Pure Is A Good Solution
September 25, 2019
Pure Is A Good Solution
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
Our Pure Storage array is being used as storage for our financial cores and Cisco UCS hosts. Our old platter drive SANs were end of life and we needed modular, expandable storage that would grow with our organization for years to come.
- Storage density. Having over 20TB of space in less than half a 3U shelf is great. When we're ready for our first expansion we won't even need a new shelf.
- Compression. I was skeptical of how much performance would be available since the array compresses all data stored. It's been faster than I thought. Boot times of VMs are very SSD-like.
- Replication. The compressed replication makes synching data between the arrays fast.
- Setting up replication to other arrays. I pretty much blundered into the solution. Documentation was not clear, mostly because the documentation available from Pure wasn't updated for the new Pure user interface yet. Left me hanging.
- Making changes to replication. The way I understand it, if I want to make any kinds of changes to the replication link (like renaming it) I have to destroy it and recreate it. I still haven't figured it out completely.
- Veeam can't look inside replicated volumes. It would be nice if Veeam could see, open, browse, and restore VMs from inside the replicated volumes on the other side of Pure replication. This would solve some big problems for us.
- Need documentation on how to configure/optimize VM OSes to take advantage of the Pure. We're coming from a 1Gb network infrastructure (including all the virtual NICs) moving to a 10Gb infrastructure. Intra-VM file transfers are slow.
- Growing reliability concerns. We've had our Pure arrays for less than 6 months and have had a drive failure in each of our chassis so far. I do like that the Pure array emails statuses immediately. Support from Pure to fix or replace drives has been good.
- Unknown. I don't have access to the budget.
- Nimble
We liked the full flash array solution that Pure offered, its performance was ideal for our use cases. However, the biggest factor (90%) of the decision to purchase Pure was that the Pure arrays came bundled with our core application server upgrade. Without this consideration we probably would have gone with Nimble, a "good enough", solution.