It has drastically improved the performance of our high-end Oracle databases and allows us the ability to replication to a DR location with ease.

I do not hire as much tech support for this solution as I would normally have to because of the way that it works, so it saves money on staffing.

VMware benefits our organization because we make use of the applications for everything.

The moment we started using Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, we immediately saw a 30 to 40% improvement in performance. In addition to that, we saw a highly dense configuration where we were able to eliminate costly spindle-based storage and free up valuable real estate in our data center. That was immediately recognized.

VMware is really beneficial for our IT board. It benefits our IT organization by enabling us to consolidate as much of the physical hardware as possible within our data center. Essentially we can shrink the footprint to make more efficiency gains out of our existing data center.

The feedback I've had from the storage admins is that it's the simplicity. It's easier and quicker to allocate storage for us. We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint than we used to.

It helps simplify storage management a Database Admin perspective - there was a lot of thought that went into the size of the disks, how we allocate those, etc. Especially when doing maintenance or expanding disks. There was always performance issues when expanding disks on the old infrastructure arrays and allot of care had to be taken on offset sizes etc - Whereas now, we're finding that we can expand disks without having to remove and add disks again. That simplifies those admin tasks without any performance implications. From a Storage Admin side they love the ease of use and visibility the systems gives them.

Its speed is superior to our existing Unity x00 model. There are three different models of Unity. There is x00, which is the original model for Unity. There is x50, and now you have x80s. It has performed substantially better than our x00 model and a little bit better than our x50 model. I cannot rate it against the x80s on the Unity class, but from what we've got, it has beaten those two models performance-wise. This is bearing in mind that those x00 models were there before they had their own X-series with the NVMe flash.

The biggest impact changing to Pure is we saw an influx of tickets from customers because they thought their BI applications were broken because they were running too quickly. 

Operationally, we find that we are not having storage problems anymore on performance. Historically, there might be various storage performance issues when you have DBAs involved utilizing network and storage resources, since it's very operationally intensive to gather multiple teams together and do comprehensive troubleshooting of problems. We found these issues have simply gone away since we have migrated to Pure Storage. It's been fairly significant change in how we manage and deploy applications.

It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users. 

You don't have to worry about the different tiers of storage. They are always fast and reliable with consistent performance.

It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights. 

Its agility has been a benefit for our IT organization. We are running VMware on Pure. The main driver was FlashStack. The joint solution has helped my organization through its support. 

It has good, reliable, and fast storage. We really like snapshot features and how automatable and programmable it is. It is all managed with ad sport and playbooks.

Fundamentally, we have more visibility to what is happening in the storage for the databases. We can determine if the problem is something that is bound by IO or the problem is related to the database structure itself. 

The amount of time that a DBA has to spend figuring out whether it is a physical problem versus a programmatic problem has been reduced significantly. Before moving to this solution, when the database was running slow, we were asked to check our disks, but we had no way of verifying that. It was a nightmare. Now, we have reports that we can send on a daily basis, and they know what their performance is like.

We can now ascertain that it is not the physical problem with the array that is causing the delays on the database. The DBAs can then look at the database and figure out various reasons or solutions for this, such as maybe the tables are value structure, maybe they need to run optimal queries, or maybe they should change the way they are accessing the data. You can pretty much take out of the equation the fact that the hardware is the problem.

Speed has definitely been a big improvement for us. We were running a bunch of iSCSI to EMC VNX and that had a gigabyte bottleneck. Now, since we're running through a true fiber channel to the Pure array, we're getting 32-gigabyte bandwidth. That means the speed and accessibility for our users and our customers have definitely improved.

The Hypervisor that ESX and vCenter use, as well as the Orchestrator for some automation,  have helped to improve my organization. There's a lot that VMware does for us. Probably 95% of our infrastructure is built on VMware's platform, hosted on-premises. This is soon to be 100%. We have some physical stuff that we're converting and VMware has made it possible to pick up and drop those servers onto their platform. We'll reach 100% by the end of the year for sure.

We do have VMware analytics stood up. It's a simple Linux machine that runs a Kubernetes container that talks back to Pure1, which is their public website for support as well as for analytics, which we're using also. It's just a simple API. 

We also use vRealize. It helps us pinpoint issues as they come. We haven't done a whole lot of the automation through vRealize, but we're probably going to work towards that so that if we have an allocation issue, it can automatically shift things for us. But the DRS and HA kind of do a lot of that for us inherently. There hasn't been a huge drive to do any of that quite yet.

Using this solution has benefitted us operationally by making us more efficient.

VMware benefits our IT organization through cost efficiency.