Arcserve OneXafe vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

For SMB file storage Exablox is great, but as an ESXi datastore it still needs work.

Incentivized

If data storage, access, and security [are] of the highest priority to your business then Pure Storage FlashBlade is an excellent tool that must be considered. Analytics or sharing that requires the fastest speeds available will benefit from the NVMe solid-state drives they use which are far superior to spinning rust. It is less ideal for those who do not require such time-critical work.

Incentivized

• Exablox is simple to setup and relatively easy to use.
• Exablox is priced very competitively and is a good value for the cost.
• Exablox has good customer service.

Incentivized

• Speed. We are seeing large transactions take very little time.
• Upgrades- In-place upgrades of both hardware and software are extremely easy.
• Ease of use- I have several engineers working on this and from setup to day to day operations it is extremely easy to maintain.

Incentivized

• Exablox is still in its infancy as a company and in some respects the product feels like a version 1.0.
• Integration with VMware ESXi has some bugs that need to be figured out.

Incentivized

• When reporting out a user has exceeded there quote, it only references the UID. It would certainly be nice it calls out the UID name that is clearly present in the Dashboard.
• The ability to determine a snapshot total size would be helpful.
• Proactive reachout to discuss new versions and assist in planning the upgrade would be a key win.

Incentivized

The price for Exablox was very appealing. If we can resolve the NFS datastore issues we are seeing in VMware, this is a perfect solution for a ESXi datastore. Once that issue is resolved, I will give Exablox a higher rating.

Incentivized

Again, the initial install, setup and config was simple through a web browser.

Incentivized

Good API, multi-protocol support is great.

Since the day we installed Exablox we have not had any down-time. The storage resources have been available 100% of the time.

Incentivized

SMB file access has been very responsive. We have not seen any slowness. Also, in using Exablox as tier 1 storage in our VMware environment, the VMs performed great. No slowness issues.

Incentivized

Exablox has been very responsive to our requests. They communicate very well and are extremely knowledgable

Incentivized

Without exception, the contacts with support have been quick and extremely knowledgeable. I do not fear getting an underqualified engineer to assess or work on my arrays. In addition to this support structure, the sales engineers are top notch as well.

Incentivized

Straightforward and simple implementation. We completed the implementation in less than 2 hours.

Incentivized

Exablox was much less expensive than other storage arrays and I think there are a lot of reasons to purchase them. I believe that as the product matures, it will be a great option for storage.

Incentivized

The NetApp a800 we tested was 14% faster than Pure FlashBlade with NFS workloads. However, NetApp lacked ease of administration and performing simple tasks such as creating multiple NFS volumes required scripting from the command line. Our flashblade contained 15 baldes and our NetApp was a clustered pair with each half containing 24 nvme devices.

Incentivized

We have not tried to scale Exablox so we are not familiar with this.

Incentivized

• We purchased Exablox specifically for our ESXi environment, so we are hoping to get the wrinkles worked out to see a greater return on our investment.

Incentivized

• We were able to consolidate 5 different storage platforms of lesser performance onto a single Flashblade and achieve much, much lower latency and higher throughput.
• We've been able to reduce the amount of training and configuration required to just Pure Flashblade, instead of 5 different vendors and products.
• In addition to our core use cases, Flashblade has capabilities that we are pursuing for some new projects, i.e. analytics data store and the object store features.

Incentivized