Flashy, but don't be fooled by all the glitz
February 15, 2019
Flashy, but don't be fooled by all the glitz
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashBlade
At this point, it is used only internally by a few teams mainly as an endpoint for DB backups. The Flash Array is a larger (capacity only) endpoint that provided us with more room to grow into and better scale. The connectivity options, as well as drive speed, allowed us to significantly reduce backup times.
- Supports CIFS, NFS, and S3 for storage options.
- Top level folder quotas for CIFS helps keep usage under control.
- For basically secondary storage, it's very fast.
- CIFS support is definitely an afterthought.
- Inability to sort shares by quota utilization makes easy resizing via web UI difficult.
- Some might care about or see the lack of fiber channel or FCoE as a problem. I don't believe it does iSCSI either.
- Faster database backups also means faster restores. This has definitely has helped in the past.
- We aren't really using them to their full ability at this point. We have some projects on the horizon around logging that should change that.
We did not evaluate other options before purchasing. My personal history is mostly around personal NAS and old platter drive arrays. This thing is light years beyond. Not fair to compare older arrays versus FlashBlade.
- FlashBlade has the ability to exist in multiple subnets, which facilitated faster backups without having to traverse routers or firewalls.