Follow-up from a happy FlashBlade user
Updated March 26, 2021

Follow-up from a happy FlashBlade user

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashBlade

Our FlashBlade is an evaluation unit. My team tests storage arrays from various vendors to determine compatibility & performance with our software. We share results with our internal storage team and write white papers on how to best config an array for optimal performance without software.

Pros

  • Ease of manageability. A manual isn't needed to navigate the GUI. Config options are easy to locate.
  • The FlashBlade helps to overcome some of the performance limitations built into the NFS protocol.
  • Quick and simple installation.

Cons

  • Granular control of alerting.
  • Inability to serve FC block storage.
  • Performance analysis feature needs the ability to quickly pull up the heavy-hitters.
  • Pure has greatly narrowed the performance gap between file storage and fiber channel block storage with FlashBlade. Exotic file systems and costly FC fabrics are no longer needed to run performant storage.
  • Training is not required for a storage admin who has never touched a Pure array. Everything is where you would expect to find it.
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.
Shared file systems are needed in nearly all large environments. most options are considered exotic & many of SAS's customers do not want to run them. Everyone knows NFS, but traditional NFS lacked performance. Pure offers a performant NFS with their FlashBlade

Upgrading Pure Storage FlashBlade

Yes - The Purity/FB 3.1.4 upgrade process went smoothly with no down time and took around nine hours to upgrade all fifteen blades. The new release brought no unexpected impacts of either functionality or performance.
  • mixed protocol functionality (ability to serve the same files to both smb & nfs clients)
  • microsoft active directory ldap integration
  • less-limited mixed-protocol support. there are still many limitations on sharing to windows clients.
  • more control over microsoft active-directory integration. currently need pure support intervention to join active-directory with disjoint namespaces

Comments

  • Mikayla Rosaia | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Mikayla Rosaia
    (Vendor Representative) commented 5 years ago
    Thank you for leaving a review of Pure Storage at TrustRadius. We are always looking for customers to participate in advocacy opportunities. If you are interested in sharing your story, please contact us at customer-reference@purestorage.com

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