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Rock Solid, Crazy Fast, and Pays For Itself
February 01, 2019

Rock Solid, Crazy Fast, and Pays For Itself

Edmund Joseph Tynan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray

It's a quantum leap in storage technology. I will be absolutely honest in that I was highly skeptical that the Pure Storage FlashArray would be able to offer the advertised IOPS and data deduplication, but Pure backs it up with a guarantee - if you don't hit the promised duplication storage ratio, they will provide increased storage *for free*. We had nothing to lose by going with Pure, and if any of it was true, we'd stand to gain a lot. Well, it was true, and we did!
We use our FlashArrays to support all of our critical business operations companywide. We needed to have a compact, dense, and high IOPS storage device to allow us to have future growth and improve existing performance while replacing deprecated equipment at the same time. The FlashArray was surprisingly very cost competitive and allowed us to improve IOPS and reduce latency by an order of magnitude.
  • Super low latency.
  • High IOPS.
  • Excellent deduplication.
  • HA design is ROCK SOLID.
  • Not able to do native CFS/NFS/SMB file shares. Its workaround is an "embedded" windows cluster, but you have to supply your own windows key.
  • It would be nice to have some improvements in the UI - Right now there's no graphical display showing how much of each volume is actually consumed vs. what's allocated. You can see that for the entire array, but not per volume. It would also be nice to have a breakdown of what snapshots were consuming how much space, etc.
  • We have seen SQL backup errors drop to pretty much zero.
  • "Intermittent" SCSI bus errors that we'd see occasionally from our Linux VMs have completely disappeared.
  • With our integration in Veeam for backups, we've been able to streamline and improve our backups significantly. Restores take, at most, a few minutes.
Tops, hands down in my book. Netapp's support is expensive, Dell/EMC licensing was prohibitively pricey. Nimble was probably the closest contender, and we did think long and hard about going with a technology we felt "more familiar with" (i.e. hybrid storage with spinning disks as part of the solution still), but we decided that while Pure Storage FlashArray was more expensive, we'd stand to gain a lot more from that slightly higher price tag.
  • Improved backups with Veeam integration, allows us to be more daring with deployments since we have higher confidence that we can fall back quickly if it's needed.
  • Faster replication between sites allows us to be more nimble with data migrations.
  • Ultimately, the PureArrays have allowed us to expand and include more HA configurations where previously we just didn't have the resources for them. With that alone, we provide a better back-end for our customers and in the long run that always pays dividends.
SQL server data with high transactions and large virtual infrastructure where a diverse group of employees from multiple remote sites is accessing via S2S. VPN for data sharing is another good scenario, as it's the central storage for data that everyone is reaching for. If there is critical data that needs solid backups, the Pure snapshots are a proven way to restore them quickly and easily.