Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

The solution acts as a storage for mission-critical applications. 

The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources. 

Regarding AI-driven initiatives, while we don't work directly with AI, I'm sure my customers are using it in their solutions. The tool's predictive analytics, which utilizes AI, work perfectly for service. Additionally, my customers run their AI solutions without any complaints so far.

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them.

One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

I have been working with the product for seven years. 

Pure FlashArray X NVMe is the most stable storage solution that never breaks down. 

95 percent of our customers have upgraded their boxes, and it's very easy and fast to do so. It's always within budget, and most expand their storage capabilities. It's straightforward. One of the most important government facilities in my market operates on more than 400,000 customers. It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages. More than 600,000 users depend on the product. 

The technical support is great; it's always on time. However, they changed how they sell support, which we're still used to. But in terms of actual technical support, it's a plus. The only downside is that they don't pick up spare parts promptly after a replacement. They usually take a lot of time to collect the parts. However, overall, customers always have their issues resolved promptly.

I rate the tool's deployment ease a ten out of ten. We start with planning. We will have a plan once the customer gives us the purchase order. We discuss the methodology with the customer beforehand. Typically, the equipment ships within a month or even less. And when it comes to implementation, we usually take less than half a day to deploy the solution for a customer.

The tool is cost-effective. If it works and doesn't break, it's worth it. If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.

The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.

My company has both small and enterprise clients. I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a ten out of ten. 

We use this solution on private cloud for all our Oracle workloads and databases, and also for our enterprise virtualization infrastructure running BMR.

The main reason why we run our VMware on Pure was because it went hand in hand with the ease of use, configuration, compatibility, and the support. It was a recognized solution very early on and Pure Storage and VMware have a great partnership. It offers support for compatibility drivers and things like that.

We also use some of the integration tools from Pure Storage to help us manage some of the day-to-day tasks that we do with our storage and configuration and also to help keep things running optimally. One of the things we're using is the management pack from Pure Storage for vROps, so that we can continuously monitor the entire environment as well as our Pure Storage. With that we are more proactive about being able to make adjustments to meet the demands of our users. We use that to automate some of our storage augmentations when we need extra volume.

The moment we started using Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, we immediately saw a 30 to 40% improvement in performance. In addition to that, we saw a highly dense configuration where we were able to eliminate costly spindle-based storage and free up valuable real estate in our data center. That was immediately recognized.

VMware is really beneficial for our IT board. It benefits our IT organization by enabling us to consolidate as much of the physical hardware as possible within our data center. Essentially we can shrink the footprint to make more efficiency gains out of our existing data center.

What I really like about this program is that it is easy to use and easy to configure. I  am also very happy with their support. It's the first storage company that we've actually engaged with and formed a partnership that does what they say they're going to do and they meet all of the requirements given.

Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services. 

Pure is an innovator. They're a disruptor in the industry and I love that. That means that they're motivated and dedicated to being at the forefront of technology. So the only thing I can say is that I wish that Pure would keep up the good work and it looks like they are. 

We've been a customer for about four years and as far as the stability goes, we have not had any issues with the product. Again, it has met the described functions that we need. When our vendor told us what Pure Storage does, we weren't certain of that because many vendors make empty promises. But Pure Storage was the first company that delivered what they promised. 

As far as stability goes, we have yet to have an outage. We have had failed components, but we've had top-notch support, and we've been able to resolve critical issues within hours. So if I had to rate the stability with Pure Storage products and our environment from one to 10, I'd give them a 9.7.

For our environment, we have seen the ability to scale up and out very easily with the product. We have also performed storage and controller upgrades live with zero downtime. That is another key component of our requirements that were met. I have been involved with every upgrade and there have been no issues. Scalability for us has been great. It works well and it does what it's supposed to do, as advertised.

What I like about Pure Storage technical support is that when you enter a request, you immediately get a response. Within less than 15 minutes you get a follow-up phone call, depending upon the severity of troubles you're encountering. That has been very good for us. And again, if I had to rate that on a scale of one to 10 I would say that's about a 9.5. That too is another thing in the industry that we haven't experienced before.

We were running on very old hardware that was all spindle-based sand solutions. Large-sized equipment with too much power consumption. We looked at other solutions like Kaminario, Nimble, Nimbus, 3PAR, and Tintri, but choosing Pure Storage was a no-brainer. We saw the solution, we were skeptical upfront, but when we did our research, it was very quickly recognized that Pure Storage was the right solution. We were able to save a ton of data center space with density ratios we've never seen before with hardware. 

With Pure, we immediately saw value in the density ratios that we would be able to achieve. We saw value in the performance, in the scalability, and with the support. In the past, we've had trouble with support with all the other major vendors. So that was something that we took a risk on. Thankfully we did because it worked out.

The initial setup of any storage solution is complex. However, what Pure Storage has been able to do, is remove those complexities. When you receive the product, you will get detailed information on what to do. It really does eliminate the complexities. In other words, our experience has been very positive with the product out of the box. We did not need dedicated support engineers, we were able to figure these things out on our own, and we did it based on their documentation. If I had to rate that on a scale of one to 10 I would say that it's about a 9.5 as well.

One of the interesting things about ROI is that most companies assume ROI without quantifying it, which has one of the beauties of where I work, we were able to quantify an ROI. We looked at historical data from our previous spindle-based solutions and year after year we looked at those costs, the performance, everything down to the movement of water that it takes to cool this equipment. So with Pure Storage, we did a comparison in the same manner, and we saw a dramatic improvement in precious real estate space. If you had to put a dollar value on it, we'd saved a lot there. Don't expect ROI within the first year. Give it about two years and then you will start seeing a difference. 

As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license. That's something that our other competitors don't seem to do very well with as they usually have additional costs. 

On a scale of one to 10 Pure Storage has rightfully earned a 10 rating. We are very proud to be a customer and I hope the developers will continue to innovate and keep up the good work.

I use Pure FlashArray X NVMe for our virtualization environment. 

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use. 

The tool's pricing is higher than competitors. 

I have been working with the product for a year. 

I contacted the support team during the installation, and they were good. 

Positive

We decided to move from NetApp to Pure FlashArray X NVMe because we've been with NetApp for 15 years, and sometimes it's necessary to change vendors. Additionally, NetApp didn't offer the expected discounts for this project, so we decided to switch vendors.

The tool's overall deployment took two days to complete. It was easy. 

The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten. 

We run all our Tier 1 and Tier 2 storage on it, our VMware infrastructure, all of that would be running on the //X70s. Our database workloads are on the new Xs.

The feedback I've had from the storage admins is that it's the simplicity. It's easier and quicker to allocate storage for us. We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint than we used to.

It helps simplify storage management a Database Admin perspective - there was a lot of thought that went into the size of the disks, how we allocate those, etc. Especially when doing maintenance or expanding disks. There was always performance issues when expanding disks on the old infrastructure arrays and allot of care had to be taken on offset sizes etc - Whereas now, we're finding that we can expand disks without having to remove and add disks again. That simplifies those admin tasks without any performance implications. From a Storage Admin side they love the ease of use and visibility the systems gives them.

• Simplicity
• Performance
• Visibility

Those are the three most valuable features that I've observed.

The visibility you have on what the frames are doing, even your phone is amazing, very detailed information about the environment in real-time.

One area that I haven't been sold on yet is the POD replication. We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency. We have another array that our latency isn’t affected by replication and when compared to the X array with a synchronous POD setup – it’s faster to respond to the system, but as soon as the POD mode is Async – the X is faster again. We not talking huge numbers – with the POD in synchronous mode with talking under 1ms for most IO operations.(Distance dependent to the other array)  I do feel there is some gaps in my understanding of the POD setups in detail so perhaps its tuning gap.

The stability has been excellent, there was one minor issue when the M70s were first released – but they have been 100% stable since.

The only aspect that I can talk to is the benchmarking that I did from a Database perspective, as we purchased the X70 for our Database workloads. What we want to see is as we increase workload the latency should remain stable. We are able to push the X70 way past our current needs from a throughput and IOPS perspective – without any degradation on latency. As we ramped up more machines into the tests, the only limitations we ran into were switch ports and FCoE saturation – the X had headroom.

The technical support is very good. The teams are awesome. The guys in South Africa, and they're very, very good.

If you're looking at it from a database perspective, you obviously want to make sure that you can scale your workloads without a degradation in performance. What we've seen on the X’s, and the Pure’s in general, is that we can scale beyond what we need without any degradation in performance. The real-time monitoring I’ve seen via your phone is a differentiator alone – to get a heat map in the past was a big process and took place after the event.

In terms of the Predictive Performance Analytics, I haven't seen it myself. I know that the guys have just recently started looking at a lot of analytics.

Although I don't admin the solution, I would give it a ten out of ten - from the vendor technical expertise and helpfulness, it's simple, reliable, quick and predictable at the same time I’m expecting lower costs for us once we fully migrated.

I didn't do the setup, but everything I heard was that it was straightforward.

We used the main guys in South Africa, Data Sciences. They do everything, top to bottom if you want or with you teams. Our experience with them has been awesome.

I do know there has been a reduction in the total cost of ownership, although I can't say how much as we in a transition from our old arrays, but I do know the cost per gig is lower, the dedupe on the array helps drive this cost down – as well as the physical size is much smaller and uses less power.

The vendors at the time would have been Dell EMC and Hitachi.

It depends through which lens you're looking at it. If you're looking at it from a database perspective, you obviously want to make sure that you can scale your workloads without a degradation in performance, your latency times. What we've seen on the Xs, and the Pures in general, is that we can scale way beyond what we need to without any degradation in performance. We don't need to sacrifice any of the performance as we scale up or scale to the side. There aren't many vendors that we looked at that can scale to the size of the operations that we needed, from an I/O-testing perspective. In real, day-to-day, we don't run that hard. But if we need it, we can. It's there. 

In terms of the Predictive Performance Analytics, I haven't seen it myself. I know that the guys have just recently started looking at a lot of analytics, but I haven't seen it myself.

Although I don't admin the solution, I would give it a ten out of ten. It's been awesome to work with. It's simple, it's very reliable, it's very quick. And we get excellent dedupe ratios on the machine without a sacrifice in performance.

We use the solution as storage for our vSphere environment.

The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature. We have two Pure Storages. They are in a high-available setup. If one fails, the other will take over. With all the virtual machines on the storage, we need a reliable solution. The product is reliable.

We are a little bit disappointed about the data deduplication feature. We were promised a deduplication rate of at least 2:1. At the moment, we get 1.8:1, which limits our expectations. We may run out of storage in the foreseeable future. We need better data deduplication.

I read that the vendor is working on a better deduplication algorithm. It will be useful for us if it works. We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment. It's important for us.

I have been using the solution since June 2021.

When we scheduled an update, the support technician called us and made the update remotely. We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site. It took around 24 hours to replace the controller. The technician who came on-site did not have the controller with him. The technician waited one and a half hours until a taxi driver arrived with the controllers. It could have been coordinated better.

Positive

We used DataCore before. It was a Windows-based solution. We had to restart the servers every month because of Windows updates. Every month, we had to restart the servers manually. It was not very pleasant. Pure Storage is a Linux-based system, and there are not many security issues. We only have two updates about every six months. It is much more reliable.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took about three days. The first day, we just put it in our racks and put the network cables and fiber channel cables on it. On the second day, we made the initial setup with high availability and created the first volumes. We migrated the data from our current storage to Pure Storage on the third day.

We deployed the solution with the help of certified partners. They were experienced professionals. They knew what they were doing.

Our performance has increased. We were using DataCore before. It wasn’t so performant. Pure Storage has flash drives. We have better IOPS.

The product is expensive. We bought it because we want to be able to use it for about ten years. The vendor offers maintenance contracts where we are guaranteed to be able to upgrade the system, change controllers, and do other things. We hope that in ten years, the solution will be worth the money.

Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Our clients primarily use thePure FlashArray X NVMe for their primary storage needs.

Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates.

There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product.

I have been working with Pure FlashArray X NVMe for six months.

I would rate the stability as a ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability as an eight out of ten. It is highly scalable, but there is room for slight improvement. It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.

The initial setup is very simple. Installing it usually takes around one hour to get it up and running. The total time depends on what you are putting on it, like your specific data and applications.

I would rate the product as a seven out of ten in terms of costliness.

Overall, I would rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe as a ten out of ten.

We use it for databases and VMs. We are using its most recent version.

Its speed is superior to our existing Unity x00 model. There are three different models of Unity. There is x00, which is the original model for Unity. There is x50, and now you have x80s. It has performed substantially better than our x00 model and a little bit better than our x50 model. I cannot rate it against the x80s on the Unity class, but from what we've got, it has beaten those two models performance-wise. This is bearing in mind that those x00 models were there before they had their own X-series with the NVMe flash.

The Pure1 App is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can see your diagnostics and cases in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone.  EMC has not unified both diagnostics and cases into a single App that I am aware of at this time.

You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me.

Their technical support is excellent, but I can't get hold of engineers directly at Pure even when an engineer is assigned to me, which is a downside.

I have been using this solution for two years.

Its stability is excellent.

Its scalability is good. I wouldn't call it excellent because you're limited on capacity customization. You get that limitation with any array, but it seems there is a little bit more flexibility on the Unity side from a scale-out standpoint. Pure is not flexible on your datapak expansions. You're locked into a certain amount of storage. You can't customize your Pure flash storage to the degree that you can on the EMC Unity side.

Currently, its usage is pretty extensive. We're considering purchasing C-class arrays for our next use case, and we're about to use them more because of several factors. One of them has been that EMC is now starting to lose our organization's trust because of subpar support coming mostly out of India. The offshore talent in Asia or Australia is good, but the offshore talent in India is not good. Usually I know more than their L1/L2 support folks about their product.

Their technical support is excellent, but I can't directly get hold of engineers at Pure directly. Their support system is such that even with an engineer assigned to me, I can't phone them directly even if an extension at an 800 number. I have to basically jump through a manager on duty, to try to get to the engineer, whereas with EMC, the engineer might not pick up the phone, but I've got extensions for whoever gets assigned to a case to leave a voicemail on top of an email.  Pure wants to handle most of their support thru email exchange unless Zoom warranted. This is a downside that Pure has. If you get into an issue after you've got your initial engineer and you need to follow up, getting to them directly can take a little bit longer or more effort.  While Pure has an "Escalation" button on their support portal they forget humans like to talk to humans directly when urgent.  True you can email please call me.

Its setup was more straightforward than EMC Unity's setup. It took about two hours.

It is not maintenance-heavy. Its maintenance appears less than an EMC Unity array. I handle the array, but in terms of maintenance, you can schedule the upgrades with Pure, like EMC. It is done all remotely by Pure's own people. That's one thing that is not good with EMC because you have to deal with their Indian offshore team for upgrades which is lacking many times.

Pure support is how EMC used to be. EMC used to be follow-the-sun, where you had support in Cork, Ireland, the US, and then Australia, but like a lot of our US companies, they have now offshored and it is reflected in worse support in several ways, one being communication barriers.  Resolution times have been extended more than it should due to offshore support. I have had extended
turnaround times to get solutions because of their lack of talent. There
is a language issue, and their L1 support team is clearly not as good
as it should be.

What I do love about Pure is that it is lighter in maintenance.

We used an integrator, and our experience with them was great.

Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It is hard for anyone to get a 10.

At Secure-24, we have been a long time customer of Pure Storage. We started with Pure Storage approximately four years ago. We use it as the primary mechanism for block storage in our environment.

We specialize at comprehensive managed services of business-critical applications. We run a hosting environment and the full gamut of applications, infrastructure, security, compliance, and governance. Using that model, Pure Storage is a key part of being able to deliver the performance, encrypted storage, and reliability for mission-critical applications.

The biggest impact changing to Pure is we saw an influx of tickets from customers because they thought their BI applications were broken because they were running too quickly. 

Operationally, we find that we are not having storage problems anymore on performance. Historically, there might be various storage performance issues when you have DBAs involved utilizing network and storage resources, since it's very operationally intensive to gather multiple teams together and do comprehensive troubleshooting of problems. We found these issues have simply gone away since we have migrated to Pure Storage. It's been fairly significant change in how we manage and deploy applications.

It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users. 

You don't have to worry about the different tiers of storage. They are always fast and reliable with consistent performance.

Based on the various types of workloads and environments we run, we have looked at Pure Storage as being one of the largest infrastructure-based changes we have seen in our environment in the last 10 years of infrastructure hosting. 

What has changed is you now have databases and applications where you can make an infrastructure change and it directly impacts the end user experience. You generally don't see that with other infrastructure changes. If I change from storage A to storage B, maybe there is a small or minor performance increase. 

With Pure Storage, there was a dramatic performance increase which we saw across various different applications. Going from a legacy vendor to Pure Storage, we saw reductions in MRP reports previously running at six hours going to 30 minutes.

With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks. 

Ideally, in a perfect world, you would have all-flash arrays being able to displace even your traditional "cheap and deep" type storage frames. We are more excited from the industry perspective when this type of transition can happen from a cost perspective.

Also, I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center.

With mission-critical, business-critical environments, stability is of the utmost importance. Pure Storage has impressed us in this area. We have gone through multiple software upgrades, as well as completely non-disruptive hardware upgrades. Upgrading from an FA450, which is one of the arrays from more than four years ago, to an M70, then to the X70s. We have gone through that, the full controller and full storage upgrades, non-disruptively to any of our customers. This has been a big change from what we've seen historically in the storage industry, where you had to do an upgrade or when you had to do a large new purchase, and there would be a significant amount of time, planning, and organization which would go along with it. There would be intangible costs that would generally come along with legacy providers.

The way that we have looked at scalability is from a linear scalability perspective with multiple storage frames. We like having the capability of scaling wide with multiple storage frames as opposed to trying to scale too large with any one individual frame. However, we also have an X90R2 with two petabytes of NVMe in it which fits in about six rack units of space. This has been transformational, as well. From there, we scale out linearly with multiple of X90R2s, as opposed to trying to somehow cluster them or make them larger.

Over the last four years, we have displaced the majority of other storage solutions in our data centers with Pure Storage.

The engineers and architects on our team were the ones directly doing the setup and implementation.

We have absolutely seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO), specifically around the operational overhead of running a storage array. Now, we have our Pure Storage arrays managed by VMware resources. Therefore, we don't have a specific role for storage management where one used to exist. So, the VMware team is able to manage, deploy, and configure the arrays. The simplicity of drives allows for this consolidation.

There are a lot of intangible costs, such as gathering teams together in war rooms to troubleshoot performance issues, simplicity of managing the array, growing the array, and going through upgrades. When you look at all the intangible operational expenses, in many cases, these will offset the capital investment of going to an all-flash array.

To say, "Pure Storage has simplified storage," is a bit of an understatement. The array has gone from having a PhD in working with it to effectively having a high school diploma. Anyone who understands anything about IT can run a Pure Storage array. It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems.

With the traditional Pure Storage array, you had very consistent low latency, but you still were in one to three milliseconds. Now, with the all NVMe arrays, it's a whole new paradigm of fast. You're actually measuring everything in less than a millisecond. So, with the I/O responses, your high bar is one millisecond. This is something you haven't seen in most traditional storage frames or even all-flash storage frames.

We generally always advise people to make the choice to go with Pure Storage because they won't regret it. We can evidence that a lot through our experiences of running massive databases and systems on Pure Storage today and prior experiences that we've had with it.