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 feature of the Cisco MDS Series is security."
"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."
"SAN switches in Cisco MDS Series are a valuable feature of the solution for our company."
"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 most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is its reliability, support, and scalability."
"The product is easy to use."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"It is fast and reliable. It works."
"We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform."
"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."
"It worked flawlessly."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"The product is very expensive."
"Cisco MDS Series could improve by adding more gigahertz. However, they are doing this over time."
"Cisco MDS Series can improve by having API functionality for automation and programming."
"The solution's management interface and GUI need improvement."
"The GUI client is Java-based and we know that Java is not secure, so everyone disables it."
"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."
"The licensing model could be less complicated."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"The price could be better."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
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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