Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

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.

We use this solution for on-premises, VMware workload storage.

I do not hire as much tech support for this solution as I would normally have to because of the way that it works, so it saves money on staffing.

VMware benefits our organization because we make use of the applications for everything.

The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance.

You can't use this solution with VNC, yet. We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC.

I would like to see the cloud version of the application improved. It is kind of new and it still has some limitations. Using it with VNC would be nice, and making it more incorporated with vSphere would be very nice.

The stability of this solution is extremely high. Very good.

Scalability of this solution is decent, and I would rate it a seven out of ten. We've recently become a VNC client, and you can't use Pure Storage with VNC yet. They are working towards it, but in the meantime, it prohibits us from using VNC along with some of the Pure features that they have.

I would rate Pure's technical support a ten out of ten.

We switched from our previous storage solutions because of speed. At the time, Pure was a lot faster. It was flash, and we were on spinning disks at the time.

The initial setup of this solution was simple and straightforward.

We used Logicalis, an integrator, for our deployment. Our experience with them was good.

We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees.

We looked at EMC, Pure, and IBM. The Pure interface was much better, which is why we chose it. The cost was also better in most cases.

We run VMware on Pure, mainly because of the speed and the ease of use of the Pure storage interface. The joint solution has helped because we can do the same thing with a lot less tech.

We use the vSphere plug-in for Pure. It helps because we don't have to learn the CLI for Pure. It allows my medium-level tech staff to do stuff that they normally would be a little nervous about doing on their own.

We are big fans of this product, and for anybody considering this solution, I strongly encourage them to use it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this solution primarily for production data for our virtual environment. We run a lot of SQL out of it.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

Speed has definitely been a big improvement for us. We were running a bunch of iSCSI to EMC VNX and that had a gigabyte bottleneck. Now, since we're running through a true fiber channel to the Pure array, we're getting 32-gigabyte bandwidth. That means the speed and accessibility for our users and our customers have definitely improved.

The Hypervisor that ESX and vCenter use, as well as the Orchestrator for some automation,  have helped to improve my organization. There's a lot that VMware does for us. Probably 95% of our infrastructure is built on VMware's platform, hosted on-premises. This is soon to be 100%. We have some physical stuff that we're converting and VMware has made it possible to pick up and drop those servers onto their platform. We'll reach 100% by the end of the year for sure.

We do have VMware analytics stood up. It's a simple Linux machine that runs a Kubernetes container that talks back to Pure1, which is their public website for support as well as for analytics, which we're using also. It's just a simple API. 

We also use vRealize. It helps us pinpoint issues as they come. We haven't done a whole lot of the automation through vRealize, but we're probably going to work towards that so that if we have an allocation issue, it can automatically shift things for us. But the DRS and HA kind of do a lot of that for us inherently. There hasn't been a huge drive to do any of that quite yet.

The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly.

They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit.

I think it's a lot better than what we were running for production as far as the VNX, which has fail drives about every month. It had the EMC VNX protocol. And it's not the VNX product itself, it's just that we have a much older one so it has older disks and drives that will fail.

We absolutely see this working as our company grows. Even though it is fairly simplified in the way that they do their RAID and everything like that. It makes pulling drives and putting new ones in super simple. The costs could be improved though because it is quite expensive.

Their customer service is phenomenal. In their escalation paths, everything is laid out in black and white and it's very streamlined. Then they even go so far as to actually talk with other vendors on those integrations. If there's a potential issue with VMware and there's a potential issue with Cisco, Pure engineers will actually talk to Cisco engineers or VMware engineers and come to a resolution together instead of pointing fingers and saying, "Well, it's their problem, not ours." I've actually seen that in action so it's not just talk. You can actually do that.

It ended up being an incompatibility on the Cisco end for the UCS from one of the drivers that we had installed based on the firmware that we installed for that particular blade. But rather than Pure just saying it's Cisco's problem, call Cisco, they actually got on with a TAC engineer and talked us through it. With this method, they came to a resolution a lot quicker than it would have been to just open a ticket with Cisco and start the troubleshooting process all over again.

I had worked at a different company and we switched from EMC's XtremIO flash array to Pure and we were actually one of Pure's first customers when we did that. Their simplified support model and then their Evergreen program where they upgrade controllers as they come out was pretty phenomenal. I carried that over into the company I work for now. I kind of suggested that as a route to go in.

We used VNX, which we still have. I think one of the main driving points at the time was that we were running out of space on the VNX and the flash pool, and we could have added additional space, but the cost comparison between getting a Pure array and adding a new shelf to the VNX was about the same. I felt like we would get more bang for our buck going to Pure, which we have.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It's pretty much plug and play.

We actually used Pure professional services, which we didn't even really need, but we used anyway because it came with the implementation purchase. We did use a reseller to buy. We used RoundTower to buy the Pure array. We used professional services from Pure. It was probably set up within 20 minutes ad we could've done it ourselves, but it's always good to have trained hands on it.

A SQL job that would normally take six minutes running on VNX takes two minutes on Pure. That's been pretty beneficial because we're constantly running reports out of those SQL instances. We've seen enhancement and efficiencies from that.

EMC still has good products so they were still there. We were looking at adding additional space to the VNX. And then for general purpose, we did look at some stuff through Cohesity, but we needed more performance-oriented space. So that's why we went with Pure.

Try to get as many discounts as you can if you go with Pure.

If you don't need performance-oriented space or storage, Cohesity is very well priced and scalable. If you just need file server storage, you might not want to go with Pure. You might want to go with something a lot cheaper or more cost-effective like Cohesity.

The Systems Engineer that we worked with was a huge help, too. 

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten. It's very functional and very cutting edge. Technology just costs a lot.

Pure FlashArray X NVMe has very few features. Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues.

We need to get more information about the performance fine-tuning that we are doing. Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe. It will be much better if Pure FlashArray X NVMe provides these options like other products.

The latency issue does come up multiple times. We tried to fix it, but we couldn't figure it out.

I have been using Pure FlashArray X NVMe for four years.

I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a seven out of ten for stability.

Pure FlashArray X NVMe is a scalable solution, but the scalability depends on the load. You cannot increase capacity if latency is present. So scalability mainly depends upon the latencies. I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a six out of ten for scalability.

The follow-up is missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe. With other solutions, we'll be able to identify the issues, and engineers will be available for remote sessions to fix the issues. However, with Pure FlashArray X NVMe, we need to escalate the issue and get an account manager for its resolution.

Neutral

Pure FlashArray X NVMe has the easiest initial setup. We can set up Pure FlashArray X NVMe within one hour because everything is preconfigured. If you know everything, you can do it. I have set up the solution within half an hour.

Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products.

Pure FlashArray X NVMe is the best solution for small-scale projects. However, if you want to use it for a high-end project, you must scale it properly. You will face latency and performance issues if you don't scale the solution properly.

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

We use the solution for storage.

We use it for localization and we use the virtualization environment for the server applications and VDI, and we leverage Horizon for the virtual desktop.

Everything works well, and it is very fast.

The pricing is good.

We're happy with the services. They are user-friendly.

It offers a simple setup process. 

It's stable.

The solution is scalable. 

We haven't come across any major issues. 

They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage.

I've used the solution for about three years. 

The product offers good stability. We can upgrade live to a new version of the software with no issues. It doesn't crash or freeze.

We've tried to add a new disc in the past. It's easy to expand, and we found the process of expansion very simple. 

In our company, we have 2,000 employees working on virtual desktops. If you include our customers, that number is about 4,000.

While my colleague has worked with technical support, I have not, and therefore cannot speak to how they are to deal with. My understanding, based on his experience, is that they are fine. 

The initial setup is very simple and quite fast. The deployment only takes a few days. 

We don't have any issues with the pricing. It's not too expensive. 

I haven't compared the solution to other options. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We're a partner and end-user. We deal with Pure quite often.

Pure Storage has a hybrid deployment, and customers can get Pure Storage on AWS or Azure.

Pure Storage created this technology of the NVMe. They have very good features. Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator. It's NTP protection. Also, if your customer doesn't care about the usable space and just wants space to put their data, Pure makes one to four applications, which could take 250 or 300 terabytes of space. The solution is fast and reliable and has good install-based referrals.

Given its price, Pure is not the first option. If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure.

Customers ask if there is Turkish language support, but Pure Storage doesn't have it. Only partners give support in Turkish, or customers need to speak in English. It would be good if Pure Storage could improve this.

I've been in this sector for 28 years, and I've worked with Veeam for two or three years.

I have one client who installed Pure Storage almost eight years ago. During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.

I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe's scalability a nine out of ten.

Pure has good storage, but they don't have Turkish language support.

The initial setup is very easy. Recently, they made an upgrade, a live system working on a bank, which is a non-interruption upgrade from one service to another one. The upgrade was very useful and easy to do. We didn't need to stop anything. The maintenance and the updates are very easy.

Pure Storage is better than IBM, Dell, and other solutions because it makes a good application and keeps its promise. Pure Storage has stability and works very fast. They keep their promise for what they build. For example, if they promise one to four with an application, they do that. Even if they can't do that, they put in an extra hard drive to keep their promise, and it's a free hard drive. The most important position of Pure depends on whether you are talking about net space or the use space.

Of course, Dell and IBM have good solutions, but that depends on what storage level we are talking about, such as SIP or NAS.

If the customer needs a certain size, say about 500 terabytes of usable space, Pure is not a good solution because it will be expensive. IBM could be a better choice.

I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten.

Pure might be better than other products could be. But in some projects, IBM is better for the customer. However, I must understand what the customer needs. I am not saying that Pure is the best, but In some projects, I prefer to go with Dell, HP, or IBM. I need to understand the customer needs and budget before comparing them. Pure has better technology right now, but if the customer has a small budget and if we are just talking about the use space or the net space, Pure doesn't work.

There are so many applications on devices. Those are part of my job and a few others as well.

I find it more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, not for the enterprise.

I appreciate the performance. The support service is nice.

After implementation, there are limitations, such as the number of paths, file systems, and replication options. It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises.

I have been using the solution for two years.

There are some stability issues. I think I can provide some examples.

The scalability issue is that the product team tends to increase the storage capacity.

The support service is nice.

Positive

We used Hitachi previously. Hitachi is more of an enterprise product, however, that was a management decision, not mine.

Implementing the product involves setting up a few racks, which can be done quickly. That said, configuring firewall policies and similar tasks takes more time. The implementation itself should not take more than a day.

I am an engineer, so I'm not the right person to ask about the implementation team.

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

We considered Apache and Hitachi.

Choosing the right solution depends on customer requirements. I am an engineer, not a test guy.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We use Pure FlashArray X NVMe is a premium tier storage offering. It is a dedicated array option that we offer our customers. We are a service provider and deployed it in multiple data centers.

The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use.

Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution.

I have been using Pure FlashArray X NVMe for approximately three years.

Since we have deployed Pure FlashArray X NVMe we have not had any major issues with failures or performance on these arrays.

I rate the stability of Pure FlashArray X NVMe a ten out of ten.

The solution scales well and is easy to do. 

We have approximately 10 dedicated customers and another 10 or 15 in the shared use case. Our customers are our users and they may be a company that runs their own software development and this is only their storage on their cloud offerings that they purchase from us.

We plan to increase our usage.

I rate the scalability of Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten.

Overall the initial setup of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is not difficult. It's simple to deploy, install and get up and running. The full process of deployment which includes installation, setup, and configuration, takes approximately one day.

I rate the initial setup of Pure FlashArray X NVMe an eight out of ten.

A small team is typically required for the implementation, as different teams handle different responsibilities, such as networking, virtualization, and facilities. The installation process also requires a couple of people as different roles such as cable racking, networking configuration, and array configuration have to be handled.

We have a dedicated support team for maintenance available 24/7 across all of our data centers. A small group of individuals is in charge of overseeing the platform, and we also have a standard support team in place.

I highly suggest obtaining the implementation certification for Pure FlashArray X NVMe. It is necessary for deployment and can be a bit frustrating as it requires paying for professional services unless you have the certification. With the certification, you are able to deploy on your own. The process is straightforward and uncomplicated, but you don't have access to all the required information to do the initial setup without the certification. Obtaining the certification is a good idea.

There's training material that's available and it's a normal certification test. That cost approximately $150.

I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten.

They could make it easier to receive information about the solution and the support has been a mix of good and poor experiences.