A Flashy Array of Storage Quality
February 19, 2019
A Flashy Array of Storage Quality
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray is in use as our primary Storage array, across our entire company. We run a mixed Production and Dev / Test workload, primarily within a Virtualized Environment. We still have several Physical DB Hosts. It provides a performant and flexible storage platform that does particularly well with deduplicating the many copies of data and environments that our use involves. We replicate from one array to a remote array, which provides the basis for our Disaster Recovery strategy.
- Our deduplication rate is above what we anticipated. This is likely due to consistently duplicating much of our environment for testing purposes as well as the nature of our primary warehouse management system.
- We have found that integration with VMWare has been straightforward and quite useful. Expanding the size of a device from within VMWare is simple and effective.
- Snapshots are quick and easily presented to other hosts.
- Expansion into a new tray of disks was quick, easy, and did not provide any interruption.
- Performance has been phenomenal, with latency well under 1/2 ms.
- Analysis and feedback for any adjustments that should be made on the layout of devices.
- Offer a more robust option, beyond the two controller layout, to allow for completely seamless failover/upgrades.
- Continue to incorporate VMWare integration into reporting and monitoring from the Pure Array viewpoint.
- Positive impact in that it has allowed us to quickly and easily grow through size constraints that have been troublesome in the past.
- Time and effort required for management are much less than our earlier EMC environments.
- Evergreen maintenance allows us to plan on controller upgrades at the end of three years, rather than forcing us into a full replacement cycle.
Deduplication provided a key differentiator. Total cost was less for Pure. Complexity and ease of management were significantly less for Pure.
- It has allowed us to keep more copies of test environments, and this has improved the testing of programs, helping eliminate mistakes that slip through.
- In the past, we have often hit performance limitations with storage, where moving data would take a certain amount of time and we couldn't get below that based entirely on the storage back end. Pure Storage FlashArray has allowed us to increase copy performance significantly.
- Replication has allowed us to maintain a remote copy of even non-production data. This has allowed us to improve our positioning for Disaster Recovery, particularly when it comes to Tier 2 applications.