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If you want a 'Purely' superior experience!
May 08, 2020

If you want a 'Purely' superior experience!

Nathan Chitwood | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashBlade

Primarily, we use Pure Storage Flashblade as a backup target for high priority data. IT is the only department utilizing this. The main problem we wanted to address with backup, was actually the restoration. Many storage targets tout they are a great option for backup, but when it comes to restoring data, they fall down hard. The data is highly compressed and de-duped on slow low-tier storage. Getting it 'rehydrated' takes FAR too long. Pure Storage Flashblade solved that problem!
  • NFS target
  • Large data analysis processing
  • High performant block and object storage
  • Data protection target
  • Windows environment based NAS support
  • Block level de-dupe
  • Smaller storage options
  • Time is money. No one wants to wait for data to move.
  • Not a great traditional NAS
  • Scalable - this chassis can double in size
  • Practically an install and forget appliance
The main difference between them and these mentioned is pure performance. There is no comparing backup and restoration times with competitors. We are talking thrusters vs warp engines here. Data compress and dedupe was for a time when storage came at a premium. Data rehydration is simply not mentioned by competitors. They just talk about dedupe rates, and how they can keep your data safe. But, what good is safe data when you can access quickly if it compromised. Pure Storage Flashblade fixes that.
In our situation, the primary use for Pure Storage Flashblade is data protection. We wanted a performant backup target. Most of these options are slow, and data restoration is abysmal. This is not the case with Flashblade.

NFS works great. We use NFS between the Flashblade and our backup environment.

I personally don't care for it as a NAS in a Windows heavy environment. It does support basic Windows SMB, but not well. If IT is well suited for Linux/Unix sysadmin, then Pure Storage Flashblade is highly recommended.