Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

I use FlashBlade for shipping data to the cloud.

I like its size. It is smaller than the other competitors. We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The stability is good with only 30 minutes of downtime during upgrades. We do have a backup of the blade. In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.

It is scalable.

The technical support or customer support is satisfactory. They are good, but I do have some language challenges. They are a bit fast for me. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial deployment was easy and quick. It can be deployed in a minute.

It requires some maintenance from our side.

We take Unisys' help for deployment. They contact Pure Storage if needed. We have two to four people for deployment.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten 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.