Item: Pure Storage FlashArray
Rating: 10
Author: Toby Wenzel

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have 5 FlashArrays, shared in a 5 organization multi-tenant environment. Two are for file servers, two are general purpose, and one is for Oracle and SQL databases. These were purchased over a two year period, to replace aging monolithic SAN arrays. They resolved all of our storage bandwidth bottlenecks and capacity issues.

Pros and Cons

They are excellent for virtual environments. The speed and dedupe/compression is extremely valuable.
We have had excellent performance running Oracle and SQL databases on the FlashArray.
The maintenance couldn't be easier. Downtime is virtually non-existent because of the design of the architecture.
With Evergreen, we will receive free controller upgrades with support renewal.

It would be nice to be able to perform storage copies directly between volumes on a FlashArray.
Integration with VMware where you could replicate a volume, then point vms to the new volume.
Bring the price of a disk pack (10 disks) down to a reasonable amount. It's almost the same price to purchase an entire new FlashArray.

Return on Investment

Very little management after initial setup.
It is quite expensive, so we haven't noticed an ROI on hardware costs, but many less man hours are required to manage the FlashArrays.
The performance provided using a FlashArray over legacy SAN, is probably the biggest ROI we see.
The minimal amount of space required of a Flash Array saves on data enter rack space.

Support Rating

I have had nothing but outstanding support from Pure Storage. We had one issue with networking after an upgrade. Support worked with my for several hours to resolve the issue. Once second level support got involved, they figured out the problem and created a workaround right away.

Alternatives Considered

I looked at several different vendors, then did a POC bake-off between the Pure Storage FlashArray and Nimble Storage AF series flash array. It was very close on performance, but Pure was easier to set up, manage, and maintenance was non-disruptive.

Innovative Uses

I have replicated from one FlashArray to another at a remote data center. Once the replication was complete, we were able to bring up our virtual environment very quickly.
I have migrated many virtual machines between datastores on an array in minutes, enabling me to use smaller datastores where needed.

Likelihood to Recommend

It works very well for single purpose workloads (think databases or same type applications). It seems to struggle with good compression and deduping mixed workloads. We have noticed about a 6:1 ratio with DBs, and <3:1 on mixed workloads or large file servers. It is still extremely fast, just not as good compression and dedupe.

The little array that could

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray