"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."
"We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN."
"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."
"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
"We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."
"Technical support has been excellent."
"The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience."
"There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"The solution offers amazing performance."
"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."
"I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"Support has been helpful."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
"In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented."
"The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"I would like a more informative CloudIQ for iOS. What you can see via the web UI significantly differs from what you can see via the web application."
"They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive."
"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."
"If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice."
"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"The solution is not cheap."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"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."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
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Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 16 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 33 reviews. Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe writes "CloudIQ ensures that all our arrays are properly communicating so we can see performance and storage capacities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Provides protection against ransomware threats with immutable snapshots, and it is well known for its scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades". Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series and Dell EMC XtremIO, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage and HPE 3PAR StoreServ. See our Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
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