Pure Storage provides an all-around positive experience!
September 07, 2019

Pure Storage provides an all-around positive experience!

Ian Hillier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray

We utilize two Pure Storage FlashArrays, with one in each of our main datacenters. It's the only primary storage solution we use, and the entire organization runs on Pure. Technologies running on the FlashArrays include SAP, Citrix, VMware, Docker, Exchange, and SQL. The arrays replaced multiple legacy spinning disk arrays and we were able to consolidate workloads onto a single array in each datacenter.

Pros

  • Simplified Management - Command line access is available, but everything you need to do can be done through the GUI.
  • Excellent support - Proactive, very responsive and capable.
  • Metrics - Right there on the homepage of the GUI, you can see what's going on with the array.

Cons

  • Updates to the GUI - It takes a while to get used to where things are, and they could be better organized.
  • Alerting - Often support gets notified of issues before we know about them. Not necessarily bad, but a heads up would be good.
  • Consolidation of workloads off of legacy disk arrays saved us >$30,000 per year in support costs.
  • Performance of the single array removed the need to add shelves of spinning disks, saving $200,000 in equipment purchases.
We did a bake off between the (then) EMC array and Pure Storage. Pure's active/passive infrastructure meant that recovery time from a major hardware failure such as a controller failure was measured in seconds. The EMC array took much longer to recover, and we didn't see the same kind of performance while in an error state.
The normal 80/20 read/write load of a transactional database is ideally suited for an all-flash array. Essentially, storage latency is removed as a bottleneck, CPU wait times are more than halved and read performance is greatly increased. Heavier write loads such as Citrix or VDI solutions work but the increase in performance isn't quite as impressive.

Pure Storage FlashArray Feature Ratings

Flash Array Performance
10
Flash Array Integration
10
Data Compression
10
Non-Intrusive Upgrades
10
Simplicity
10
Power Savings
10

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