technology. The solution does not come cheap. It's pretty expensive.

For FlashBlade I'd probably rate it a ten out of ten as so far it has been amazing. 

We're using Pure Storage FlashBlade for backup purposes. We're also planning to deploy the product for the big data environment.

What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features.

An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced.

The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems.

I've been working with Pure Storage FlashBlade for four years.

From a stability perspective, Pure Storage FlashBlade is very stable, and the technology is great, so I have no doubts about the product, stability-wise.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is a scalable solution, but it's less scalable than VAST Data.

The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade has been getting worse. Previously, support was very good, but as Pure Storage grew as a business, the quality of support has worsened.

As a partner, I serve the customers, and I deal with the Pure Storage FlashBlade support team a lot. In the past, an experienced engineer would be assigned immediately whenever I open a ticket. Nowadays, I deal more with level-one engineers, so issue resolution takes longer. The support team now takes up more time in terms of understanding the problem, so the quality of support for Pure Storage FlashBlade has worsened.

I'm a new partner for VAST Data, and I don't have much experience with it yet, but I've used PureStorage FlashArray. I can't compare Pure Storage FlashBlade with PureStorage FlashArray, but I can say that Pure Storage FlashBlade is stable, strong, fast, and modern, and it's an enterprise-class object storage product.

The deployment of Pure Storage FlashBlade took less than one day.

You can get ROI from Pure Storage FlashBlade, depending on the use case. The product has a specific ROI for fast restoration. Its ROI would also be different when you're using it for data management. For machine learning or AI purposes, you'll also get a different ROI from Pure Storage FlashBlade. As a backup solution, you can expect ROI from it in four years.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

I've evaluated VAST Data.

I'm a partner of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

My rating for Pure Storage FlashBlade is eight out of ten.

My advice to anyone planning on using Pure Storage FlashBlade is that it's a very important storage solution, and I would especially recommend it for data management platforms. Pure Storage FlashBlade will serve you well when you need to make data decisions and when you want better performance. I would also recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade for business intelligence environments.

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.

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.