Very happy with our FlashArray
Updated January 08, 2019
Very happy with our FlashArray
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
We currently use the Pure Storage FlashArray as general use block storage for a VMware environment with around 450 guest VM's for a single department. When we replaced out Vmax array, we were looking for an all-flash solution that was easy to manage and delivered great performance with very high uptime. Pure Storage FlashArray has delivered on all of these.
- Deduplication and compression are a definite strong point for Pure. We see on average 6:1 data reduction across our environment.
- Ease of use. FlashArray is very simple to use. Managing block storage has gone from a full-time job to almost an afterthought for us. There is no more monitoring and tuning on a daily basis for best performance. A simple look at the Pure1 dashboard is all it takes to get a picture of all of our arrays' health. Setting up new volumes and replication is super easy and it takes only a few clicks.
- Hardware and Software upgrades. We have done two controller swaps, one from the FA series to the M series and another from the M series to the X series. Both times were full-time our environment with zero downtime. They also took very little time, ~4 hours to complete. Drive and shelf upgrades are equally as quick, require no downtime and zero configuration. Software updates are performed remotely by Pure are also seamless.
- None
- The performance had really helped our day to day business processes. Run time of daily processing jobs has reduced significantly.
- The dedupe and compression have really helped with the amount of storage buys we have had to do over the last 4 years. We have a lot of headroom for growth with the amount of raw storage we have purchased.
- The Pure Storage FlashArray has not had a single second of downtime in the 4 years we have had it. This kind of reliability is almost unheard of.
We compared this unit directly against the EMC XtremIO array. We selected Pure for a number of reasons. The points where Pure really stood out were the method of scaling/ ease of additional hardware updates, single SKU licensing, Evergreen upgrades and built-in replication. Upgrades and replication are two that really stand out for us.
With EMC, to add more disk we would have had to add more bricks which could result in downtime. With Pure Storage, they can add a shelf and configure it in less time than it takes to remove it from the box. Replication was also a big factor. With Pure Storage, it's built in with no extra cost. EMC would have required us to also buy Recoverpoint which would have almost tripled the initial buy-in.
With EMC, to add more disk we would have had to add more bricks which could result in downtime. With Pure Storage, they can add a shelf and configure it in less time than it takes to remove it from the box. Replication was also a big factor. With Pure Storage, it's built in with no extra cost. EMC would have required us to also buy Recoverpoint which would have almost tripled the initial buy-in.
- When we were still evaluating Pure Storage FlashArray, we had to use it as a data lifeboat for all the LUNs on our Vmax when an SRM failover test left all the LUNs with invalid signatures and some of the VMware hosts were unable to talk to them. The only recourse was to format the LUNs, but we had to do something with the data. We were able to put it all on Pure while we formatted them. Despite filling the disk on that eval box, it never skipped a beat and delivered sub-millisecond latency and outstanding performance. We were able to reconfigure the Vmax and suffered zero downtime.
Pure Storage FlashArray Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal
Relationship with Pure Storage
Upgrading Pure Storage FlashArray
Yes - We have done 2 hardware upgrades. Both times there was zero downtime and zero impact to running virtual machines.
- Ability to upgrade to NVME disk in the future
- More fiber for added FC bandwidth