Dell VMAX All Flash is the latest iteration in the former Symmetrix series of enterprise flash array storage, available in the Dell VMAX 250F edition, or the Dell EMC VMAX 950F edition.
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Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Pure Storage in Mountain View, California offers all-flash array data storage promising affordability, high availability, and consistent performance.
The EMC array is a lot more robust, but the PURE array does almost the same with about a tenth of ease from the configuration. It really depends on the type of backend servers that you need to support as to whether you need a EMC array or a PURE array.
Really the deduplication and compression ratio has been all over these guys. The speed on the flash storage seems more customized if I may say and our deployments were smooth. Nothing against these guys since we work with all at the same level, but there are very notable perks …
Pure Storage offers better support plans, simple UI and easy upgrade options. It can be more pricey but, you get what you pay for and Pure is very competitive when it comes to pricing for features/value. Win-Win-Win!
They all came late to the Flash game and are struggling to keep up. Colleagues I talked to at the beginning of the all-Flash Array explosion talked about how stable Pure Storage arrays were compared to those trying to enter the market. Since then, I haven't bothered looking …
The Forever Flash offering from Pure is the deal maker. We will always have new controllers every 3 years and will not need to ever purchase new or upgrade our array.
All those guys are losers. Definitely, there are no alternatives. This is like EV cars. You can buy whatever, but Tesla is still the reference. Spending money elsewhere is okay because rates are 0%, but this remains crazy. Why pay more for less? All the features are not as good …
We did a bake off between the (then) EMC array and Pure Storage. Pure's active/passive infrastructure meant that recovery time from a major hardware failure such as a controller failure was measured in seconds. The EMC array took much longer to recover, and we didn't see the …
Dell/EMC support was not as effective as Pure Storage's. Within days of selecting Pure Storage FlashArray, we had a team of technicians helping implement the array, integrate it with our existing systems, and test migration of VMware datastore to the array for proof-of-concept …
We tested our Pure arrays agents a few alternatives. They're the only ones that built their platform to be future proof and had the simplest licensing agreement of the bunch (there was none!).
Pure Storage FlashArray was chosen due to the performance, reduced management complexity, and support features as compared to other solutions. Some vendors did not offer a support model that fit, compatibility with legacy HPUX, or offered the compression and dedupe features. …
My organization leverages both Pure and not-Pure platforms. Larger enterprise arrays such as vmax use all flash. The pure x70s have easily held their performance and reliability against the Xtremios and VMAXes.
Dell EMC VMAX All-Flash Storage is a very powerful storage that easily manages huge data transactions with high IO processing speed. This Storage is well suited for critical production environments because response times are much better. This storage enables direct data backup. It's always up and running during updates because it creates a redundant connection from the controller.
When you need speed, it's FAST, especially for MS SQL databases. If you are having bottlenecks, you can spend your time finding it in the code because it's not Pure Storage. Love the data reduction and duplication. We can store so much more on this unit than the base physical size. Love the data snapshots. When you need to complete copy your entire environment for testing etc. Nothing is easier, a few clicks and you are done. Extremely helpful for testing and training.
Reporting is too general. Being a tech nerd, I want to be able to see the nitty-gritty details. I also need to be able to define canned sets of reports for problem application systems.
Pricing is a bit higher then some of their direct competitors .
It has so far been a very fast and stable product. We have had wonderful support when we have needed it and the account manager and engineer attached to our organization have been very responsive with any questions and concerns we have had.
The install went smoothly, and the engineer explained every step along the way. The next couple of days he checked in to make sure that migration was running as planned. The user interface is designed with usability in mind. You don't need a dedicated "Storage Silo" to manage this product. For smaller IT departments that need to support many different workloads, this could not be a better feature
We have never had an outage with Purestorage. Yes we have had 2 drives go out but replacements were installed so fast there wasn't any issues. We have had a NVRAM module replaced but were noticed from Pure they were sending a replacement because they were predicting a failure so pure was proactive preventing any issues. Knowing Pure is monitoring our device 24x7 gives us peace of mind.
The corporation has a very diverse data load and when we migrate from a hybrid storage to pure all-flash, significant gains have already been observed. Latency always remains below 1 ms regardless of the load and volumetry used. Application performance also depends heavily on whether or not the code is more permormatic and network access infrastructure. The product has been meeting expectations
The best part about this array is that once you have it configured it is pretty much done. There is little to no other configurations to be done other than normal volume adjustments. Support is great as they understand this array very well. The updates are very hands-off and are done solely by support. You contact them and then there are no other changes done on the end-user's side.
Pure Support is timely and communicative. They are always ready to assist and very skilled at what they do, no matter the time of day. Even at 12:10 a.m. on New Years Day when your array has a hiccup that causes some errors in your environment, they will be on the phone with you in an instant. If they are unable to determine the cause right away, because things appear to be normal, they will take your environment's configuration, lab it up in their support environment and then research until they figure out what caused the problem. Even if it takes 3 months. True story.
Excellent training and really you don't need that much. We received training at the Pure offices and also on site when the product was installed. Simple things like how to login to the GUI interface, how to setup users, how to create volume and mount it. How to make a snapshot, how to copy it and mount it. Really is pretty self explanatory on how to do things with the GUI interface. We were expecting complicated base on other vendor products, we got super simple.
Great videos and documentation. There is a common theme with PureStorage, "Keep it elegantly simple". They have great support network and great support user groups. Documentation has been very helpful with providing auditors with methods and procedures on security and other ways the product works. Great documentation on setting PureStorage to be the most effective with VM's, SQL Server, and other products.
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
Thanks to the deduplication that is built into the product we are seeing great reduction in total space required by consolidating similar data types on the same array.
Our users are very pleased with the performance.
The replication allowed us to move our workload from to another data center with minimal downtime.