Our primary use case of this solution is for the production storage, development, and DR storage.
Infrastructure Architect at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Web interface is easy to use and we've seen data reduction numbers
Pros and Cons
- "We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
We run a lot of Oracle workloads and we need a lot of development environments and this solution allows us to snapshot those environments. It releases those to new teams within minutes at a very small storage cost amount.
It really helps simplify storage. It's very, very simple to use. The web interface is also very easy to use. The bureau's EOS is just perfect, there's nothing really complicated about it. With the help of the array, it's very easy to navigate. We can see the volumes and our protection groups. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the Legacy storage that we were using.
What is most valuable?
Ease of use is the most valuable feature for us. It just does what it says. It's very efficient, really quick, and replication is great.
Predictive performance analytics are also good. The compression and the predictive analytics tell us how much storage we're using and how much longer we have before it runs out. The compression algorithms are perfect.
What needs improvement?
The new features that they are coming out with are very compelling for us, especially now that they have a partnership with AWS it will get some traction in the coming year. We will certainly be going with VMC on AWS. It's very compelling for us now that it's working with VMware.
There's nothing that they could improve on. They've been brilliant all the way through. We've had no downtime, no problems, easy installation; it just works.
Buyer's Guide
Pure Storage FlashArray
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Pure Storage FlashArray. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
Three to five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There have been no problems whatsoever with stability. We do purity upgrades during the daytime and we don't lose any workloads and we don't have any outages. The support of Pure Storage is just absolutely brilliant. We've had no outages whatsoever with it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We scaled up when we bought new arrays where we get the snapshot replaced and upgraded for no extra costs. During the workloads and while the upgrade was taking place there were no outages, none whatsoever.
How are customer service and support?
We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were getting rid of Dell EMC because they were awful and they cost a fortune. vSAN was also an option because we use a lot of VMware but we stuck with Pure Storage. It was a solution that we'd put in a few years ago and we didn't have any problems with it so we wanted to continue using it. We have a good working relationship with the account managers in Scotland. They're really good.
How was the initial setup?
The set up was very easy. The hardest part was getting it out of the box and into our tack.
What about the implementation team?
We used an integrator called ProMax. We did 50/50 with them. We got ProMax to come in and start the process and then we finished off the work. This was the first time that we worked with them and we had no problems with them. I would rate them a ten out of ten. The engineer was helpful the whole way through. He helped me unbox the solution, get it into the racks, build it, cable it up, and get it into production.
What was our ROI?
We've seen data reduction figures in the amount of storage that we're using. We've seen cost savings compared to Dell EMC. We've seen the performance of the array. We don't have any real figures, but I'm 100% sure that it's faster than the Legacy storage that we were using.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
If you're considering this solution I would advise you to do a Pure Storage demo and have them put an array in to try.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Principal Engineer at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels.
Pros and Cons
- "The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
- "The solution helps to simplify storage."
- "The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
- "Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
- "The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
What is our primary use case?
We use it for virtualization.
How has it helped my organization?
We have complete control over it.
We partner with Oracle on stuff, so we have support on it. Before, we have had issues with support from our other vendors. It has been a major improvement from a support perspective.
The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. We've run Fibre Channel for our historical storage, and going from Fibre Channel to InfiniBand connected has blown up the amount of traffic that we can do. Now, we can support 40Gs per link, and there are eight links. When we went from being able to support four Fibre Channels at eight gigs a piece. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the speed of it. It is much faster than anything that we can get from similar competitors.
The solution helps to simplify storage.
What needs improvement?
Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't scaled yet, but we're planning to. We do upgrades constantly.
It's very scalable and easy to do.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We moved from an infrastructure that was owned by another team, so we needed something to move our own stuff onto. We originally tried some hyperconverged solutions from Dell EMC, but they didn't perform well at all. It took years to get that together and when we ran our benchmarks on them, and we decided they were not good. So, we immediately turned eyes to Oracle who is a big provider for my whole company, not just my team, and talked to them about what they had that was going to suit us, and they pointed us towards Pure Storage. As soon as we had a proof of concept and were testing it, we decided to run with it.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case.
What about the implementation team?
We used Oracle.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend Pure Storage.
We investigated some flash storage implementations for it and based off of the way that the appliance works the added cost of flash doesn't scale with the performance that you get with it, so it hits on our middle ground. It works perfectly for us. We don't need to look at any type of flash storage.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
Pure Storage FlashArray
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Pure Storage FlashArray. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Vice President, Products and Services with 51-200 employees
Comparison of technology-defined storage solutions: max IOPs, raw capacity, total cost, and cost per GB per IOP.
Original posted at https://www.freeitdata.com/.
Buzzwords suck. That’s right, I said it. Hybrid, All-flash, Converged, Hyper-converged, Data-aware, VM-aware, Software-defined, Object Storage, BigData, Scale-out – we get it, but why is it all so confusing? Or better yet, why is it all so similar?
In Spite of the Buzz - A Win for the Customer
Despite the overuse of buzzwords and re-classifications, the storage industry has actually seen dramatic improvements over the last 3-4 years. All of these changes are great for the customer. More efficient technologies & more competition have lead to lower operating cost, better pricing, and better solutions. But what good is saving all that time and money implementing and using these products, if it takes just as long to weed through all the jargon to find the right one?
Technology-Defined-Storage
There are plenty of options and a ton of overlap, but each of these unique solutions has a place in today’s modern data centers. Let’s take a moment and weed through the buzzwords to get a better understanding of where each one fits best.
- Performance Centric – The top tier. The absolute must have NOW situations. There are several solutions that will fall into this section. Typically, the all-flash technologies that promise 300k IOPS. These types of solutions are best suited for your production database or VDI environments, but are often limited by budget and capacity.
- Me Too (Hybrid) – The two trick ponies. These solutions typically combine a flash element with spinning disc to create a “best of both worlds” scenario. You can get speed and capacity at a reduced cost when compared to the performance tier. They also aren’t the cheapest, or the fastest.
- Designed for the virtually minded – Sliding all my money to the middle of the table betting on “virtualization black”. Very specific and very good at what they do, these solutions focus on how they function within virtualized spaces.
- Cheap-n-deep (Capacity Play) – Yes, they still have a place in our hearts. The “box of drives” are still very useful inside today’s modern data centers. Perfect for backup/archiving and large amounts of unstructured data. Typically these boxes won’t overwhelm you with performance or features, but they fit the wallet nicely.
- All-in-one (Converged + Hyper-Converged) – I like Legos too. Like building blocks, these solutions allow you to group compute, storage and networking into one device and stack them as needed. This makes it super simple to manage your environment and allocate assets, but it’s an all or nothing type buy.
Below we have dissected a few of the industries leaders to look at IOPS, Capacity, cost and how they compare. This is a great snapshot, but doesn’t by any means tell the entire story.
Software Makes All the Difference
It’s all in the software. Obviously, reliant to some extent upon the hardware, the software really determines how the important stuff is handled...the data. De-dupe, compression, hot data, cold data, these features all play a big role in the IOPS and capacity capabilities of each solution. Not to mention the reporting and administration capabilities provided by these unique and elegant software platforms. Many of the hardware components inside each of these “boxes” are virtually the same. They are manufactured by the same companies, assembled in the same manner, with same CPUs, the same RAM. The software layered on top of this hardware really defines its capabilities.
Fit-Defined-Storage
In a perfect world, we just look at the speeds and feeds, features and functionalities and find the best technology to fix the problem, but there are many other business considerations when evaluating data center technologies. Installation, integration, usability, performance, the list goes on and on, but budget is often the biggest one.
Uh oh. More buzzwords - TCO, cost per GB, cost per IOP. All just ways to assess whether those features are worth the money. We couldn't just look at cost as a single determinant on picking the right solution, but looking at it relative to the performance and capacity is one easy way to determine “value.” Here is a look at the same data above by cost per GB.
How about looking at it by cost per GB, per IOP.
One size doesn’t fit all. At least not when you factor in more than just size. The process of evaluating solutions can become long, complex, and costly.
Scale-out, IOPS, TCO, cost per GB…all of these things together with budget, timing, integration & ease of use factor into finding the right fit. By themselves they’re just features, much like buzzwords.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are vendor-agnostic implementers.
Chief Consultant and Architect at Tahir Professional Services
A reasonably priced, scalable and stable solution with great support and easy installation
Pros and Cons
- "The technical support is very good."
- "There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
What is our primary use case?
We are using the latest version.
What is most valuable?
We are satisfied with the product. It is very good.
What needs improvement?
There is definitely room for improvement.
Overall, the solution is pretty good, although it does have certain gaps. There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for around three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
So far, the solution has proven itself to be stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is very scalable.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is very good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to going with Pure Storage FlashArray, we were using the range of all of the Dell EMC products.
While all these products have their own uses, Pure Storage FlashArray is in a market of its own.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward.
It takes under two hours to accomplish.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is reasonable.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is definitely storage-centric and this it accomplishes very well.
I use the solution in my own company.
The solution is both cloud- and on-premises based.
While I don't actually use the solution myself, as I provide services for and commission it for the customer, I have probably done this 50 times over so far.
I definitely recommend the solution. It's very good. It does what it advertises and this very well.
As Pure Storage FlashArray is purpose-built, I would rate it as a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
Sr Infrastructure Architect at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It provides better performance for our desktops
Pros and Cons
- "The stability and performance are the best things about the solution."
How has it helped my organization?
It provides better performance for our desktops.
It has positively affected our space requirements.
We have reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.
We haven't done as much capacity planning as we should have. I am sure it would help us.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is its performance.
The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are very good.
The upgrade architecture is very good.
Our data reduction rates, latency, and availability are all good.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have had it for about two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is very good. The stability and performance are the best things about the solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is very good.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is very good.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward.
We have undergone an upgrade of firmware.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a reduction in TCO.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The cost has room for improvement.
Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did an evaluation of Dell EMC, Pure Storage, and NetApp.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend trying it. We like the product, and it works well.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
CIO at NGS srl
It's simple, powerful, and ready to use
Pros and Cons
- "It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
- "Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
- "Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
What is our primary use case?
There are two real use cases.
- General purpose infrastructure for VMs.
- Business technical applications, such as Oracle DB or MS SQL DB.
How has it helped my organization?
One customer didn't have the budget to renew all the VM and VDI infrastructure. It was not so huge (approximately 100 VMs). The VMware partner provided the Horizon View solution, suggested to upgrade it to Windows 10 (for example), but the customer didn't want to recreate the infrastructure.
Without touching anything, and integrating from the traditional storage, was a two-tier Dell EMC squared infrastructure toward a flash array. We were able to guarantee the overall performance and consistency for Windows 7 machines without upgrading anything, which was a huge improvement without an additional cost. Then, we added a lot of additional VMs.
What is most valuable?
It's simple, powerful, and ready to use.
What needs improvement?
Replace SSDs in the lower-end unit.
Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I has good stability. We have had no issues with upgrading.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't done an upscale of the solution, maybe more in future projects.
How are customer service and technical support?
It has very good support.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is very straightforward. It is clear, simple, and easy. While it's a human interface, there a lot of operations that are automatically done by the unit itself.
What was our ROI?
Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's cost-effective when we replace it and has rich improvements with low effort from the customer side.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Our customers will usually also evaluate HPE 3PAR. It is a good competitor because they put emphasis on their infrastructure.
In the end, the customers pick Pure Storage because of me. I don't sell 3PAR because I don't believe in the solution.
What other advice do I have?
It is simple, powerful, and a beautiful solution. It is a nice piece of software, but it also has some nice hardware inside.
The predictive performance analytics are quite good. We have touched a lot of cases where the performance was quite similar, even under big loads, but the compression and duplication numbers can be misleading. Because PDFs are more compressed, the dedupe and compression numbers are being lowered.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes.
Pros and Cons
- "We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us."
- "Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
What is our primary use case?
The primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the product.
We are moving into a DevOps environment and CI/CD. Their departmentalization was an enabler because database is a service in the pipeline where the underlying risk factor has to be correct, especially the storage. This primarily applies to the driver and the infrastructure as a base, but the end game is to have a DevOps pipeline.
How has it helped my organization?
We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, e.g., our database team used to spend 93 days backing up and restoring databases. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us.
What needs improvement?
Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products.
If Pure Storage had its features at parity with its competitors, it could move ahead.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It scales well, around a petabyte.
How are customer service and technical support?
We have an in-house engineer in one of our onsite offices.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. We started with about 60TB and have grown from there.
What was our ROI?
We have seen ROI.
We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did a vendor search, which included a big payments project across Asia-Pacific for a company that could do data provisioning very quickly. Then, Pure Storage was chosen.
We also considered Dell EMC, HPE, and IBM. We picked Pure Storage because of its ratio per terabyte and speed.
What other advice do I have?
Pure Storage is now our de facto standard product to use.
The analytics were gathered for this environment, and the environment is big. Production-wise, it is running Oracle, and performance-wise, it is running enterprise applications.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Chief Architect at VLSS LLC
It helps to simplify storage. After moving to this product, storage becomes an afterthought.
Pros and Cons
- "Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
- "It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
We do a lot of Oracle implementations and getting Oracle workloads to run faster and better. For a lot of our customers, they are looking at Pure Storage for its underlying storage. It makes everything a lot easier for them in terms of increasing performance, lowering operational costs, and making their day-to-day lives easier.
How has it helped my organization?
It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought. They know it works and it performs well.
What is most valuable?
- The performance that you receive and its ease of use.
- Being able to get it up and running in a very short order.
- Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great.
- It takes away a lot of issues that customers were dealing with before. E.g., a lot of times, customers are dealing with performance problems when they migrate to Pure Storage that go away, then they don't have to worry about them anymore. Then, they can focus on other things, like automation.
What needs improvement?
We work with a lot of Oracle customers. 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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
From our internal usage and our customers, the product is rock solid. We haven't heard of any issues or seen anything ourselves.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is very easy. You rack the array, you plug it in, you connect a couple cables, and you can be up and running in under an hour.
What other advice do I have?
Try it out. It is easy to get it up and running, and simple to migrate your Oracle workloads over to run an apples to apples comparison. The performance numbers speak for themselves. If you factor in the ease in terms of operations, as well as the cost of the array compared to other solid state arrays, it becomes a clear positive for Pure Storage.
All of our customers are looking at submillisecond latency, which is the common Pure Storage metric, and we have definitely seen it there. Everything has been great in terms of throughput and availability has been fantastic.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
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Updated: November 2024
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