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Generally it's been my experience that if you're paying for Pure Storage cost is your last concern. Personally I have years of experience with their SANs and t

Generally it's been my experience that if you're paying for Pure Storage cost is your last concern. Personally I have years of experience with their SANs and they're a dream to work with. But I also never had to write the checks for them.

SteveNuts 4y ago
They also have a very nice opex model. You basically tell them how much usable space you need (high water mark), and they will make sure you have that amount available. It also comes with an SLA for latency and they'll even upgrade your controllers for free if it goes out of bounds. I'm a huge pure storage fan.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Many people who deal with raw hardware don't realize that what the business wants is guarantees that shit is going to work, cost mostly be damned. And so that's how you get scenarios where you pay through the nose, but you've explicitly called out what you need and you get it, even if the company ends up doing weird things like shipping the top-end hardware (with speed disabled) so that they can make sure they meet the requirements.
  - sanp 4y ago
    But when you purchase hardware, are you not paying a lower cost than what you would to the hyperscalers?
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      When you buy oem drives yes, when you purchase from high touch vendor such as PS and proprietary tech then no
      - bombcar 4y ago
        it can go either way and it entirely depends on your use case and what you need 4PB of cloud storage is probably a bit more than $800,000k and then you still have data "in the cloud" and not local to whatever you're doing with it.
        dilyevsky 4y ago
        Agreed. If you’re egressing a lot to other sites or have elevated iops reqs then cloud may still lose
      - SteveNuts 4y ago
        That’s debatable when you consider the performance you get from Pure. Our X20 which is on the small end, with only 10 drives can easily do hundreds of thousands of IOPs, supporting over 1000 VMs and a high performance ERP solution. The whole thing costs us about 50k a year. On an AWS/GCP that would cost a lot, lot more.
        riku_iki 4y ago
        > hundreds of thousands of IOPs that's like number for consumer grade ssd which costs $100?
        SteveNuts 4y ago
        Sure, try running a thousand VMs on it though (which is an extremely random workload). A single sequential test at an optimal byte size benchmark for a consumer SSD is not representative of a real workload these arrays would see. Doing so is a lot more complex and intensive than what a single consumer grade SSD can handle. My point was just that if you wanted to get dedicated IOPs on AWS to match what you get with modern SANs, it’ll cost you far more.
        riku_iki 4y ago
        it is random 4k iops: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/711085i0072733DF2FDB712/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-i... I tend to think your number for PS is likely off.
  - SteveNuts 4y ago
    In this case, Pure will monitor your arrays for you and determine if the latency issues are coming from the controllers or the nvme subsystem, and they’ll either add more drives or swap out the controllers for faster hardware to make sure the SLA is met. It’s a pretty good system especially for CFOs who prefer opex model
- albatross13 4y ago
  Yeah, they're fun to work with. Some decent open source libraries to interact with their APIs too. I really appreciate the effort they put into APIs for their appliance.
hedora 4y ago
Given their target 66% profit margin (product price = 3x cost of goods sold), their $/GB compares favorably with any flash based storage that doesn’t use wide erasure coded stripes, even ignoring dedupe and compression. Not sure how they compare to other enterprise offerings these days, or how hard it is to roll your own RAID 6 open source thing with synchronous replication.

SteveNuts 4y ago

They also have a very nice opex model. You basically tell them how much usable space you need (high water mark), and they will make sure you have that amount available. It also comes with an SLA for latency and they'll even upgrade your controllers for free if it goes out of bounds. I'm a huge pure storage fan.

bombcar 4y ago
Many people who deal with raw hardware don't realize that what the business wants is guarantees that shit is going to work, cost mostly be damned. And so that's how you get scenarios where you pay through the nose, but you've explicitly called out what you need and you get it, even if the company ends up doing weird things like shipping the top-end hardware (with speed disabled) so that they can make sure they meet the requirements.
- sanp 4y ago
  But when you purchase hardware, are you not paying a lower cost than what you would to the hyperscalers?
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    When you buy oem drives yes, when you purchase from high touch vendor such as PS and proprietary tech then no
    - bombcar 4y ago
      it can go either way and it entirely depends on your use case and what you need 4PB of cloud storage is probably a bit more than $800,000k and then you still have data "in the cloud" and not local to whatever you're doing with it.
      - dilyevsky 4y ago
        Agreed. If you’re egressing a lot to other sites or have elevated iops reqs then cloud may still lose
    - SteveNuts 4y ago
      That’s debatable when you consider the performance you get from Pure. Our X20 which is on the small end, with only 10 drives can easily do hundreds of thousands of IOPs, supporting over 1000 VMs and a high performance ERP solution. The whole thing costs us about 50k a year. On an AWS/GCP that would cost a lot, lot more.
      - riku_iki 4y ago
        > hundreds of thousands of IOPs that's like number for consumer grade ssd which costs $100?
        SteveNuts 4y ago
        Sure, try running a thousand VMs on it though (which is an extremely random workload). A single sequential test at an optimal byte size benchmark for a consumer SSD is not representative of a real workload these arrays would see. Doing so is a lot more complex and intensive than what a single consumer grade SSD can handle. My point was just that if you wanted to get dedicated IOPs on AWS to match what you get with modern SANs, it’ll cost you far more.
        riku_iki 4y ago
        it is random 4k iops: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/711085i0072733DF2FDB712/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-i... I tend to think your number for PS is likely off.
- SteveNuts 4y ago
  In this case, Pure will monitor your arrays for you and determine if the latency issues are coming from the controllers or the nvme subsystem, and they’ll either add more drives or swap out the controllers for faster hardware to make sure the SLA is met. It’s a pretty good system especially for CFOs who prefer opex model
albatross13 4y ago
Yeah, they're fun to work with. Some decent open source libraries to interact with their APIs too. I really appreciate the effort they put into APIs for their appliance.

hedora 4y ago

Given their target 66% profit margin (product price = 3x cost of goods sold), their $/GB compares favorably with any flash based storage that doesn’t use wide erasure coded stripes, even ignoring dedupe and compression. Not sure how they compare to other enterprise offerings these days, or how hard it is to roll your own RAID 6 open source thing with synchronous replication.