Likelihood to Recommend 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 Qumulo is great for media and entertainment companies, that need simple and easy management of a NAS. The product can also scale and be sized to larger shops too. The support that comes with it also can act as an extension of internal IT. Their support is always watching the box when it phones home with hardware errors or if it would go offline. Qumulo is not initially set up well-running virtual workloads, while Vmware supports NFS, some settings need to be adjusted on Qumulo to allow for upgrades to happen while virtual machines are running
Read full review Pros 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 Support, they offer a slack based support which is fast and incredibly helpful. Fast releases, they release new features every 2 weeks and actively seek out improvement ideas from end-users. NFS and SMB co-existent support through mapping permissions allows mixed end users to connect through there native protocol. Read full review Cons 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 Admin users are not able to be tied to SSO or LDAP accounts. At the start there was no RBAC but this has since been addressed. While there is incredible analytics, there is no native way to get historical trends by volume or user. Read full review Usability Good API, multi-protocol support is great.
Read full review Support Rating 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 Their Slack-based support is like nothing I have experienced. They are fast, helpful, and willing to go the extra mile, even when an issue is not clearly their's to solve. They are committed to your success. The engineers on the Slack channel are oftentimes the engineers that programmed the very same feature you are asking questions about or having issues with.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 Qumulo was not the least expensive but we were blown away by support offered and pre-sales support to ensure questions were answered. Our main challenges were mixed end-user platforms and a diverse set of use cases on those end-user computers. Having the dual access to volumes, over NFS and SMB, helps us greatly in this area.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Reduced cost in support and upgrade times compared to old fiber San. Allows the Service Desk to focus on other things since permissions and access are simplified. Very easy and bandwidth efficient replication allows us to comply with DR. Read full review ScreenShots