I like Pure Storage way too much
September 09, 2019
I like Pure Storage way too much
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
Flasharray backs most of our VMware datastores. It also is the backend to our Linux-HA implementation running SMB and NFS.
- It's fast with low latency under load.
- It is supported by an evergreen support policy.
- Purestorage sees the under-the-hood issues on it before they become problems. They contact us and schedule maintenance to provide fixes and upgrades.
- The thing just works. We spend almost no time on it and it's in use for most of our production environments.
- There's very little improvement to be made. They even have a load prediction engine now that allows you to predict what will happen if you scale up one of your load types (choose a volume and tell it you're going to make ten more of them and see what it predicts).
- It saves us a lot of engineer time relative to NetApp.
- It's priced competitively.
- A single M20 flasharray is supporting 64 blades of VMware compute without any problem.
FlashArray just works. They set it up with us and it works. The interface is simple. Things are easy to do. We use it as a backend for VMware and sometimes as a backend for Linux-HA-based NFS/SMB serving. It's just there and easy. IBM's V7000 was cool but required figuring out and not everything always made sense. Netapp 7-mode and Cluster-mode both have a lot to go to get simplicity, though they really support CIFS well. If you are looking for a CIFS NAS, look at NetApp or Pure Storage FlashBlade, or frontend a FlashArray with a Linux server or two if you have the know-how.