Pure Storage FlashBlade Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for storage management.

We needed a separate storage device because we have a large amount of data. The cost benefits of this storage have improved my organization. 

Has simplified storage because it is easy to use. It's plug-and-play. We don't need too much support or technical support to be able to start using it. 

There has been a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%. 

The most valuable feature for us would be that it's a good cost-benefit solution for storing large amounts of data compared to other solutions in the market. 

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.

It's stable.

Scalability is good. 

I'm not directly involved with the technical support but I haven't heard any complaints or any issues about it. The vendor helped us to install and deploy the solution. 

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. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The vendor helped us to install and gear it. We had a good experience with them and didn't have any issues. 

Nowadays we have plenty of data storage solutions in the market. Pure Storage is very fast, very straightforward. The price was nice. I believe that in terms of at least storage needs, it filled its role very well.

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 of this solution is for video editing. 

This solution has improved my organization in the way that we used to have a lot of spinning discs. There had to be multiple racks because of the capacity and performance required, now we can put it all in just a couple of Us. 

The ease of use of this solution has absolutely simplified storage for us. 

We've seen some good data reduction rates. We get about 4:1 at our data center. We're getting around 2:1 for the one that we're using for video editing.

Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features.

I like the information that we're getting out of the predictive performance analytics feature so far. We've only had it for six months so we need to get some more data. 

I would like to see better integration. 

Stability is rock solid. We've had them for years without any issues. 

It scales really well. 

Technical support is excellent. 

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. 

The initial setup was easy. It was done in ten minutes.  

NetApp and Pure Storage were the two solutions that we considered. The NetApp solution was more complicated. 

I would rate this solution a ten. We haven't had any issues with it, it's easy to use, and the speed is incredible. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to buy it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for the massively scalable flash storage that's close by on our on-premise service.

This solution has improved how our organization functions in the way that it has essentially made us not have to think about storage. That's probably the biggest selling point. Storage is boring and you don't want to think about it. From that point of view, it's provided a lot of benefits. It ticks the big boxes. It's fast, it's scalable, it's essentially zero-touch maintenance. All of those get us eighty, ninety percent of the way.

The biggest feedback is that none of the teams have noticed. I'm not getting negative feedback which is a big improvement from where we were.

Primarily, most of the features that we've used work out of the box. It's fairly simple if you just roll it out. We integrated it with our kubernetes cluster fairly painlessly but, also the flip side of that is that's where the pain point is coming from because we need a bit more control over it. That's been the frustrating aspect of it, but for the most part, it was plug and play.

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.

Regarding stability, I have no questions so far. We did a hardware upgrade of an older system and it just kept on ticking. I was quite impressed by the zero downtime.

We haven't pushed it to its limits. We're only at one FlashBlade so far. Being able to dynamically scale it as we added more storage was simply enough. I have no reason to believe it wouldn't be as painless when we scale up to multiple FlashBlades.

We've only had to use their technical support during run of the mill maintenance events like upgrading the firmware and exchanging the box. It was very helpful during the big upgrade. I had them on video call so we could do it in real time while we were in the data center.

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.

The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there.

We implemented it ourselves.

I would rate this solution a solid eight to nine, it does tick all of the major boxes. Our main concern is just with the little customizations that we need.

If someone is considering this solution I would say that for the gap in the market that Pure Storage is going to fill, essentially updating NAS to the 2018s, they excel at that. If you have an existing solution that isn't performing then Pure Storage makes perfect sense to drop into a lot of enterprises.

Our use cases vary but usually we use the solution for cloud-based solutions. We use it for containers, which provide security on premises for our customers to test environments. Most of our customers are medium to large enterprises based in Bulgaria where we are located. We are resellers, distributors and system integrators. We have a partnership with FlashBlade. 

I think the most valuable part of the solution would be the seamless integration. The fact that they all use the same platform for connectivity, regardless of the physical position of the place. From the customer's perspective, this is the easiest product that I've tested, it's seamless.

It's difficult to find something that could be improved. The new version of the Purity operational system will be released this week and we've been told a lot of improvements have been made so we'll have to wait a few days and see what they're talking about.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

This is a stable solution. 

It's very easy to scale out and to scale up. 

The technical support is good. I've been to the support center in Ireland. I've been doing this kind of work for 10 years and this is the best support line I've ever encountered. Very little maintenance is required although every solution requires troubleshooting if something is not running right. Usually the system reports any issues before they occur and sometimes the customer doesn't even know that he or she has a problem. The support line responds very swiftly, within 30 or 40 minutes. It's all automated.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It's takes about half an hour to deploy. Everything is usually web based and very thoroughly described. The company I currently work for is a reseller and system integrator so we usually do the integration. If the customer would like to do it, they can do it themselves. They're usually quite surprised at how easy it is to deploy. 

This solution is on the more expensive side but it's usual for niche products with a lot of compatibility and features, so the price is right.

There is a 30-day trial period for the product and there is no penalty for the customer if they don't like it. We rarely have issues with it. 

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

This solution is deployed in our on-premises lab.

We are running VMware on Pure for improved performance. We have seen an increase in performance. We are using the VMware integrations developed by Pure to some extent, but I do not have specific details.

The most valuable feature of this solution is performance.

I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution. 

This solution is pretty stable. Since they are using it for a performance lab, it has to be very stable. 

Our scale is not that big because we have one array. It is not our primary source.

We have not engaged with technical support for this solution.

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

The implementation was done by somebody in our lab.

We qualified with NetApp and have evaluated other solutions, but this is the one that we chose. 

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to go by the business needs, as opposed to just choosing the fastest solution. In our area, we needed the fastest, which is why we bought it. However, there are other deployments within our company where we don't use Pure because we don't need the performance. Other options make sense. Base your decision on the value, and what makes sense.

This is a nice product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is our storage solution.

It improves our organization by making the management much easier to access and not as time consuming. It has made the management easy and simple.

We use it to monitor latency. The solution corrects the latency and makes it easier.

For space requirements, it helps expand what we are trying to use it for on the network, which is all positive.

It does a great job of capacity planning for us.

The management is its most valuable feature.

The predictive performance analytics are pretty good.

The simplicity of the solution is great.

The stability is pretty good.

The scalability is pretty good.

The technical support is pretty fast. Everything is good with the technical support.

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.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We will be upgrading our controllers soon.

We used a consultant with our deployment. The experience was pretty good.

It reducing our total cost of ownership by 10 percent.

I have not seen ROI.

Through past experience, we all decided that Pure Storage was a better fit for our environment.

The interface is a lot better than most other storage solutions. We have Nimble, as well, and I prefer the whole layout of Pure Storage over any other storage solution.

While Nimble is definite good, I would recommend Pure Storage because it is a pretty good system.

We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it.

I would rate it as a nine (out of ten). Altogether, it is a pretty good system. Everything is well setup: The management, interface, and everything else are all pretty good.

It is for our enterprise. The product is fantastic. 

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription.

Our latency has gone down.

We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to.

Speed is its most valuable feature.

The compression is amazing.

The support needs improvement.

I would rate the technical support as a five (out of ten). They need to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it.

My previous solution was EOL.

The initial setup was straightforward because Pure Storage set it up for us.

We have undergone an upgrade of our controllers, and the process was okay.

We did use a company for the deployment, and our experience was fantastic. We ended up buying the company.

I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional.

NetApp and Isilon were also on the shortlist.

The compression is true and does happen.