Storage that I never have to think about.
September 13, 2019
Storage that I never have to think about.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
Our Pure Storage FlashArrays are our businesses primary data storage. Primarily used to host our virtual infrastructure, they provide high bandwidth, low latency storage with in-line dedupe and compression that hugely reduces our raw storage consumption whilst never being the bottleneck in any of hosted systems. Not a single storage failure to date.
- Hugely reliable and with amazing support staff. This is probably the most critical factor for us and makes our PURE arrays my favourite bits of kit in our environment. Many occasions where PURE storage support staff have identified and resolved issues with our virtual platform better than the support staff of the virtual platform (and so far never something that was caused by the PURE storage arrays). Really quick and easy to raise cases through the management web interface and always good quick responses.
- Very high speed (average read and write latencies of between 0.2 and 0.4ms). Never had storage speed being a bottleneck.
- Great dedupe and compression. We can massively over-allocate storage, confident that the PURE storage arrays will crunch it down as much as possible. On average between 4 and 10 times reduction (although of course, it does depend on the data).
- Great extra features at no extra cost, such as Veeam plugins and the amazing Active Cluster synchronous replication.
- The EverGreen option (only if you get 3 years support in one go) has already replaced our FA-420 controllers with the newer FA-m20 controllers at no extra cost. Really good to know that controller upgrades are included in the support costs so we won't fall behind and have to start from scratch again with newer hardware.
- I suppose the only real downside we have seen has been that these are definitely a premium cost item. However, so far they have been worth every penny in reliability, performance and features so until someone finds me something as good for less money then I will keep these, thank you very much.
- Okay, just scraping the barrel for negatives, but these are an expensive way to store media content as it doesn't compress or dedupe well.
- Not had a single outage caused by the Pure Storage arrays going down. Great controller redundancy even means that the Purity software updates have no impact on live and the support staff always do thorough checks before and after the upgrades.
Not had any need to look into alternatives as we are very happy with our storage arrays and, thanks to EverGreen controller refreshes we hopefully won't need to look elsewhere any time soon. The only other storage we use is cheaper bulk spinning disk storage for non-critical media content and backups. Not surprisingly, the cheaper storage can't really hold a candle to the Pure Storage arrays.