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Flasharray review of awesomeness
July 24, 2019

Flasharray review of awesomeness

Jeremy Calcamuggio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashBlade

Every interaction we've had with Pure support has been refreshingly straightforward and well handled. The upgrade process is very easy and well-orchestrated by support. To date, we haven't had a problem that support wasn't able to solve and quickly.
We are currently using Flashblade as backend storage for VMs, utilizing NFS exports. Flashblade is only installed at our primary datacenter, so remote sites with local VMs are using local storage (non-Flashblade).
Additionally, we are working on proof of concept projects to use Flashblade for future analytics workloads.
Primary business problems solved by Flashblade:
  • secondary storage that is very fast and scalable (our primary storage is Pure Flasharray).
  • consolidating storage vendors and platforms to a single vendor Pure Storage.
  • Eliminates any storage latency troubleshooting we used to do on other platforms for virtual machines.
  • Massive throughput!
  • Simple interface.
  • Eliminates volume sprawl as we can present much larger volumes and still enjoy very low latency and high throughput.
  • Need replication capability.
  • HTTP functionality to use Flashblade like an HTTP server with directory browsing would be great. For storing common content for internal use like package repositories, installers, system images, etc.
  • Syslog support for system logs and audit logs.
  • 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.
Of all the storage arrays I've used in the last 20+ years, Pure Flashblade and Flasharray are by far the simplest and easiest to configure. By miles and miles, to be frank. Additionally, performing an upgrade to software or firmware on non-Pure storage platforms in the past has been a complete crapshoot and frankly has caused significant downtime due to failed controller failovers, etc, during upgrade. My 5+ years with Pure has been completely contrary to my previous experiences, and I would recommend them on this basis alone.
  • We've been able to create more environments for our SAAS products to support more internal development efforts. This is primarily due to the deduplication features allowing multiple copies of large databases without capacity penalties.
  • We've also been able to replace more clunky replication mechanisms with Pure Flasharray replication to support our disaster recovery efforts.
  • Pure snapshots and cloning has enabled us to create and refresh new application/database environments in minutes versus days.
It's not appropriate for storage workloads that need replication to another site, for instance, disaster recovery.
It's also not appropriate for storage processes that rely on cloning and snapshot capability, for instance, database server volume cloning for refreshing data between application environments.