Easy interface and the accessibility of the features are effective and this solution functionalities on data migration and processing of different from other packages is amazing. NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays is the most secure platform for easy management of all the business and project data and the capacity planning tools and even the configuration options are the best and easy to use.
When you need speed, it's FAST, especially for MS SQL databases. If you are having bottlenecks, you can spend your time finding it in the code because it's not Pure Storage. Love the data reduction and duplication. We can store so much more on this unit than the base physical size. Love the data snapshots. When you need to complete copy your entire environment for testing etc. Nothing is easier, a few clicks and you are done. Extremely helpful for testing and training.
Support - I've never had a call passed off to a different party that I then have to wait to get back to me. The person responding to my support ticket has been able to help me every time.
Non-disruptive upgrades. We were able to transition from a SAS based //m series array to a NVMe based //x series array with zero down time. This gave us greater performance and capacity with minimal disruption.
Simplicity - Pure Storage aims to automate the complicated steps of storage management with superior software. You know they are still happening under the surface, but the administrator does not have to deal with keeping the process just right with a given vendor's command set.
Licensing - All-in base licensing instead of expensive add-on licenses for additional features. There are very few exceptions to this rule.
As always, Netapp upgrades are really painful. I wish there was an easy way of upgrading Netapp.
GUI is hard to use and CLI is even worse. GUI is confusing and you click all over the place before you get over the learning curve. CLI has changed from the 7-mode days and is very confusing to use. I have had scenarios where the support themselves use documentation to put in the proper commands.
Like any array, Netapp's CDOT has it's own bugs in the software. We learnt the hard way when one of our nodes went down and a bug prevented take over of SCSI services which resulted in an APD situation on all our ESXI hosts. Was a nightmare rebooting all the VM's and ESXI's to relieve them of the APD's. People don't pay millions towards a storage platform to go through nightmares.
It has so far been a very fast and stable product. We have had wonderful support when we have needed it and the account manager and engineer attached to our organization have been very responsive with any questions and concerns we have had.
Our organizations primary storage platform is NetApp AFF-A900 nodes. All our storage requirements, be it storage visible to our compute either using FC or NFS is through these nodes. The shares or CIFS too are setup on these nodes. We also use the fabric pool to write the data to NetApps Storage Grid
From the day our first array was put in (2017) we have had very little issues using it the way we wanted to and none of the setup or processes we incorporate this into have ever been complex. All of the interfaces in the GUI are very intuitive and do not require any CLI experience to do what we need it to do.
We have never had an outage with Purestorage. Yes we have had 2 drives go out but replacements were installed so fast there wasn't any issues. We have had a NVRAM module replaced but were noticed from Pure they were sending a replacement because they were predicting a failure so pure was proactive preventing any issues. Knowing Pure is monitoring our device 24x7 gives us peace of mind.
The corporation has a very diverse data load and when we migrate from a hybrid storage to pure all-flash, significant gains have already been observed. Latency always remains below 1 ms regardless of the load and volumetry used. Application performance also depends heavily on whether or not the code is more permormatic and network access infrastructure. The product has been meeting expectations
Pure Support is timely and communicative. They are always ready to assist and very skilled at what they do, no matter the time of day. Even at 12:10 a.m. on New Years Day when your array has a hiccup that causes some errors in your environment, they will be on the phone with you in an instant. If they are unable to determine the cause right away, because things appear to be normal, they will take your environment's configuration, lab it up in their support environment and then research until they figure out what caused the problem. Even if it takes 3 months. True story.
Excellent training and really you don't need that much. We received training at the Pure offices and also on site when the product was installed. Simple things like how to login to the GUI interface, how to setup users, how to create volume and mount it. How to make a snapshot, how to copy it and mount it. Really is pretty self explanatory on how to do things with the GUI interface. We were expecting complicated base on other vendor products, we got super simple.
Great videos and documentation. There is a common theme with PureStorage, "Keep it elegantly simple". They have great support network and great support user groups. Documentation has been very helpful with providing auditors with methods and procedures on security and other ways the product works. Great documentation on setting PureStorage to be the most effective with VM's, SQL Server, and other products.
The IBM All Flash FAS was similar in performance and price, but we were already a NetApp shop. This made the decision easier to go with the NetApp AFF system so it would tie in with our SnapManager architecture, as well as keep the learning curve short.
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
We run what seems to me to be a crazy number of hosts (800), backed by 2 pure arrays. Around 400 hosts per array, including database servers, render farm, application servers, etc.
Epic, our EMR providor, has very aggressive guidelines for performance. The Netapp AFF meets those guidlines easily eben in a mixed workload environment. This has helped us meet our business objectives by not having to diversify our storage platforms or vendors.
Multi-protocol support (block (ISCSI/FiberChannel) or File (NFS/CIFS)) Allows us to use the Netapp systems to solve all storage requirements regardless of the system needing storage
Clustered technologies along with non-disruptive movement of data between nodes on the cluster make hardware refreshes simple and allows the business to keep running without interruption even during massive data moves.
