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.

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.

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'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.

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.

We are also using FlashArray.

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.

We outgrew our old solution, which is why we implemented this one. We are traditionally a Dell EMC shop.

Our customers asked us to change from our previous solution, HPE.

I would rate this solution a nine. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is because the servers are a little big. We have seen smaller products with the same storage capacity. We switched because we were looking for a solution that could meet our data storage and performance needs. We researched the costs for different storage solutions and Pure Storage was the one that fit our needs. Its cost-benefit was the most valuable part for us. 

I have a little bit of experience with NetApp, but we don't sell the latest NetApp systems. In the past, we worked with NetApp — it's a good filing system.

We were just using a very homebrew, on-premise, traditional NAS-style storage solution that was quite a few years out of date already. We took the opportunity then to upgrade our infrastructure completely. 
The other solution we looked at was a startup that uses NBME fabric as their solution, but it's not zero touch. You have to configure a lot, you have to take a lot of care of it, so it just didn't appeal from that perspective. That's still why I think Pure Storage ultimately won our business just because it works out of the box.

We knew we needed to switch to this solution because of the speed. We had these in our data centers and the speed was rock solid and we wanted to get these out to video editors. 

We switched to Pure Storage as a decision to get away from Dell EMC.

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. 

Performance needs are what caused us to replace our existing solution.

We use Nimble. We found out that Nimble had a lot of latency issues, so we decided to switch to Pure Storage. Ever since then, everything has been running a lot more smoothly.

My previous solution was EOL.

We wanted to have a multi-vendor strategy. We already had two storage vendors and we wanted to more competition. This was where Pure Storage came in. We were looking for a SSD data storage or all-flash base, so that is where this solution fits in.

It was setup before I joined the company.