Awesome Product with Caveats
July 27, 2019
Awesome Product with Caveats
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
We provide LASS to credit unions and our Pure Storage array was purchased for this purpose. We purchased it for the speed VDI and other applications needed from disk.
- Very fast. The latency rarely breaks 0.75 ms with significant traffic.
- Easy interface. I was able to learn how to use it on my own.
- Reliable. I haven't had to touch the array since I put it in except to add LUNs and monitor capacity. There have been no breaks in the 2 years we've had it.
- Wide support. We have AIX, HP-UX and VMware all attached to the array. There are drivers and support for all three and not all disk vendors can say that.
- Support. Responsiveness to an issue I'm having, even when Sales is pushing, has been lacking. Haven't had a system down issue, so may just be a severity thing.
- Price. Flash has been falling like a rock over the last two years with 1 TB SSD selling for under $140. And while I know the software is part of the price, I haven't seen the hardware drop impact their prices at all
- For us, deduplication has been about 65-75% of what what promised.
- The speed of the SAN has been impressive. Rebooting a Windows 10 virtual desktop takes less than a minute. Our hosted customers have never once mentioned speed issues on their servers.
- While we are getting twice the deduplication of our other flash solution, our cost calculations were for 33% more than we're getting, so our bottom line IS taking a hit. That being said, we are getting 3:1 deduplication with no loss of performance. This means we have consumed the disk slower than our other solutions and had more time before needing more disk.
We have twice the deduplication on our Pure Flash as we do our Tegile. Even the flash on the Tegile can get to 5 or 6 ms, while the Pure rarely gets close to 1 ms and never crosses it. Our Tegile has both flash shelves and hybrid, so that is impacting the latency as the hybrid is easily overwhelmed, so it may not be an entirely fair comparison in latency. The poor deduplication is purely Tegile's fault (no pun intended).
- Not applicable. It's just disk for us with standard uses.