Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Cisco MDS Series vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco MDS Series
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise SAN (1st)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
193
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco MDS Series is designed for Enterprise SAN and holds a mindshare of 24.1%, down 31.7% compared to last year.
Pure Storage FlashArray, on the other hand, focuses on All-Flash Storage, holds 7.3% mindshare, down 8.9% since last year.
Enterprise SAN
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

OğuzKalaycı - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 3, 2024
The product is easy to set up and easy to use, and the support is very fast
We use the solution in SAN environments for server connections It is a stable product. The solution doesn’t relapse during updates. The product is easy to use. The product is very expensive. I have been using the solution for approximately ten years. I am using the latest version of the…
Alfadel Alharthy - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 20, 2022
Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable
When we set up the solution we did not require a lot of support from the teams. The good thing about the support is they can access and upgrade the framework and all other aspects. However, the account managers from Pure Storage are not communicating very well with us. We want to talk to them about what features should be used, use cases, best practices, and other technical discussions. Additionally, we would like to know about the new features, the introduction of new technology in the storage itself. It would be nice if they could communicate this information to us. The support is very good. They always call us for technical upgrades and firmware. If we have any issues they log in and we open a session for them, and they help us. The only issue is the time zone difference between our time zone and their time zone. I would rate the support from Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of five.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"SAN switches in Cisco MDS Series are a valuable feature of the solution for our company."
"The issues with these switches are extremely rare, and the whole product line is very predictable and stable."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is its reliability, support, and scalability."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is security."
"The product is easy to use."
"The features I found most valuable are the ease of deployment, it's easy to upgrade, easy to configure and easy to administer. There is no need for vendor professional services which saves project cost. The usage of WebUI for all primary features like hostname, IP address, SNMP traps, zone sets, addition and deletion of zone members or zone sets, backup of switch DB is very simple."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the devices, databases, and zoning."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"It has good stability for our company."
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"The solution helps to simplify storage."
"We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency."
"We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us."
"The most important feature of any storage array is its reliability, measured by its uptime."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
 

Cons

"The licensing model could be less complicated."
"The solution's management interface and GUI need improvement."
"Cisco MDS Series can improve by having API functionality for automation and programming."
"It is quite a stable product. It should be shipped with the latest firmware to avoid download and upload schema at the beginning of the initial setup. There should also be the possibility of downgrading the firmware when required. WebUI needs DCNM instead a web-based GUI should be made available like Brocade san switch."
"Cisco MDS Series could improve by adding more gigahertz. However, they are doing this over time."
"The product is very expensive."
"The GUI client is Java-based and we know that Java is not secure, so everyone disables it."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing cannot be considered an advantageous trait of the solution since it is expensive. I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"The price of the Cisco MDS Series is high."
"It's perpetual licensing and maintenance is a recurrent cost."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"There is always room for negotiation."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"Our costs are around $100,000."
"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
"Pure Storage is expensive. It comes with features, so you get what you pay for. It is expensive compared to our old storage systems, but from the amount of human effort that you have to pay to babysit a storage system, it reduces that. I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us."
"I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less... It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Enterprise SAN solutions are best for your needs.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
26%
Government
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Educational Organization
33%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Storage. It may be more expensive, but it should pay for itself for its functionalit...
What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashArray?
We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price. However, the current retail price may be relatively high, and discounts ...
 

Also Known As

Cisco MDS 9100, Cisco MDS 9222i, Cisco MDS 9700
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Rugby League
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Enterprise SAN. Updated: October 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.