"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."
"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."
"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."
"We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"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."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"The solution is stable."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."
"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."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
"We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform. The idea is that they would run a basic NFS or CIF share from the controllers. FlashBlade is the powerhouse for File and Object storage, but if you don't need all that power, a lightweight file function would make FlashArrays more versatile."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly."
"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."
More Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array Pricing and Cost Advice →
Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 33 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 65 reviews. Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage and Pure Storage FlashBlade, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Gluster Storage.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage Arrays reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
