Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

I managed Pure Storage in my previous organization for various clients. We had clients from multiple domains, such as the financial domain, the automotive sector, and the banking industry. These customers had three different types of applications using Pure Storage. One of them was the Oracle Database with high throughput and low latency requirements.

The second one had time-sensitive functions, where a two-millisecond delay was acceptable but a five-millisecond delay was not. It required indexing and low latency.

The third type of use was hosting a virtual infrastructure, such as VMware VMs. These are the three areas where people used Pure Storage, specifically FlashArray storage, in their environment.

They offer a cloud-based solution where in one pane, you can see the entire cluster or Pure FlashArray Storage, even if it is spread across two locations such as America and Europe. You can do health checks to see how your storage is performing and what capacity is being used. You can also generate a report. If one of your clusters is having a capacity or load performance issue, from the Pure portal, you can do a simulation of future capacity. You can also check what kind of workload you want to have on a particular cluster. Based on that, it will tell you whether the upgrade is feasible or not. You can figure this out yourself through the portal as a user. You do not need to reach out to an account manager or a salesperson for that.

It provided simplicity. There was also the option to upgrade the storage cluster every three years. When older technology was becoming obsolete for a client, Pure Storage provided an upgrade path with minimal cost, specifically for controller upgrades. During that project, my interaction with Pure Storage facilitated the transition from an M50 to an X50 controller, which comes in the high-performance category. This feature demonstrates the adaptability and forward-thinking approach of Pure Storage.

It took our clients about a week to realize its benefits. It helped clients decrease their organization’s storage footprint. With the NVMe technology, the footprint was reduced. They were also able to save a lot of rack space and physical space along with the electricity usage.

Initially, there were a few use cases we started with when looking at alternative storage platforms. Once upon a time, we were ran a different platform that was physically huge, power hungry, low on capacity and mediocre on performance. Use was complex and did not scale very well. It was also very cost prohibitive to maintain. We quickly outgrew it, especially when we started to adopt VMware vSphere virtualization.  We knew we had to replace this beast with something that made more sense for us.  We needed to reduce the footprint down to something a lot more reasonable.  We wanted to contain costs, especially when it comes to hardware investments and maintenance renewals. We also needed more intelligence, visibility and flexibility in our data storage platform.

We were introduced to Pure Storage through one of our long-term partners in the Chicagoland area who brought them in for a meet and greet. Their presentation was compelling. It was exciting to see what they were doing with technology, especially with the concept of data deduplication, so we decided to give it a go. The results were simply unbelievable. We deployed Pure into multiple datacenters effectively consolidating down entire row's of storage to a single rack. It ran circles around our legacy platform and what it did for VMWare was really something to see.  Boot times were drastically reduce, latency went from 30-40ms down to sub millisecond...consistently. 

As we continued to use Pure and their products evolved to add in additional features/technologies, we were able to solve other issues we never knew we had.  Our BC/DR playbooks were effectively rewritten to take advantage of array to array replication for disaster recovery.  Snapshots cut our product upgrade times in half because we no longer needed to rely on taking full backups of our environment before deploying new code.  Snaps were immediate and rolling back was almost just as fast. It was a true game changer.  Pure had single handedly improved our business strategies and making us more agile in provisioning storage and overall, running our datacenters. 

Over the years, we have witnessed Pure continuing to deliver new feature sets and technical enhancements in it's Purity code base.  Did I mention that all of these features and enhancements are part of cost of support?  Yep...no nickle and diming people to death. 

As alluded to above, our environment is far more performant, reliable and feature rich since going on their platform. 

In our company, we implemented a Pure Storage FlashArray for our VM virtualized environment. 

We do have vCenter integrated with Pure Storage. We use that application to deploy virtual volumes on our Pure Storage solution. We are still in the beginning stages, so we only have four virtual systems running on it. However, in the coming months, we will be migrating the bulk of all of our VMs over to vCenter and Pure Storage.

The inline deduplication and compression have exceeded our expectations. The rep from Pure Storage kept promising us 4:1, and we were very skeptic about getting that. We were anticipating mainly getting 1.5:1. So far, with the VMs, we have been running closer to 5:1 deduplication and compression, which is amazing to us.

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. With the old HPE system, there were quite a few more steps to have to deal with. Therefore, it has definitely reduced our management.

I am an implementation engineer for Pure Storage FlashArray. We sell it through partners to different companies in Kazakhstan.

The single management interface is advantageous, enabling us to manage all arrays from a centralized location.

Pure Storage FlashArray provides immediate benefits to our customers with its easy setup process, allowing for instant use and rapid realization of advantages.

Pure Storage FlashArray is echo-friendly and helps reduce our carbon footprint.

FlashArray provides high stability and can help reduce downtime for customers. It was helpful when migrating data from one storage to another, achieving this without any downtime.

I use FlashArray to manage storage and DR sites for my clients.

We saw the benefits of Pure Storage immediately. The biggest benefit was data reduction. We migrated 700 terabytes of storage to Pure Storage and reduced that to 400 terabytes. It managed the bottlenecks since the storage was moved to mNVRAM instead of mechanical devices. Unfortunately, since our staff is based on the storage size, I lost one of my coworkers because of the incredible reduction we achieved.

Virtualization with ESXi, Hyper-V, XenServer, KVM is the primary use case. VDI, containerization, AI, HPC are some other use cases seen in my day-to-day consulting with customers.

Being an all-flash storage, it has helped improve performance of business apps reducing latency and increasing IOPS.

I primarily work with small and medium-sized businesses, and Pure Storage FlashArray has consistently been our primary storage array. Initially, we dedicated it to SQL Storage, but after witnessing its exceptional performance, we expanded its use to encompass everything else in our environment. Previously, we used VNX from EMC, which was incredibly slow. The significant improvement from tens or hundreds of milliseconds to microsecond response times motivated us to upgrade and make FlashArray the core of our infrastructure.

I immediately recognized the benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray, including the instant improvement in response time and performance compared to my previous storage solutions. A decade ago, Flash storage wasn't ubiquitous; it was considered a high-end solution, primarily utilized for caching, while spinning disks remained the standard. Therefore, the speed of FlashArray was remarkable. Over time, as FlashArray became more commonplace with increased adoption and competition, its reliability and seamless integration with VMware and other products solidified my decision to continue using it over alternatives like Nimble or other Gartner Magic Quadrant recommendations.

The interface has always been one of my favorite features because it's fantastic from a usability standpoint.

FlashArray significantly reduced our storage footprint, shrinking it from 30 views down to just six. This dramatically decreased our overall impact, not only in terms of space but also power consumption. We went from hundreds of power-hungry spinning disks to a mere 30 FlashArray disks, resulting in a substantial difference in energy usage.

I have not had any downtime due to storage failure since using Pure Storage FlashArray.

Pure Storage FlashArray reduced our total cost of ownership by decreasing the number of labor hours required.

We mainly use FlashArray to provide flash storage for SQL and Oracle databases in production.

FlashArray has improved the stability of our servers and critical databases stability and server stability. We began seeing benefits two to three weeks after we deployed. The platform is more flexible and has lower latency.