DDN A³I vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

Well suited for large data repositories, like video storage, data lake, etc. Wide and deep and does not take up multiple racks. Easily grows with your needs as one can drop in more disks when needed, as you grow.

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

• Large storage array
• Fibre channel storage using RAID arrays
• Each SFA can grow with one master and up to 4 slaves
• Up to PB or more of storage

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

• The Disk array appliances load disks from the top
• Cabler management is more than 4 feet long. Hard to find a rack it really fits in.
• Interconnects between units need to be more seamless and easier to understand.

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

IBM is close to the Platinum level but DDN comes in large and cheaper but with a bit less features.

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

• ROI is that it seems very economical for massive video camera storage.
• Dedicate a rack to it.
• Best if all units are next to each other but do not have to be.

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