Tired of managing multiple storage arrays? Review the Pure Storage FlashArray!
September 06, 2019
Tired of managing multiple storage arrays? Review the Pure Storage FlashArray!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
The State of Colorado is using the Pure Storage FlashArray as the enterprise storage platform to solve the Storage-As-A-Service problem by consolidating multiple storage arrays into a smaller and faster footprint and bring in new capabilities such as Disaster Recovery by providing the data replication for critical and essential services between multiple sites.
- When we needed to increase our capacity, the Pure FlashArray provided us with the zero downtime scalability for critical and essential systems during critical production workloads.
- Our customer had an aggressive DR site replication requirement which needed to be implemented and tested in one month. With the Pure Storage FlashArray we were able to architect the data repositories, confirm site links, set up and replicate Protection Groups, test the replication process and timing, and successfully deliver a DR solution in the required 1-month window.
- We were having some serious issues with one of the arrays at the beginning, and I wanted to ship the equipment back because I was done with the product and felt like I was about to be let go. The Pure team set up a three-way discussion/troubleshooting session with VMWare and Cisco, and reviewed our existing certified configurations from a prior vendor, and provided a proposal on remediation. Since agreeing and implementing the final proposed configurations, we haven't had an issue since. Pure driving the conversation and giving us a recommendations really showed they cared and wanted their services to shine.
- Our reps have been fantastic! Whenever this is an error/alarm, they're on the situation within minutes. Sometimes they respond before we can show they've acknowledged the issue and that they're ready to review the system when we provide access.
- The Pure Storage FlashArray has given us a much better dedupe and compression ratio/storage utilization than our other storage arrays, allowing us to consolidate from 3 very large arrays to one small footprint.
- We have a very strict password policy, and upon integrating the array to our authentication source, some characters were not supported and I couldn't log in to the array. This was more of an annoyance, and I'd expect the FlashArray to support a larger range of special characters.
- Pure could have been a little more proactive on some of the errors we were seeing and getting back to us that there was a patch that would correct some issues. This really would have helped us in the beginning as we were moving our entire workload to the array.
- The positive impact the Pure Storage FlashArray has had on one of our business objectives is providing that easy DR capability and providing us with metrics to offer a reasonable SLA to the customers.
- Another positive impact the Pure Storage FlashArray has had on a business objective is the ability to shrink our footprint from 3 arrays to one, in addition to simplifying administration to a single pane of glass.
- One more positive impact the Pure Storage FlashArray has had on a business objective is the ability to soon integrate with other cloud providers if we needed to supplement our offsite backup requirements.
Having the VPLEX be the storage interface between all our arrays was nice because some systems required different performance and capacities and it was the single pane of glass. Since the Pure Storage FlashArray offered us the same single pane of glass, the performance improved and it did such a great job at deduping and compressing our data, we no longer needed to set up a multi-tiered storage solution.