Cisco SmartStack vs. Pure Storage FlashArray

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.

Incentivized

• The Pure Array does data reduction particularly well. We've seen a 7x reduction on some of our volumes.
• It is easy to get used to the system after coming from other storage arrays.
• It has some welcome additions such as a smartphone app that makes it easier to view your cases, etc.

Incentivized

• 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 .
• Seriously, I have nothing else.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

From the day our first array was put in (2017) we have had very little issues using it the way we wanted to and none of the setup or processes we incorporate this into have ever been complex. All of the interfaces in the GUI are very intuitive and do not require any CLI experience to do what we need it to do.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The install was very quick. The engineer that Pure sent said that if we started by 10 am we would be done by lunchtime, and he was not kidding.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The product suite scales well and the FA in particular can service any need for all but the most demanding file protocol environments

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized