Azure Blob Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage

83 Reviews and Ratings

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Pure Storage FlashBlade

62 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Azure Blob Storage	Score 9.7 out of 10	N/A	Microsoft's Blob Storage system on Azure is designed to make unstructured data available to customers anywhere through REST-based object storage.	$0.01 per GB/per month
Pure Storage FlashBlade	Score 9.9 out of 10	N/A	Pure Storage offers FlashBlade, a scale-out file and object storage – architected to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) while accelerating tomorrow's discoveries and insights.	N/A

Pricing

Azure Blob Storage

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Editions & Modules

Block Blobs: $0.0081
per GB/per month
Azure Data Lake Storage: $0.0081
per GB/per month
Files: $0.058
per GB/per month
Managed Discs: $1.54
per month

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Azure Blob Storage	Pure Storage FlashBlade
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Azure Blob Storage	Pure Storage FlashBlade
Considered Both Products	Azure Blob Storage Verified User Anonymous Chose Azure Blob Storage Blob storage lets us control the file source/hosting and retain everything within our Microsoft ecosystem. Blob is less feature-rich than some of the other products. Still, we consider it as a value-added product included within our environment, and alternative products are not … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Azure Blob Storage Azure Blob Storage was used only because we were already using it for other projects, and it has a good reputation for being a reliable cloud provider. It also has widespread regional availability and allows for data replication. It can also be easily accessed via the API or by … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Azure Blob Storage We didn't actually evaluate anything but Azure Blob Storage since it worked so well for backups and Audit logs and the price point was good enough for us. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Azure Blob Storage Azure Blob Storage is the best choice to store files when the app runs in Azure. It also has some advantages over S3, like Shared Access Signatures, that make it easy to control access to files directly via a URL. Azure Blob Storage is very fast and we have not had any major … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Azure Blob Storage S3 seemed to be just as functional as blob storage in our analysis. The only real difference is we already were on the Microsoft platform with 365, and it was an easy system to continue to learn. That was the only real deciding factor between the two that made any difference … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Azure Blob Storage Ease of use and availability to actual usage makes it my first choice. I feel like IBM Cloud is where azure was 5 years ago in terms of implementation and ease of use. AWS has some great functionality but it almost feels like you need to learn how to work under the hood of a … Incentivized Helpful? MW Michael Ward Sr Systems Administrator Chose Azure Blob Storage Azure Blob is the only major cloud object storage platform that we use today. Incentivized Helpful?	Pure Storage FlashBlade Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Pure Storage FlashBlade provided a flexible and secure solution which these alternatives couldn't quite match. The simple file management system and rapid performance made this solution come out on top for us. The only real benefit over Pure Storage FlashBlade that these other … Incentivized Helpful? Alexander Cooper RPA Developer Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Pure Storage FlashBlade is in our experience far faster, performance-wise, compared to its close competitors. However, if you factor in any packages you currently have with IBM or AWS for example, you can get more value for money for your data requirements. However, if … Incentivized Helpful? Chirag Deol Chief Marketing Officer Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Pure Storage FlashBlade is very fast. [It was] simplify with the easy install, easy upgrades, automatic performance. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade The NetApp All Flash FAS provided similar performance but had a larger footprint. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Pure Storage FlashBlade has certainly very good high speeds when compared to its competition. Its performance is at par with the leading competitive storage solutions and in few cases even exceeds the expectations. Pure Storage FlashBlade's support of talented engineers is very … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade It delivers the following, see below, and this is why it was selected as the platform of choice. Supports CIFS, NFS, and object Speed and performance Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade We did not evaluate any other products, the FlashBlade has nothing similar in my opinion. Incentivized Helpful? Edward Hammond Principal Solutions Architect Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Pure Storage FlashBlade provides higher performance than the competition. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Julie Ulrich Systems Engineer Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Flasharray C is the true second-tier storage we were looking for with all the features we need. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Prior to FlashBlade, we used Avamar for our enterprise backup solution. While Avamar is a solid product, the FlashBlade provides better and more predictable stable performance. Since owning FlashBlade, we have never had any hardware issues or a drop in performance over time. It … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade I've used many different file storage systems in the past from various established firms. They all have their place, but in the end, I wanted a vendor and solution that was high performing, stable, cost-efficient, easy to use and manage with a Sales, Account, and Support team … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade We have Oracle ZFS Appliances and the cost of Flashblade was equivalent to one shelf of SSDs in cost. We shopped Isilon and Oracle Solutions, but FlashBlade had a definite cost/performance advantage. Incentivized Helpful? Nathan Chitwood Sr. Systems Administrator Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade 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 … Incentivized Helpful? CS Chris Stotler Manager Platform and Storage Engineering Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade We did not evaluate any other products. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade The NetApp All Flash FAS provided similar performance but had a larger footprint. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade I haven't used others. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade FlashBlade is high capacity and much higher performance than other disk based NAZ servers. Incentivized Helpful? JC Jeremy Calcamuggio Senior Systems Engineer Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Pure is both more expensive and less configurable than the excellent HNAS. However, the HNAS is now dependent upon Hitachi storage. The Flashblade is a self-contained unit, which helps reduce cross-platform lock-in. It's not mandatory to have Pure block storage to use the … Incentivized Helpful? Todd Crouse IT Hardware Engineer/Storage Architect - Senior Staff Member Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Pure is easiest to install and administer making it a perfect fit for our EDA scratch environment. Pure lacks mixed mode support which forces Qualcomm to use NetApp or Isilon for any SMB environments. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade 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. Incentivized Helpful? Michael Cannella Enterprise Cloud Architect Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade Performace knocked it out of the park. Our only issue at the time was that ECS wasn't supported with Replication. Incentivized Helpful? DT David Thornton, CISSP Security Engineering Manager Chose Pure Storage FlashBlade We considered all of the major manufacturers of storage when we were evaluating our choice of a product to replace our older storage. We considered HP, EMC, DELL, and Netapp-- all of which the team has used at various times. Interestingly enough, initially no one had experience … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Azure Blob Storage	Pure Storage FlashBlade
Small Businesses	Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Score 9.6 out of 10	Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Pure Storage FlashBlade Score 9.9 out of 10	Azure Blob Storage Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises	Pure Storage FlashBlade Score 9.9 out of 10	Azure Blob Storage Score 9.7 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Azure Blob Storage	Pure Storage FlashBlade
Likelihood to Recommend	10.0 (0 ratings)	8.4 (0 ratings)
Usability	8.0 (0 ratings)	8.2 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	9.0 (0 ratings)	8.2 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Azure Blob Storage	Pure Storage FlashBlade
Likelihood to Recommend	Azure Blob Storage is well suited for cases where you are working with different data formats and looking for cost-effective storage solutions based on access frequency. Another area of strength is the encryption of data at rest, and encryption can be managed on your own. However, it may not be appropriate for transferring large data very fast. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Pure Storage FlashBlade is best for companies that want their data stored and secure. The big storage capacity and cloud integration secure our data and ensure no third-party access without authorization. It provides us a secure data storage services for our objects. Fast and easy to install and easy to use. Incentivized Chirag Deol Chief Marketing Officer Read full review
Pros	Reduced cost. We were able to reduce our storage infrastructure by several hundred terabytes by consolidating redundant copies and dedupe/compression on files. Extremely high level of redundancy. We can replicate data in a variety of ways that we would never have been capable of on our own hardware. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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. Incentivized Michael Cannella Enterprise Cloud Architect Read full review
Cons	If we are transferring huge amount of data (outbound), it can get quite expensive. With new features being added constantly, although a good thing, at times it becomes difficult to keep up with the changes. Documentation needs to keep UpToDate and should include best practices. Performance can be improved especially when it comes to cold storage. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	Blob storage is fairly simple, with several different options/settings that can be configured. The file explorer has enhanced its usability. Some areas could be improved, such as providing more details or stats on how many times a file has been accessed. It is an obvious choice if you're already using Azure/Entra. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Good API, multi-protocol support is great. Edward Hammond Principal Solutions Architect Read full review
Support Rating	Documentation sometimes appears to be out of date or not fully documented properly with new releases. It is like documentation comes out for a specific version and is quickly out of date. Another issue is documentation is scarce on new releases and only seems to get properly updated (and sometimes is still wrong) once enough people hit the forums to complain. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Blob storage lets us control the file source/hosting and retain everything within our Microsoft ecosystem. Blob is less feature-rich than some of the other products. Still, we consider it as a value-added product included within our environment, and alternative products are not needed for our requirements. Keeping the hosting within our tenant locale is vital to us. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Pure Storage FlashBlade is in our experience far faster, performance-wise, compared to its close competitors. However, if you factor in any packages you currently have with IBM or AWS for example, you can get more value for money for your data requirements. However, if performance is a must, the increased cost is not an issue. Incentivized Alexander Cooper RPA Developer Read full review
Return on Investment	Made it easy for organization to move to cloud from on-premise based solution. We were able to centralize all our documents. Cost savings compared to on-premise based solutions. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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