Likelihood to Recommend Azure Blob Storage is well suited for cases where you are working with different data formats and looking for cost-effective storage solutions based on access frequency. Another area of strength is the encryption of data at rest, and encryption can be managed on your own. However, it may not be appropriate for transferring large data very fast.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Ease of use both through Azure Portal as well as API. Cost-effective solution for storing a large amount of data compared to other storage solutions. Scalability, Security, and Performance are the other key aspects of Azure Blob Storage that are easily manageable through Admin Console. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Unstructured data makes it harder to conceptualize what we have but with partners like Panzura that has been a non-issue for us. Not always easy to understand the different models or tiers you can pick from when purchasing. Read full review 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. Read full review Usability Good API, multi-protocol support is great.
Read full review Support Rating Documentation sometimes appears to be out of date or not fully documented properly with new releases. It is like documentation comes out for a specific version and is quickly out of date. Another issue is documentation is scarce on new releases and only seems to get properly updated (and sometimes is still wrong) once enough people hit the forums to complain.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Azure Blob Storage is the best choice to store files when the app runs in Azure. It also has some advantages over S3, like Shared Access Signatures, that make it easy to control access to files directly via a URL. Azure Blob Storage is very fast and we have not had any major issues with it after using it for several years.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Azure has increased the flexibility of where we place data within our organization. It has proven to be very reliable and always accessible. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots