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Flash Array delivers storage space and new opportunities!
January 10, 2019

Flash Array delivers storage space and new opportunities!

Tulio Conrado Campos da Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray

Here at the Brazilian Space Agency, we use Pure Storage FlashArray across the whole organization. There were two main problems we accounted for when we decided to purchase an all-flash array solution:
1) We had a great variety of hardware in our storage layer, which in turn was expensive and difficult to manage & maintain.
2) We predicted growth of applications and data from ongoing research projects.
The main features that we looked at were their data reduction algorithm and Pure Storage Orchestrator. We were able to attain a 3:1 reduction ratio. With a much smaller investment, we achieved considerable free storage area without consuming all our datacenter free rack-space. Orchestrator provided an automation layer that provided ways for us to fully use our storage layer directly to applications, through automated provisioning and containers. This sped up development and helped coalesce our newly born DevOps paradigm. When we needed snapshots of backups, Pure and Pure resellers provided precise and fast information.
  • Data reduction
  • Proactive post-selling support and technical advice
  • Provisioning alternatives
  • Data replication for highly available environment
  • Simple to use and intuitive interface
  • Good performance/general information about data usage/access
  • Improve with more management features. Today, there is provisioning but limited management. Other features, such as data group protection management through this interface could be a killer feature.
  • We had some difficulties integrating flash array with our alarmistic monitoring system. Maybe this could be a little bit easier.
  • Less than a year after commissioning our Pure Storage FlashArray solution, we were able to deliver 5 new applications and implement/redeploy more than 10 services, services orchestration, DevOps tools, and so on.
  • We were able to adopt a fully digital business process, eliminating printer, paper consumption by more than 80%.
We achieve proactive hardware support through the use of the Pure1 and Call Home features. It does work as announced. They gave precise and simple solutions for the non-trivial deployment, security and high availability questions we had.
Dell EMC Unity is a great hardware alternative, but, in our analysis, did not provide the 3:1 data reduction we aimed for.
  • Use of container storage as a service through Pure Service Orchestration. This simplified application configuration and deployment.
  • We are planning a hyper-converging environment, using containers orchestration, virtual switching, and transparent storage provisioning.
It is appropriate for achieving storage space economy through data reduction and as a high velocity, high availability storage hardware. It is easy to integrate/provide storage. Less appropriate for non-critical information which can be stored in a cheaper storage layer.