Pure Storage FlashArray is the simplest product I have ever used
July 24, 2019

Pure Storage FlashArray is the simplest product I have ever used

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray

Pure Storage FlashArray is used by the whole of engineering to build our testing and monitoring environment on. It addresses the problems of easily and seamlessly provisioning/de-provisioning our testing environment.
  • Monitoring
  • Provisioning
  • Alerting
  • API to monitor aspects of the flash array
  • More granular limit on volumes
  • The high amount of deduplication/compression specifically for a testing environment increases our ROI massively.
  • Seamless upgrade performed by support reduces our support overhead.
  • Simple monitoring further reduces the amount of administration required.
The proactive support from Pure1 ensures that we are always running a healthy array. This is an excellent feature that is missing on most or all of other vendors offerings.
Their proactive support will call or email you when an issue is detected, schedule a software upgrade during your outage window, and give advice on the software version to upgrade to.
Pure Storage FlashArray is a lot simpler to configure and manage as you do not need to manage aggregates, volumes, and LUNs separately as you do in NetApp. Pure Storage FlashArray has better deduplication due to the fact it is whole array deduplication as opposed to volume or aggregate level. Outage or upgrades will not degrade performance on FlashArray due to its active/standby configuration as opposed to active/active. Provisioning also does not require a reboot of VMware host unlike NetApp.
  • Doing multiple clones of the production environment for testing is almost free due to the deduplication and compression feature.
  • Zero impact and zero touch upgrade means upgrade can be done at any time with no downtime.
  • Fast provisioning saves on project implementation time.
Pure Storage FlashArray is appropriate where a high performing SAN is required and where a high number of IOPS are necessary. It is also appropriate where consistent performance is required even during a controller failure, as the controllers are on an active/standby configuration.

Pure Storage FlashArray is less appropriate if the emphasis is on the amount of raw storage provided. It is even less appropriate if you have encryption at rest as the compression and deduplication engine will not work.

Pure Storage FlashArray Feature Ratings

Flash Array Performance
9
Flash Array Integration
8
Data Compression
8
Non-Intrusive Upgrades
10
Simplicity
10
Power Savings
7