Re: Pure Storage

I have had customers use it for the Wintel environment and it worked well. I have no negatives to report about the storage or the company.

For IBM i though the first thing is it is not supported. For most customers that's a show stopper right out of the gate. But if your customer is willing to live on unsupported storage it could be considered.

It is more work to set up than IBM Storage because it requires the use of vSCSI rather than NPIV, so each volume needs be mapped in VIOS between IBM i and Pure. Performance wise it is my understanding this adds only a little overhead.

Pure does have their version of flash copy called snapshots. Will it work for IBM i? I expect it should but, certainly it cannot be used with PowerHA for example as there is no communications capability from PowerHA to Pure. I also suspect the Flash Copy Toolkit from IBM would not function with Pure.

As to remote copy I didn't find anything there but didn't spend much time looking. It would have the same caveats as with flash copy.

So to summarize.

Not supported.
vSCSI rather than NPIV
Would need to write your own tooling to utilize snapshots.
Would need to write your own tooling to utilize remote copy (if it exists)

- DrF

On 7/15/2021 6:27 PM, Evan Harris wrote:

Hi

Anyone had any experience using Pure Storage for providing IBM i storage ?
Good, bad or just another storage brand ?

I was curious if it was possible and found this reference:
https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/IBM/AIX/FlashArray_for_IBM_i

Do they provide the same functionality as IBM is storage, e.g. Flash Copy
and the like ? I am assuming they do, but interested in real world
comparisons and experience not the brochures so much.

I am not planning anything specific but it came up in conversation with a
client that was obviously bedazzled by Pure Storage for their wintel
environment so I was just curious. I've been to a few presentations and
they do seem to have a good story to tell.

If anyone is using it in anger - or has any reference material to point me
at - I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say about it.