I'm looking to replace our NetApp FAS2720 with Pure Storage C50R4 File Services in our small setup, where we currently manage less than 10 SMB file shares and around 200 TB of data. We already utilize Pure Storage for our VMware clusters and are considering this switch to reduce maintenance overhead and address some old 8.3 legacy file naming issues we face with NetApp. Any insights or experiences you can share, either for or against this move? Thanks!
4 Answers
I've been using Pure Storage for a similar setup, and trust me, it's faster with a single GUI and no need for firmware updates. Just transfer those 8.3 names using RoboCopy and you should be all set!
If you're on Windows, keep in mind it has decent NFS support, but not for NFS 4.x. Regarding your maintenance overhead concern—what makes you think it'll be less? By the way, the 8.3 filename issue is a red flag; is it due to app limits?
We're using SMB, not NFS. As for maintenance, Pure systems run the same OS, and since we're upgrading several anyway, handling 6 devices under one OS is less work than juggling different manufacturers. Testing and all that takes time too.
Got it. The 8.3 filenames sound like a headache. Are these problems from old data you received?
We faced that challenge with large VMDKs too, around 220 TB. We decided to stick with Windows SMB and moved to a scale-out NVMe/TCP block setup instead. We compared Pure and Lightbits Labs, and Lightbits performed better for scale and latency without the NAS complexity.
Wow, that's interesting! We gave up on VMDKs at around 50 TB because of backup issues with Rubrik. It was a pain to re-ingest data when tracking failed.
Are you looking to connect directly to the Pure via SMB, or plan to use it with a file server that utilizes Pure as a block storage? I've had a large file server on Pure and it was incredible.
Same here, but it seems like they want to use it directly as a NAS instead of a SAN. I’ve thought about it before but never made the leap.
Thanks! We have some smaller file servers on Pure as block storage, but larger VMDKs can get tricky.
Cool, thanks for the reply! 🙂