"The most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is its reliability, support, and scalability."
"SAN switches in Cisco MDS Series are a valuable feature of the solution for our company."
"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 issues with these switches are extremely rare, and the whole product line is very predictable and stable."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the devices, databases, and zoning."
"The product is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is security."
"The tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC"
"Most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services."
"We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity."
"Cost, racial per terabyte, and speed is why we chose PureStorage. It was no brainer."
"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 licensing model could be less complicated."
"The GUI client is Java-based and we know that Java is not secure, so everyone disables it."
"The solution's management interface and GUI need improvement."
"The product is very expensive."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"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."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
Cisco MDS Series is ranked 1st in Enterprise SAN with 8 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. Cisco MDS Series is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco MDS Series writes "Easy to upgrade, easy to configure and easy to administer". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". Cisco MDS Series is most compared with Dell Connectrix, HPE SN6000, IBM SAN384B and Dell PowerVault, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN.
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