Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

We use this solution on private cloud for all our Oracle workloads and databases, and also for our enterprise virtualization infrastructure running BMR.

The main reason why we run our VMware on Pure was because it went hand in hand with the ease of use, configuration, compatibility, and the support. It was a recognized solution very early on and Pure Storage and VMware have a great partnership. It offers support for compatibility drivers and things like that.

We also use some of the integration tools from Pure Storage to help us manage some of the day-to-day tasks that we do with our storage and configuration and also to help keep things running optimally. One of the things we're using is the management pack from Pure Storage for vROps, so that we can continuously monitor the entire environment as well as our Pure Storage. With that we are more proactive about being able to make adjustments to meet the demands of our users. We use that to automate some of our storage augmentations when we need extra volume.

The moment we started using Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, we immediately saw a 30 to 40% improvement in performance. In addition to that, we saw a highly dense configuration where we were able to eliminate costly spindle-based storage and free up valuable real estate in our data center. That was immediately recognized.

VMware is really beneficial for our IT board. It benefits our IT organization by enabling us to consolidate as much of the physical hardware as possible within our data center. Essentially we can shrink the footprint to make more efficiency gains out of our existing data center.

The solution acts as a storage for mission-critical applications. 

The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources. 

Regarding AI-driven initiatives, while we don't work directly with AI, I'm sure my customers are using it in their solutions. The tool's predictive analytics, which utilizes AI, work perfectly for service. Additionally, my customers run their AI solutions without any complaints so far.

We use it for databases and VMs. We are using its most recent version.

Its speed is superior to our existing Unity x00 model. There are three different models of Unity. There is x00, which is the original model for Unity. There is x50, and now you have x80s. It has performed substantially better than our x00 model and a little bit better than our x50 model. I cannot rate it against the x80s on the Unity class, but from what we've got, it has beaten those two models performance-wise. This is bearing in mind that those x00 models were there before they had their own X-series with the NVMe flash.

At Secure-24, we have been a long time customer of Pure Storage. We started with Pure Storage approximately four years ago. We use it as the primary mechanism for block storage in our environment.

We specialize at comprehensive managed services of business-critical applications. We run a hosting environment and the full gamut of applications, infrastructure, security, compliance, and governance. Using that model, Pure Storage is a key part of being able to deliver the performance, encrypted storage, and reliability for mission-critical applications.

The biggest impact changing to Pure is we saw an influx of tickets from customers because they thought their BI applications were broken because they were running too quickly. 

Operationally, we find that we are not having storage problems anymore on performance. Historically, there might be various storage performance issues when you have DBAs involved utilizing network and storage resources, since it's very operationally intensive to gather multiple teams together and do comprehensive troubleshooting of problems. We found these issues have simply gone away since we have migrated to Pure Storage. It's been fairly significant change in how we manage and deploy applications.

It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users. 

You don't have to worry about the different tiers of storage. They are always fast and reliable with consistent performance.

We primarily use the solution for cluster applications and databases. We use the solution on the DBA and those that use double machines.

Being able to have broken files on-site on the same appliance is quite useful.

The newer version of NVME has a really noticeable difference in quality versus the last generation. It's better in terms of latency. It allows for so much more input.

The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward. 

The stability is quite good.

We've found the scalability to be excellent.

The price of the product isn't too high.

Currently, it's our tier-one storage. We use it mostly for our Oracle databases.

It has drastically improved the performance of our high-end Oracle databases and allows us the ability to replication to a DR location with ease.

We needed a flash array to support our core databases for maximum performance. We use SQL. We were using vSAN before, but we were having some problems with it. So, we wanted to isolate the databases with dedicated storage. Rather than using a vSAN solution using servers, we tested a couple of solutions, and we figured out that Pure FlashArray X NVMe was giving us the best performance.

Fundamentally, we have more visibility to what is happening in the storage for the databases. We can determine if the problem is something that is bound by IO or the problem is related to the database structure itself. 

The amount of time that a DBA has to spend figuring out whether it is a physical problem versus a programmatic problem has been reduced significantly. Before moving to this solution, when the database was running slow, we were asked to check our disks, but we had no way of verifying that. It was a nightmare. Now, we have reports that we can send on a daily basis, and they know what their performance is like.

We can now ascertain that it is not the physical problem with the array that is causing the delays on the database. The DBAs can then look at the database and figure out various reasons or solutions for this, such as maybe the tables are value structure, maybe they need to run optimal queries, or maybe they should change the way they are accessing the data. You can pretty much take out of the equation the fact that the hardware is the problem.

We run all our Tier 1 and Tier 2 storage on it, our VMware infrastructure, all of that would be running on the //X70s. Our database workloads are on the new Xs.

The feedback I've had from the storage admins is that it's the simplicity. It's easier and quicker to allocate storage for us. We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint than we used to.

It helps simplify storage management a Database Admin perspective - there was a lot of thought that went into the size of the disks, how we allocate those, etc. Especially when doing maintenance or expanding disks. There was always performance issues when expanding disks on the old infrastructure arrays and allot of care had to be taken on offset sizes etc - Whereas now, we're finding that we can expand disks without having to remove and add disks again. That simplifies those admin tasks without any performance implications. From a Storage Admin side they love the ease of use and visibility the systems gives them.