Azure Data Lake Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

Azure Data Lake is an absolutely essential piece of a modern data and analytics platform. Over the past 2 years, our usage of Azure Data Lake as a reporting source has continued to grow and far exceeds more traditional sources like MS SQL, Oracle, etc.

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

• Setting up Azure Data Lake Storage account, container is quite easy
• Access from anywhere and easy maintenance
• Integration with Azure Data Factory service for end to end pipeline is pretty easy
• Can store Any form of data (Structured, Unstructured, Semi) in faster manner

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

• study for the certifications also to have them as a reference for work when you have any questions about applying a configuration to the equipment.
• The Internet interface is simple and easy to use. Capacity is good and it's good that HP continues to innovate with this technology

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

Good API, multi-protocol support is great.

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 Data Lake Storage from a functionality perspective is a much easier solution to work with. It's implementation from Amazon EMR went smooth, and continued usage is definitely better. However, Amazon EMR was significantly cheaper overall between the high transaction fees and cost of storage due to growth. The two both have their advantages and disadvantages, but the functionality of Azure Data Lake Storage outweighed it's cost

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

• Instead of having separate pools of storage for data we are now operating on a single layer platform which has cut down on time spent on maintaining those separate pools.
• We have had more of an ROI with the scalability as we are able to control costs of storage when need be.
• We are able to operate in a more streamlined approach as we are able to stay within the Azure suite of products and integrate seamlessly with the rest of the applications in our cloud-based infrastructure

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