Pure Storage FlashArray Review

There are two real use cases. 

1. General purpose infrastructure for VMs. 
2. Business technical applications, such as Oracle DB or MS SQL DB. 

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.

It's simple, powerful, and ready to use.

Replace SSDs in the lower-end unit. 

Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex.

I has good stability. We have had no issues with upgrading.

We haven't done an upscale of the solution, maybe more in future projects.

It has very good support.

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.

Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation.

It's cost-effective when we replace it and has rich improvements with low effort from the customer side.

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.

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.