Pure Storage: fast, simple , reliable and no more additional licenses!
August 31, 2019
Pure Storage: fast, simple , reliable and no more additional licenses!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
Primary storage for corporate storage needs like virtual machines, collaboration, and ERP. It replaced two HP EVA 6400s with that were not able to keep up with I/O needs, while frequent failing components and the EOL made it a risk to keep them as primary storage. We use the built-in snapshot feature to snapshot 90% of all volumes every 30 minutes and keep them 6 days on the array. This will help us recover in case of ransomware. We have a second PURE X20 in our remote site 300 KM from here and use async replication to sync critical data off-site.
- Easy to manage. When compared to HP EVA the GUI and the available options are logical and easy to understand. Our administrator needed very little to none training to use it.
- Low Latency and high throughput. Normal business operation is around 20K IOPS and < 1 MS.
- Support. Knowledge engineers that will ' stay with you' till the issue is resolved and provide assistance even when the root cause is a, for example, a faulty transceiver in an FC Switch or an MPIO issue on AIX.
- Pure1 portal provides enough information for basic capacity planning and the new VM Topology is helpfull to quickly get information about which VM Vdisk is having latency issues.
- Excellent integration with VEEAM. For example, using the VEEAM console we can restore a file from any of about 130 snapshots that we take on the SAN.
- The portal provides some basic information on the deduplication and compression ratios but is not very helpful when troubleshooting a sudden increase in utilization.
- Reduced nightly ERP Batchjobs from 11 hours to 7 hours. Payroll jobs saw a 50% reduction in runtimes. This permitted more flexibility for our business processes.
- To update our test ERP environment we used to do offline DB backups taking over 14 hours to complete and could only be scheduled during certain weekend. Then, the process to restore this data would take another day. Now we refresh the test environment in less than 1 hr. The snapshot of 25 volumes takes only a second. The users love to be able to get their test environment updated with just a short notice. We also can use any of the existing snapshots to go back in time, if they want that.
- The ease of use of PURE has taken away the ability for only a senior storage admin to manage the system. This had great impact on our team as we can now be more responsive.
We were looking for a SAN with a large capacity in a small footprint and easy to use interface. The 3Par had a much larger footprint and cost a lot more. Compellent had fewer features then Pure and seem not as easy to use while the dedupe and compression process seemed not as efficient.