We had chosen NetApp FAS series because of its high performance, deduplication, manageability, and backup features. Although I have been able to use these NetApp FAS series features, the implementation of them has not worked as well as with other storage providers. There was …
Like most other unified solutions, NetApp excels in one particular area, unstructured data. Whilst it can, and does support the presentation of block-based volumes, I do not view it as a strong suit for NetApp. When comparing to other products, the two Unified products that I …
NetApp is best as a Windows file server virtual machines alternative and is perfect as a native CIFS server. We backup with NMDP protocol. Pure Storage is the winner for virtual machine storage with its incredible performance.
NetApp has a lot of issues. Its software is clunky and complicated. It wastes much capacity in the storage operating system. It doesn't do deduplication and compression that well and takes a CPU hit when it does. And all-flash storage was never really an option. At just about …
Pure Storage stands head and shoulders above their competition. Not only is performance and usable capacity better and faster respectively, but the predictable support costs also make this a "no-brainer." Having used other storage arrays, from setup to support, Pure is by far …
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Pure Storage FlashArray
When updating the software with NetApp it is a pain staking process since you have several components to update (Controllers, Hard Drives, RLM, Shelves, etc.). During the upgrades you also have to bring your CPU and disk utilization down to 50% before you can perform the …
Although more expensive, the FlashArray's performance, dedupe, simplicity of configuration, and support all blow the other arrays out of the water. I have had nothing but pleasant experiences with the techs at Pure Storage, and they've been plenty helpful and supportive (both …
At first, they most of our selection criteria but were missing some key components. We could use them for specialized deployments but not shared systems. They worked with us and added the components we required and we now are moving all storage needs to Pure Storage systems. …
We considered Nutanix HyperConverged systems, EMC XtremIO, NetApp SolidFire; evaluated HP Nimble All Flash & Hybrid, NetApp AFF series and VMware vSAN. The former 3 were ruled out for being too expensive and in some cases offering too little for too much money. The later did …
FlashArray just works. They set it up with us and it works. The interface is simple. Things are easy to do. We use it as a backend for VMware and sometimes as a backend for Linux-HA-based NFS/SMB serving. It's just there and easy. IBM's V7000 was cool but required …
We used to have Violin which definitely is very fast, but it is just not very pleasant to use. The performance was a little better with Violin, but the support and features didn't stack up. We also use Netapp FAS for file shares and non-critical workloads, here Netapp has more …
Nimble, NetApp and VSAN are all products that were evaluated and with which we had previous experience.
Nimble and NetApp at the time were both promoting hybrid systems rather than all flash. In both cases, we favoured all flash since it had become affordable and is much more …
Dell and Netapp require constant touching and management in our experience. The Flash Array is the opposite of that. The monitoring that PureOne provides for free is also awesome and costs money from other competitors. The other vendors really didn't have a great answer to the …
None of the arrays that we had in production could touch what Pure is capable of doing. I evaluated the EMC and NetApp AFA offerings at the same time I did the Pure POC. There was no comparison. That is why we now have 20 Pure arrays.
We have twice the deduplication on our Pure Flash as we do our Tegile. Even the flash on the Tegile can get to 5 or 6 ms, while the Pure rarely gets close to 1 ms and never crosses it. Our Tegile has both flash shelves and hybrid, so that is impacting the latency as the hybrid …
Chief Information, Facility, Purchasing and Services Manager - Roma Metropolitane S.r.l.
Chose Pure Storage FlashArray
We have used NetApp for SAN and NAS, the experience is very different for the learning curve, NetApp is much more complicated, the integration with other software like backup and replication is simple, you don't need an orchestrator like DFM.
EMC needs a trained engineer to manage it. NetApp was our first HA storage device. It lacked performance. Pure Storage FA is our first all flash storage. No more worries about performance, and hassle-free management.
It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
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.
It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
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
NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
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.
NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
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.