Storing and securing data is important for any company’s continued growth. In this blog, we’ll be talking about the best flash storage hardware.
As data storage continues to change and innovate, the push for innovative all-flash and hybrid data storage makes choosing the best flash storage hardware more difficult.
Flash Storage Hardware Can Impact Your Organization
The flash storage choice a company makes can affect its growth, security, and day-to-day performance.
With the all-flash market continuing to grow and change, it can be difficult to keep up.
Most enterprises want storage that’s built for the future and can be counted on to keep their data secure.
Consolidating hardware by leveraging flash storage can improve so many aspects of a company’s capacity for growth and efficiency.
Although there are many options on the market for flash storage, Pure Storage has quickly risen to become a contender for the best option on the market.
They boast all of the storage services you need to consolidate everything, from block, VM, file, or objects.
With Pure Storage you can power your databases, virtual machines, containers, analytics, and webscale apps.
And this cal be done with effortless all-flash shared accelerated storage performance and enterprise-grade availability.
But how does Pure Storage stack up against some of the top industry competitors?
Vs Dell EMC Unity
First, let’s take a look at what Dell has to offer.
Dell EMC offers a unique array of all-flash as well as hybrid storage products.
Their current featured product, the Dell EMC Unity is designed for use at the enterprise-level. But, it claims to be as cost-efficient as a mid-range flash storage system.
Specs Overview
With all EMC Unity All-Flash models, Dell offers:
- Unified storage with All-Flash performance
- Data reduction services for greater efficiency
- A 25-minute install time, manageable from the cloud
- Scales up to 16 PB
Its entry-level all-flash model, the Dell EMC Unity 350F offers:
- 4 TB to 2.4 PB all-flash storage
- Block, file, and VMware VVols
- 3D NAND TLC flash technology
- Dell EMC Unity software
- Enterprise-grade data services with inline data reduction
Security
With Dell, you’re offered unified data protection, enterprise disaster recovery, and data-at-rest encryption. Also, it offers general proactive support and maintenance.
Enrollment in their future-proof loyalty program also offers tempting add-ons.
For example, they offer a 3-year satisfaction guarantee, system trade-ins towards next-gen products (for Dell and competitors).
This comes with never-worry data migrations to next-gen storage, and an array of cloud-based and storage efficiency perks.
Vs HPE Nimble Storage
Next, we’ll examine some of HPE‘s top products. In the secondary storage market, the HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays aim to provide a balanced combination of flash storage and predictive analytics.
Through flash-efficient architecture and HPE InfoSight predictive analytics, HPE guarantees 99.9999% availability and reliable access to data.
The Nimble claims to deliver the best all-flash capacity per TB in the industry. It can also be fully integrated via the cloud.
Specs Overview
In the All-Flash Arrays:
- 6 TB – 1106 TB raw capacity
- 3 TB – 815 TB usable capacity
- 14 TB – 4075 TB effective capacity (assumes 5:1 data reduction from deduplication and compression)
Security
Along with the 99.9999% guaranteed availability, Nimble adds resiliency to its security. The system has the ability to handle three simultaneous drive failures.
And the native application implements consistent snapshots and replication and can integrate with today’s leading backup software.
Additionally, protection comes through intra-drive parity as well as encryption that provides data-at-rest and over-the-wire protection.
Data shredding is also built-in.
You may want to check out this info about sell HP Storageworks for cash.
Vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage
Thirdly is the HPE 3PAR StoreServ which claims to lead the industry as the #1 midrange storage array and a leading all-flash array.
It boasts a timeless architecture that has helped eliminate complex storage silos for customers while modernizing storage infrastructure.
The 3PAR offers advantages for businesses needing midrange storage in that scaling up is simple.
For example, with 3PAR‘s system, a few terabytes in a single system can scale to over 80 PB in a four-system federation with a common OS, feature set, and management.
But just because it has a history of innovation and consistency, the 3PAR doesn’t necessarily stack up against other contemporary competitors.
Specs Overview (3PAR StoreServ 8000)
- Max Controller Nodes: 4
- Max Host Ports: 24
- Fibre Channel: 4-24
- Max Raw Capacity: 4000 TiB
Security
As with the Nimble, 3PAR offers predictive analytics with HPE InfoSight to help anticipate and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack.
Also like the Nimble, 3PAR guarantees 99.9999% availability.
And similar to Dell, HPE also offers what they call future-proofed architecture.
Both the Nimble and 3PAR storage are designed for NVMe and Storage Class Memory, meaning they’re compatible with the latest technology and won’t need to be upgraded for the foreseeable future.
Both HPE products also offer easy and flexible scale-up and scale-out for non-disruptive performance and capacity growth when called for.
The Verdict: Pure Storage FlashStack
Pure Storage’s selling points are to simplify effective storage to help accelerate a company’s performance, consolidate infrastructure, and automate maintenance and security.
Developed jointly with Cisco, the Pure Storage FlashStack converged infrastructure solution brings pure data-centric architecture to your data center.
Based on the 100%-NVMe FlashArray//X or FlashBlade, FlashStack CI delivers maximum performance and reliability for business-critical applications, DevOps, and modern analytics out of the box.
Further, FlashStack is easy to deploy and operate, and it combines the latest in compute, network, and storage components into a single, integrated architecture. Its structure accelerates time to deployment while reducing deployment risk and lowers overall IT costs.
And that’s only one reason why Pure Storage is appealing. For example:
Top 5 reasons to choose FlashStack:
- Scale, upgrade and avoid downtime with stateless technology
- Management designed for the data center and the business
- Promote innovation through simplified upgrades: Cisco UCS infrastructure and Evergreen Storage
- Designed around performance and reliability
- Simplicity, ease-of-use, and cost reduction
Additionally, FlashStack allows for even easier scaling and upgrading, without disruption or data migration.
Through incremental expansion, one component at a time, FlashStack gives businesses room to grow at their own pace and budget.
Further, for the layman, from small to large, FlashStack management remains consistent, efficient, and simple enough to be managed by IT generalists.
Additionally, its preventative analytics stack up against any industry competitor.
Specs Overview
- Up to 10X faster access to data
- Up to 10x more user productivity
- 99.9999% availability
- 48% lower storage total cost of ownership
- Up to 1.9 PB effective capacity
- Up to 512 TB/448.2 TIB raw capacity
Security
Moreover, Purity Operating Environment includes data storage security measures that meet the highest standards – among them, FIPS 140-2 data encryption and Common Criteria.
Therefore the Purity-powered FlashArray is a key resource for organizations needing to meet modern compliance regulations like GDPR.
For instance, backing up on all-flash enables the ability for rabid restore and recovery up to 10 times faster.
Further, it meets service levels and eliminates SLA penalties and up to 30-50% of a company’s backup infrastructure.
Besides that, its Evergreen Storage subscription ensures hardware performance for the next decade-plus. This is without the need for drastic swap-outs or migrations.
In conclusion, the flash storage a company chooses can affect every aspect of a company’s growth, security, and efficiency.
While the market is full of viable options of great flash hardware, Pure Storage checks all of the boxes that its top competitors offer with a more simple, user-friendly approach to data storage.
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