Azure Backup vs. Everpure FlashBlade

Azure Backup is suitable for companies of various sizes, with varying amounts of data. The cost of the investment should be thought out carefully so that there are no bad surprises with unnecessary files going to Azure Backup. The interface is friendly and easy to configure and it does not require your company to have a backup expert. It is highly recommended for companies with smaller number of servers and better if the servers are already running in an Azure environment.

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

• Azure Backup excels at protecting both cloud and on-premises workloads, enabling organizations to adopt a unified backup strategy.
• Azure Backup performs application‑consistent backups, capturing full application state, including in-memory data and pending transactions.
• Azure Backup requires no backup servers, appliances, or tapes. Azure Backup includes multiple built‑in ransomware mitigation features.

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

• Having an admin console that you can use to manage backup schedules across your network would be useful. Going machine to machine to check the current settings is ok but would be better in a GUI.
• Maybe an agent utility installed on each workstation where the user can specify or customize the backup, perhaps just a set of folders, or ignore certain folders, would be helpful to eliminate garbage in the cloud.

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

Azure backup is easy to implement, accessible by using the web portal GUI, and has the ability to restore at the file level or the complete VM. We have experienced zero issues with the backup process or performing file-level restorations. We have not restored an entire VM to date.

Incentivized

Good API, multi-protocol support is great.

One of the differentials of the solution is the high level of guarantee and support of the Azure Backup solution. Microsoft is a reference in a technology company with a highly trained support team and helps us with any questions or technical problems with the tool. Service is fast and efficient with trained engineers.

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

Azure Backup works on Azure, the most famous of the cloud systems that the whole world has switched to, which is now a very large part of the Microsoft ecosystem that we have been used to using for years. Therefore, it is less tiring to use the additional service of an infrastructure that we already use, even if it is a part of it, which can be easily integrated with existing systems, which is one of the most important issues we IT professionals pay attention to. For this reason, we wanted to swim in familiar waters instead of another brand.

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

• It allowed us to have our VMs protected very quickly and with simple implementation.
• It saved us from taking backups from Azure workloads from the on-prem environment, or even deploying a Backup environment on the cloud.
• It has a low/'controlled' cost as you "pay-as-you-go."

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