Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage replaced a legacy array, and now serves as our primary storage for both our virtual server and VDI needs. It is being used across the entire organization. It's given us high efficiencies in storage capacity needs, and response times are no longer a topic of discussion. It has simplified overall storage management and has given us a pathway to operational management.
- Deduplication: Not counting thin provisioning and compression, we are realizing 4 to 1 on our deduplication. It works and it works well. I realize this is totally dependent on the workload. High-level summary, our workloads consists of Windows server, Application Servers, and SQL. And yes, it works really well with VDI.
- Simplified Management/maintenance: Simple, simple, simple.
- Support: support has been exceptional both on the phone and from our local SEs. Not that we've had many issues, but our local SEs are ready and willing to answer any questions we have.
- After having used another storage vendor for years and now using Pure Storage, I'm struggling with improvements. There are some new tools that have been introduced to assist with troubleshooting and forecasting that can be somewhat challenging, but no complaints from an operational view.
- In year 3, we receive an upgrade to our storage controllers as part of our maintenance renewal. It's a non-disruptive upgrade.
- We already know what our maintenance cost will be, and can easily budget for this.
- The FlashArray has allowed us to retire legacy arrays, and we are now considering further consolidation in our storage stack.
Again, we did our research and did our consultations. We conducted a POC, which guaranteed storage controller upgrades at the cost of maintenance and numbers that we could budget for. Simplicity.