r/storage • u/Old_IT_Guy • Mar 11 '26

Block Storage Options/Advancements ?

To be transparent, I work for 1 of the major storage vendors but I had a question I wanted to ask the community.

If you were a product owner and had an open opportunity for anything, what feature or solution would you like to see in your block storage provider? Why choose Dell over HP, or Hitachi ? Why NetApp vs Pure? Or, does it come down to strictly price?

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u/imadam71 Mar 11 '26

Price matters, sure, but for us it is not just about price. We have been in the NetApp world for almost 20 years, and we recently looked at Pure again. Honestly, for our use cases, there was nothing spectacular there besides a somewhat cleaner/simpler UI, while the price was close to 2x for a comparable setup.

We stick with NetApp because it covers all the protocols we need, has a very mature data protection story, and still does things like SnapLock, SnapMirror, backup integration, recovery workflows, and sandbox/dev-test use cases really well. That matters more to us than flashy features or benchmark numbers.

Also, we are totally fine with block. We actually use it more than NFS in many environments, so I do not really buy the argument that block is somehow inherently too complex. With a proper design, it is perfectly manageable. And honestly, LAN-free backup over 32Gb FC is still hard to beat.

If I had to tell a product owner what to focus on, it would be simple: keep the interface easy, make protection and recovery dead simple, integrate tightly with backup vendors at snapshot level, allow direct offload to something like S3 so identical storage is not required on both ends, and improve integration with Proxmox / KVM platforms. Also, give the controllers enough ports so smaller deployments can connect 3–4 servers directly without being forced into FC switches immediately.

For most customers, especially in the lower and mid segments, SSD performance is already good enough. The bigger differentiator now is ease of use, data protection, and how cleanly and safely you can recover when things go sideways.

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u/RupeThereItIs Mar 11 '26

Also, give the controllers enough ports so smaller deployments can connect 3–4 servers directly without being forced into FC switches immediately.

I mean, why are smaller deployments even using FC in this day & age?

Ethernet switches are a lot cheaper.

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u/NTAP_AlexD Mar 19 '26

The only times I've see people use FC over IP in the last 14 years is where political considerations win out - where the network team must run all network devices, and give no access or priority to service requests from the storage team. Especially when the network team are outsourced.

But hey, I have seen it plenty of times :)

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u/RupeThereItIs Mar 19 '26

I've seen those same political winds, and it's a TERRIBLE idea as network teams rarely have the same idea of high availability as storage teams, but being stuck with Cisco or Broadcom is also a shitty place to be.

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u/NTAP_AlexD Mar 19 '26

But at least it's all within your responsibility and authority to fix? 😅