Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
We have different models of Pure Storage FlashArray, from small to big, with the latest models. It's been used for different platforms and different departments. It is hosting all kind of applications and databases, and they are all performing well, as expected. Pure Storage FlashArray improved system performance dramatically, with some jobs running 10 times faster.
- The first thing is performance. It really performs well compared to our old storage (as expected).
- The second thing is its simplicity. The GUI design is really thoughtful. It takes much fewer click to achieve the same thing that some other products take more steps to do.
- The replication is on network, not on fiber channel. It is a design decision, but personally I feel fiber channel is faster. However, we haven't seen any performance issue on replication.
- Active clusters function well, but there is only one way (network) to prevent split-brain. It might be more solid if there were more ways to prevent it.
- The benefit of much higher performance is immediately seen, customers are much more happier.
- It's expensive for the price, but it might not be expensive if considering the good dedup ratio.
NetApp storage was evaluated. It was a good product, stable and reliable, but it is a little bit more complicated for administrators. For performance, to be honest, NetApp storage was running on a hard drive, so it is not a fair game to compare with Pure. However, the performance difference is really big. For simplicity of use. NetApp is still good for NAS. However, Pure is really better on the SAN side.