Huawei offers OceanStor Dorado, an all-flash storage system boasting a wide range of applications and versatility to meet the needs SMBs, larger enterprises, or vertical industry applications.
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Pure Storage FlashBlade
Score 9.6 out of 10
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Pure Storage offers FlashBlade, a scale-out file and object storage – architected to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) while accelerating tomorrow's discoveries and insights.
We connect the Huawei OceanStor SAN device directly to the Huawei Fushion Servers, without using the SAN Switch, with 16 HBA cards in MESH topology. Each of the two controllers has four 16 HBA inputs under the name of SMART IO. In addition, there are two 8 GB extension ports. VMware virtual machines are running on hosts. Our ERP applications, critical DBs, and business applications are running in these. Again, we use another SAN under a different cluster in the disaster recovery section.
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.
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.
When purchasing support for your Huawei OceanStor system, there are two support options offered by Huawei (i.e. Hi-Care and Co-Care). Huawei Hi-Care service is when Huawei responds to your technical requests for remote troubleshooting and advance hardware replacement in the shortest possible time. Hi-Care provides onsite technical support to help you maintain a more efficient and stable network environment and improve network productivity. Whereas, Huawei Co-Care service is a collaborative solution delivered by Huawei certified partners. Depending on the capability of your Huawei support partners, I would recommend Hi-Care for mission-critical environments since this ensures Huawei takes responsibility for meeting the support SLAs. If you have very capable Huawei support partners, then Co-care could be a more cost-effective support option.
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.
All Flash NVMe SSD technology is currently at the top of this business. Its disk structure is hundreds of times faster than traditional mechanical SAS systems, but also compared to today's SSD systems! It has a much more affordable price than the devices of the same class. In addition to these, we had a lot of hesitation when we decided to give up the competitor brand and buy a product that works reliably and smoothly, but we researched and learned very well. We made the right choice.
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.
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.
