Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are a solution provider and we sell all sizes of Pure FlashArrays. The FlashArray X NVMe is one of the products that we provide to our customers.

Our clients with their own data centers purchase FlashArray storage because they are replacing old storage systems. They often have HP systems with hard disks and these systems are old and too slow. They are replacing them with faster systems and don't want to have additional costs every three years to renew their storage.

We also have a FlashArray for our own use.

The most valuable feature is the performance.

One of the best features is the support, which is excellent.

The user interface and reporting are good.

It is easy to deploy and administrate this solution.

In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems. They should have direct integration available using Pure APIs. Good candidates would be Rubrik and Veeam.

We have been working with Pure FlashArray storage for more than seven years.

We have not had any problem with stability, even when updating controllers for customer arrays.

We haven't had any issues in terms of scalability.

The support from Pure is excellent.

The deployment is simple. We have a single person for maintenance and they spend one or two hours per month doing it.

This is a good solution and one that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model. 

The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

Pure FlashArray X NVMe is stable and easy to migrate. 

The tool is scalable. 

The tool's deployment is easy and can be completed in an hour. Deployment is plug-and-play. 

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

The overall performance is great. The single workload performance available from Pure is higher than the SolidFire can provide. 

It's very simple to deploy and manage. Those are probably the two biggest aspects for us.

Everything has been very easy and very intuitive from a support standpoint and from a deployment standpoint. 

In terms of the upgrade procedure, we've gone through that in the last year and it was very smooth. It met expectations.

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

I've only been using it for about a year now, so I haven't run into any issues.

The biggest thing for me is not so much the Array itself. It's their Pure1 manage solution, which is a centralized monitoring plane that we can register all of our arrays to and monitor from one location. However, the ability to make that more multi-tenant for customer visibility so that we, as a service provider, can monitor all arrays we give customers visibility down to their dedicated environments would be ideal. Seeing VM performance down to the array level, and things like that would be useful. It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking. 

We've only used the solution for a year at this point. It hasn't been very long. 

The solution is reliable and the performance has been great. We haven't had any issues so far. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We haven't deployed anything too large yet. That said, just based on the design, that two-controller design, we're not going to have any of the scale problems that we had with SolidFire. They do scale it differently as it's a two-controller design. However, you can easily upgrade by upgrading your drive sizes due to the fact that it's all NVMe. The performance is top-notch, as it's all NVMe based.

Technical support has been pretty responsive. In our testing in the lab, my main interaction with their support was testing some of the different features on opening tickets and going through the upgrade procedure, and it was all really smooth. I didn't really have any complaints.

I'm familiar with SolidFire.

The initial setup was very smooth and straightforward. We didn't have any issues with it. 

We are currently a customer. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I would definitely recommend it. If a company is looking for an All-Flash Tier and they need extreme performance for individual workloads, Pure's the way to go, over something like a SolidFire.

We use this solution mostly for our databases.

The latency is good.

The administration and the stability are very good.

The software layer has to improve. The software is promising but not prominent.

We have upgraded more than 21 things. We have four artists and have had to upgrade the codes. 

There are several upgrades required, but we are slowly catching up to them.

There are not many drill-down options available. EMC is providing many reporting tools that are not available in Pure.

They need better reporting. Some of the tools are missing. EMC is a step ahead in that area.

The usage at the host level has some limited options.

We have been using this solution for one year.

It's a stable solution. It's reliable, we have not been faced with any issues.

Our IT operations team is the only one to use this solution.

We have not yet scaled this solution.

Technical support is really good.

The initial setup was easy. It was straightforward.

The installation was done within three hours. 

The licensing is on a yearly basis. We have a three-year subscription.

I don't know about the pricing as it is not my department, but if we were not satisfied with the pricing we would not have purchased it.

This is a solution that I would recommend.

I would rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe an eight out of ten.