We performed a comparison between Cisco MDS Series and Pure Storage FlashArray based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Enterprise SAN."The most valuable features of this solution are the devices, databases, and zoning."
"The issues with these switches are extremely rare, and the whole product line is very predictable and stable."
"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 product is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is security."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"This solution has improved our organization. In the past, we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"The reliability is very good."
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"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."
"Cisco MDS Series can improve by having API functionality for automation and programming."
"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."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"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."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
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 "Simple deployment, reliable, and scales well". 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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