Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

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. 

I last worked with it last year. There was a hospital that was using it for ransomware remediation. It was all about immutable. I was consulting and helping a little bit with that. 

It was all on-prem. They had multiple of them. We did a lot of replication, making sure the replication was right and the snapshots were good and immutable as per design.

The whole idea was to be able to recover the hospital in the event they got hit with ransomware and taken over. The whole idea of Pure worked very well because you could take a snapshot multiple times a day. If somebody comes in and basically grabs your data from you, you can delete that and put back the one before they got here. That's what I loved about the whole opportunity.

The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great.

It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that.

My storage background is more EMC-based. Way back, I worked with Hitachi. I have worked a little bit with Pure Storage more recently. I can't go and profess to be an expert of Pure.

I found it to be cool and great. I really did. The replication was simple and easy. I would recommend Pure all over the place.

My understanding is that it's pretty straightforward. I like to reference these things as LEGOs and building blocks. Pure seems to go this way. Basically, if you want to add storage, you're dropping in a tray. The tray is coming with the storage and some intelligence. You're building up as you go, and I love that.

I haven't called them.

I've been seeing a lot more, but previously, I was all about EMC. EMC backed my VMware environment, which was extensive and had built-in disaster recovery. Today, if someone asks what I would go for and buy, I'd say that I'm just going to go with Pure.

I wasn't involved in the initial setups, but I have been involved in some reviews of that. It is very straightforward and simple. I was a storage admin for years with EMC, Hitachi, HP, and Sun. Things have evolved so much that it's simple. It's really good.

I don't know what they spent, but from a practical standpoint and for the engagement that I was involved in, the return on investment would be very good. That's because you would be able to go and set up your environment and architect it in such a way that ransomware becomes nothing. It helps in that situation. When somebody attacks you, they want to get your storage or your data. With the capabilities of Pure and some other vendors, you can go and architect in such a way that the impact of a ransomware attack or breach is minimized. That to me is worth its weight in gold.

I didn't have the responsibility to do that in the past. I always just stuck with EMC, which always was easy and simple for me, but things evolved. Like the whole analogy to LEGOs, I move towards that. When you're building storage, you have to worry about performance. Flash drives and all the rest of the stuff are going to give me a certain amount of performance, but as I add more storage, my performance has to go and cover more of an ecosystem. There is more data on there. When you have these LEGO ideas where compute and storage come together as a shelf, you're actually increasing everything at once, which is brilliant. On top of that, they've got all really nice security features, immutable storage, and things like that. 

I love this solution. I would actually buy it. As a matter of fact, I recommended that somebody buy it just the other day. I'm really sorry that I didn't buy more Pure when I had the buying in my responsibilities. I should've bought more. I didn't see it years ago the way I saw it last year.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use Pure Storage FlashBlade for backups.

It's a very good product.

It is very easy to use, and it is very fast.

The integration with S3 needs some improvement.

There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket.

What FlashBlade can do with S3 buckets needs to be improved. Other things, such as NFS, are simple to implement, but S3 can benefit from improvements.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashBlade for three years.

I am totally satisfied with the stability of Pure Storage FlashBlade. It is very stable.

At this time, we don't have plans to increase our usage.

Technical support is great. The support is very fast.

We are also using FlashArray.

We have limited deployment of Flashblade.

I was not present for the installation, but I believe that it is simple. I don't think that it is complex.

One person is needed to deploy and maintain this solution.

We have evaluated various solutions and recently migrated from Dell EMC with the Cloud and Pure Storage Systems. The migration was done two years ago.

I would highly recommend Pure Storage and FlashBlade in particular.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a nine out of ten.

I am a reseller.

The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services.

It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release.

I have been working with Pure Storage FlashBlade for three years.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is very stable and very reliable.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is very scalable.

Technical support responded very quickly, and they are very professional.

We have always used NetApp FA Series. When compared with Pure Storage FlashBlade, I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade. It's easier to set up, easy to expand capacity, and very easy to upgrade.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is very easy to set up.

I feel that the price could always be lowered. It would be nice.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using this solution. It's good in machine learning and virtual machines.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a nine out of ten.

We have a case in one of the biggest banks in Kazakhstan, and they use it for some very fast detecting tasks. It's used for big data analytics.

FlashBlade is absolutely stable. As in all products from Pure Storage, they offer some best quality and are stable. They are quite good in terms of the hardware, in the software. 

We don't face any trouble during the installation process or handling maintenance. 

Based on the user experience, we expect that they will not have any issues in the future, we hope.

The product is scalable and easy to expand.

If you need high throughput the FlashBlade is the best solution for you. It is the only one on the market that can provide 15GB per second from one node. And if you have another node, it will be 30GB per second. So the throughput performance is excellent for FlashBlade. It's not about the capacity, not about the features - it's about the throughput differences.

I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now. They have compression. They also don't have the duplication. They have only compression and it's not very good. 

We had a POC for about six months, and we have sold it for two months. 

The stability is very good. It's reliable and the performance is good. The hardware has been great.

It is for sure scalable. If a company needs to expand dit, it can do so. It's not a problem.

We currently have three clients on the solution. Two are in a POC and one is commercially live. 

We asked support for some assistance in the past - especially the very first time we used it. The product was new for us. We asked service support for assistance and I can say they're quite good. They were very quick to respond and they have great competence in the product. They provide instructions to the engineer and I see sometimes they connect remotely if it's necessary. I can't say that anything bad about it. They are quite good, actually.

The installation process is very simple and straightforward. It's not difficult or complex. 

The implementation itself only took one to two days or so. 

The maintenance process isn't hard at all. It's very easy.

You only need one engineer to handle deployment and maintenance.

They don't have a license at all. They have some software products like Portworx, and they sell the license for those. however, the FlashBlade and X FlashArray don't have a license at all. It's included in the system; you don't need to buy it separately.

We use cloud and on-premises deployments.

I would recommend the product to others, however, it depends on the task. The task is very important, especially with FlashBlade, as, for some applications, it's not ideal. Some people think you should be very careful and size it first, and talk with the vendor first to understand the task, the application you going to deploy on the FlashBlade. If it matches and you get support and recommendations from the vendor you definitely should use it. I can honestly say, they are quite honest in this case. Pure Storage, if they see that your task is not good for FlashBlade, they will say it to you, "Sorry, but your task is different and you have to think about some other products. Maybe X, maybe Y." So are they not going to push you to buy this hardware that doesn't suit your purposes.

I'd rate the solution at a ten 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.

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.