We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashBlade and SolidFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"Support has been helpful."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"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."
"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."
"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."
"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."
"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."
"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."
"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability."
"The scalability and being able to implement it quickly."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential."
"If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is."
"Greater IOPS, speed, it's all-flash. So seeing that everything is going to all-flash, all SSDs, SolidFire fits right in there with the emerging trend in IT."
"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"The price should be lower."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"The speed could be improved."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."
"I have not seen ROI."
"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."
"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."
"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."
"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."
"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."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there."
"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity."
"The user interface needs to be improved. Much of the client feedback involves comments such as "Oh, it's hard to navigate through.""
"We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our Pure Storage FlashBlade vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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