Pure Storage FlashArray

Speed. During testing, we could push the array to about 400,000 iops.

Failover. The two controllers can failover to each other with only about 1-2 second blip.

Size. The chassis is only 3 rack units, which is much smaller than the 10 rack units of a previous array.

The latency and IOPS on our Pure SAN are incredible. After moving over VMs the performance improvement was noticed immediately.

Pure support is fantastic. They are constantly modifying the firmware to improve compression performance.

Ease of installation – The Pure system was by far 10x easier to setup/configure and begin to use than our NetApp devices were

Simplicity – The GUI of PureStorage is by far the simplest storage solution I have had to manage in my 10 years of IT. This makes is really simple to create and provision storage to any host.

Better Data Reduction – Compared to our NetApp it uses 4k block sizes, while our Pure implements a variable block size for data reductions, yielding better results. With the combination of deduplication and compression we are currently getting a 4.3 to 1 ratio with our data! This is compared to our NetApp which we were only able to get about 1.5 data reduction ratio since It wasn’t recommended to do both deduplication and compression with the NetApp due to overhead on the controllers. We have provisioned 18 TB of data on our Pure storage and are only using 3.20 TB with the rates were getting with Pure. This is amazing and we are only at 50% disk utilization.

Upgrades – 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 upgrades. This forces us to shut down servers to decrease the utilization. The Pure makes it so simple since the technical support teams schedule the upgrades with us and then do them for us! This requires no shutting down of servers and also we will never lose any performance on the controllers during an upgrade.

Performance – This is the key to the Pure storage since they offer 100,000 IOPS as opposed to our NetApp which was barely getting a maximum of 7,000 IOPS. Also NetApp was unable to retain performance during an upgrade or failure of a drive compared to Pure which retains performance period!

Customer Support – During the times that I have had to call support they have responded and resolved things very quickly compared to NetApp.

Evergreen Model – This was a huge sales point and a great advantage to our team since we normally always refresh our systems every 3 to 4 years. The Evergreen model now makes this process painless to our department.

Security – Pure offers us by default an encrypted “at rest” volume compared to NetApp which has no such feature. This was huge for us to meet certain security requirements for compliance.

Rack Space – This Pure storage solution is a no brainer when it comes to rack space. We will be saving almost a full rack of space once we have fully migrated over to our new M-series which will save us money!

Metrics – Pure has built in to the console analysis metrics that you can obtain quickly to monitor and troubleshoot compared to NetApp which you have to build a separate server to configure and license! It’s a no brainer!

Performance across BI Reporting Tools

Compression of our ERP system

Integrates nicely with VMware

Snap shots of LUNs at storage level

Improves Performance. Older VM guests now run at SSD performance which has positive feedback to our end users.

Improves Availability. More of our devices have access to data volumes.

Online hardware and software updates. Saves costs for out-of-hours work.