"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 most valuable features of this solution are the devices, databases, and zoning."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is its reliability, support, and scalability."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco MDS Series is security."
"The issues with these switches are extremely rare, and the whole product line is very predictable and stable."
"The product is easy to use."
"SAN switches in Cisco MDS Series are a valuable feature of the solution for our company."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done."
"It is easy to deploy and it's all-flash, so it's very fast."
"Cisco MDS Series could improve by adding more gigahertz. However, they are doing this over time."
"The product is very expensive."
"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 solution's management interface and GUI need improvement."
"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 licensing model could be less complicated."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"The price could be better."
"I would like to have support available in Spanish."
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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