Azure Data Lake Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

Azure Data Lake storage is well suited for applications/use cases within organizations where capturing and storing large amounts of data in any format is required, primarily for storing and processing purposes. It's an easy and cost-effective cloud solution for your application data. The ability to integrate with other Azure Services like Azure Databricks and Azure Data Factory is superb.

Incentivized

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

• Azure Data Lake Storage is extremely scalable. It allows us to scale up or down endlessly based on what we need including replication.
• In terms of security, Azure Data Lake Storage fits our requirements really well as we can monitor and encrypt seamlessly. We can also assign permissions through roles and grant network-level access.
• Due to the fact that it can scale, we are able to monitor the cost of storage and any given time and make financial decisions about our infrastructure based on how small or big we want to scale.

Incentivized

• 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

• I'd like to see a better cross-platform native client. Azure Data Explorer is fine, but it's far from the "SSMS" kind of experience SQL Server users are used to.
• Listing a large number of file is somewhat problematic and slow. Using the native C# library, running directly on an Azure VM, it can take several hours to list just a couple million files.
• Switching from V1 to V2 requires the creation of a new Storage Account and that's pretty inconvenient.

Incentivized

• 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

Good API, multi-protocol support is great.

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

The Azure Data Lake solution is designed for organizations that want to take advantage of big data. It provides a data platform that can help developers, data scientists, and analysts store data of any size and format and perform all types of processing and analytics across multiple platforms and programming languages. It can work with your existing solutions, such as identity management and security solutions. It also integrates with other data warehouses and cloud environments. It can be useful for organizations that need the above softwares.

Incentivized

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

• The cost can be high for more advanced work. In some cases, for instance, time limits and lab runtimes may be too short if you are too slow to learn what is explained as you go along.
• promote flexible team communication. You can create different spaces for different teams, and share files and tasks.

Incentivized

• 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