Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is focused on enterprise solutions, a support solution that needs either performance, reliability or cost. For example, most companies have databases, virtualized workloads, or VDI workloads. So with those kinds of environments like the Block Storage, it is perfect because it switches very well with the cost, performance, and reliability ratio. Additionally, it's easy to deploy to benefit the IT team in the management costs.

We find the ease of usability and setup valuable.

Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions. The amount of storage the customers receive is approximately 20% higher when you compare it with similar solutions. So it can be a problem when you are positioning the product.

We have been using the solution for seven years as partners and are currently working with the latest version.

The solution is highly scalable, but scalability is sometimes undervalued, but everyone can scale. In the case of Pure Storage FlashArray, our experience with upgrading the capacity only involved changing the controllers. So, for example, if you have 20 terabytes and want to go to 100, you only have to change the controllers when paying for that storage capacity upgrade. You can also include the controllers, and the controllers' upgrade does not impact production. You can do it without stopping, so the upgrade of the machines can start with the smallest to the biggest machine that can deploy up to five petabytes. If you cannot do it smoothly, you don't have to stop production and will not have a disruption.

Our experience with customer service and support has been very good. It is very good even though they are still growing, and they are very responsive to issues. They promise a 15-minute response time and are very good at keeping that promise.

The initial setup is straightforward. Two engineers are usually tasked with deployment.

Our return on investment is good.

The licensing cost is close to zero. Every new function or functionality is included when paying the annual maintenance. Our customers value it because the maintenance is always the same regardless of whether it's the first year, the seventh or the tenth year. Additionally, the products use the same operative system with new capabilities, like ransomware and safe mode. Another thing that is quite nice to have is outstanding performance. They can provide a lot of performance, so there is not a lot of difference. Still, efficiency is something customers value because the compression can be up to twice of the second competitor. I rate licensing costs a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by improving upgrade prices.

We make use of the solution primarily for storage and DR replication.

We use the most recent stable version, as the latest one is still in a beta stage and too new to be employed.

V-Vault is pretty new and its implementation is superior to that offered by nearly any vendor. It's easier to configure than most others and to import the V-Vault. A separate working machine is not required. 

I can't think of too many features that need improvement. There are no bugs, it just works and it's stable. The graphical interface is perfect and really simple. Someone who understands storage can figure it out within a couple of minutes. There are really no drawbacks.

The only minor issues that come to mind are that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad. Also, the solution should be cheaper.

I've been using the solution for the past 10 years. 

The solution is stable. It's superb. We've done upgrades in which multiple controllers were involved and, while changing from one model of the array to another, a single controller was removed. It is swapped out and a new one introduced. Once it's stable they proceed to the next one. We have never experienced an outage in any of the three companies in which I've employed the solution. Even when the controller went down, the arrays remained up.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has been amazing. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who is not super knowledgeable. The only time I entertained any doubts, whatsoever, is when V-Vaults first came out. Certain people were not very familiar with it, but this was short lived. As we were extremely early adopters of V-Vault, training was provided fairly quickly. While the general tech support was not up to snuff, within a month or two they were all trained. Since then, there have been no issues to report. 

In this company we used an IBM V 7000 and in a previous one, an EMC VMAX.

When comparing the solution to an EMC array or an IBM B7000, both of which I've used, Pure Storage FlashArray is light years ahead of everybody else. I've used a variety of these solutions and many of them are very complicated. 

Only two weeks ago we set up a new solution in a new location that we're building. It's pretty straightforward. There are certain internal matters that only the vendor can handle. But, that's fairly common with most good storage arrays. Besides this, it's really easy. The vendor is really simple to work with. One need only provide him with a list of the IP's he uses for management and replication. 

I did not do the initial storage myself, as I'm in Chicago and it is handled in Omaha, Nebraska. I did have to coordinate everything, however. We were sent a form to fill out with the name and IP use. At this point, the arrival of a technician is scheduled, who asks where the rack should be placed. At this point, it is racked, cabled up and all the initial IP configurations are introduced. This is the point at which the person can take over and start carving out the ones he wants or creating the V-Vault, should he so desire. The process is really simple.

The technician's visit lasted an hour-and-a-half. I've been doing this for a long time. So, perhaps, it took me another hour to configure everything, although the level of involvement can play a factor. We created two only and a V-Vault. Like I said, it's really easy.

The solution absolutely provides us a return on our investment. I've worked with other storage arrays such as one that IBM was promoting to us. It was the company's first attempt at doing an all-flash array and it bore much similarity to Pure Storage FlashArray. It took us a week to get it up and running. We added some development servers and the whole array went down. We lost everything. Such experiences really make one appreciate the stability and thoughtfulness that goes into the engineering and redundancy and scalability of the solution.

You could say that the licensing cost involves a one-time fee, at which point support can be renewed in what I believe to be three-year blocks. As long as a person keeps his support current he can upgrade to the newer version of the array, which can be done once every three to four years.

The solution could be cheaper.

We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee. Something that's really awesome about the solution is that the cost is all-inclusive of the features. There is no need to pay for replication or for any additional features. A person is entitled to employ these when they come out.

In my present company we have around 500 users, but my previous one had closer to 10,000.

In the current company, there are five or six of us that are responsible for overall maintenance and we handle everything. This is in contrast to the company before last in which there were three of us who handled nothing but our four different storage arrays. To be honest, Pure Storage FlashArray does not leave us with much to do. Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup. It frees us up to do real work.

My advice to others is that this solution is the best available. For someone who's not a storage admin, the support is awesome and help is provided gladly for unfamiliar areas. What's nice about the solution is that it very rarely breaks, which vastly cuts down on downtime. There is much redundancy and support is super proactive. This means that if a part goes bad they will generally know about it before we would. It's such a clean, easy to use, great supportive product. It really frees one up to do other things that are more important.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten, although I would give it a score of 50 were this possible. 

Our primary use case for Pure Storage is for disaster recovery.

We use AWS for our cloud provider.

It's fast because it's Flash storage so the IT team doesn't have to worry about it.

Besides virtualization and the benefits associated with that, we're a Workspace ONE customer, we're going to be starting that deployment Q4 of this year and we're looking forward to improving the patient experience with the doctors and the rest of the medical staff.

We are delivering a better experience for doctors and the other staff that deliver desirable outcomes. Again, it's easy on the IT staff. It's important to have infrastructure that you can rely on and not have to worry about failing.

We use SRM for VMware integration. The failovers with SRM are fantastic. It's fast and reliable. It just works, which is sometimes difficult to achieve.

The white glove customer service that I get is their greatest value. They even do the firmware upgrades for me. I don't have to worry about it.

The capability from Pure as far as sharing out files and things of that nature is a little bit lacking. However, I know it's coming so I'm not upset that it doesn't exist yet.

Their stability is second to none.

I'm confident it will grow as the hospital grows.

When I started at my current employer, our SAN was eight years old and out of support. It was very urgent that we replaced it immediately.

The initial setup was straightforward. Plug it in, then they show up to do the firmware upgrade. We connected the fiber channel, we put it on the network and within two hours we were moving workloads over.

We bought it from a reseller but we did the installation and design ourselves in-house.

We have received a return on our investment.

I have used NetApp, IBM, and EMC XtremIO in the past. We selected Pure because of its reputation. We also considered vSAN, but we ultimately went with Pure because of the ability to do things that vSAN couldn't do at the time. It has since changed. I don't know if that would change my mind about going with Pure, but I don't regret the decision.

Depending on their EMR, Pure is certified to work with many vendors including EPIC and MEDITECH, and they're a fantastic partner. Even from pre-sale to post-sales, I'm always in contact with the folks at VMware and Pure. They address any issues, problems, or questions I have. Their ability to help is endless.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. When the file services are available on Pure, it will absolutely be a ten.

We're a service provider, so it's the primary storage for hosting our customers.

Pure Storage is easy to use it has helped simplify our storage. 

vSphere integration and DevOps are our most valuable features. 

Also, one of our customers used to have a rates run that ran for eight hours, and when we migrated them across to Pure that went down to under two hours.

Still implementing.

The stability of Pure Storage is very very good.

Good to very good.

Excellent.

We switched to Pure Storage mainly because of the frustration of dealing with performance on the old platforms that we used to use.

The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it.

The biggest return on investment for us is not having to do a swap out of the arrays every five years. We've been through three Evergreen refreshes now of arrays already deployed, and that's working out really well. 

The main solutions on our shortlist at the end of the process were NetApp, EMC, and Pure Storage. We ended up buying both NetApp and Pure Storage because we always like to have at least two different vendors involved in our data centers. The decision not to go with EMC was because of the design that they'd done for an all-flash storage solution. It didn't fit with what we were trying to do.

I find that the total cost of ownership to actually be lower than the fee implementation. We record and meter everything; electricity consumption and staff time spent looking after the arrays. Our figures put it somewhere between 40% and 50%, depending on how long we run the rates for.

The data reduction rates vary for us. Anything from 6 to 1 down to 2 to 1, because it depends on our workload. Latency is always good and it's generally less than a millisecond across all the arrays we run.

Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature.

Pure Storage FlashArray is painful in certain areas, and because of this, in my company, we wish it was made to be a bit more user-friendly, especially in a VMware environment, so that it can be made less of a cumbersome process. I don't know if its less user-friendly nature in a VMware environment is indicative of some of the encryption features and other stuff of Pure Storage FlashArray. Pure Storage FlashArray would just be easier to manage if it didn't have to jump through so many hoops.

I have experience with Pure Storage FlashArray. My company is a customer of Pure Storage FlashArray.

It is a stable solution. As long as you don't accidentally cut the power off in your company, the product remains stable, making it pretty reliable.

It is a scalable solution.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a nine to ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of the product is complex.

Pure Storage FlashArray's team had to install the product in our company.

Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a solution that can be described as a product that functions amazingly fast in terms of speed once it is up and running.

In our company, we only semi-manage the product. Three people who look after server infrastructure, networking infrastructure, and virtual infrastructure in my company look after the product's maintenance.

I rate the overall product an eight to nine out of ten. I wish the product wasn't cumbersome to do certain things and should provide a little more flexibility.

We primarily use the solution for storage. 

It has improved the way our organization functions by improving the resilience of our infrastructure by quite a bit. 

The tool size is good. We have a tool size and then each size has one Pure Storage and they form the active cluster. We can just access the data on both sides with a uniform access design.

The scalability is good.

It can do some replications. They're very easy to perform. 

We're quite happy with eh solution overall. I can't recall coming across any features that were lacking. 

There was some complexity in the initial setup.

While they've improved a lot, many features have been released recently and they are not that mature just yet. My understanding is they just released some features, for some transport services over the NVMe and then the file service. However, the file service is not so mature. I had some problems with the file service when we used it. 

Other new features, such as the active clustering over the FC, and the verification over the FC feature, we didn't use. We have to have a trial on it first before commenting on it.

I've been using the solution for five years. 

It's very, very, very stable. There are no performance degrades during any upgrade or replacement of the parts. 

The product is extremely scalable. 

There is only one person using the solution currently. 

I've dealt with technical support previously. Their response is fast and mostly very, very helpful. We just need to enable the remote console on the array and then they just can easily troubleshoot by themselves. That way, we do not need more time to work with them. They just fix the problem for us.

We also use HPE Nimble. This solution scales much better. That said, it is a bit more complex to implement when you compare it to Nimble. 

There are two different classes in our design. We put more critical applications on Pure due to its stability and resilience. Less important or less critical applications or servers are on Nimble. However, the capacity of Nimble is far larger than Pure Storage.

The initial setup is more complex than the Nimble. Mostly the configurations must be done by the Pure engine at the back end.

It took two or three weeks to deploy the solution.

You only need one person to deploy and maintain the solution.

We handled the initial setup by ourselves. We did not need any outside assistance from any integrators or consultants. 

With Pure Storage, we buy the array and then all the features can be enabled on that.

It is more expensive than Nimble. The price is likely double Nimble's.

You do not have to pay for any extra features or add-ons. Everything is included. 

I'm a customer.

We use the Pure Array X model with a version of Purity 5. Recently, we bought the Pure C series.

We use it with a private cloud and on-premises as well.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Pure Storage has been the go-to storage array for me. It's a lot smaller, easier to set up, faster to upgrade, and more reliable. 

The performance is very stable. This is something which I don't get out of a solution such as, for example, 3PAR. 

The code upgrades are very smooth. They're actually all tracking their vulnerabilities. As a customer, Pure Storage gives sufficient time to the customer to showcase the new features and to say this is how to go about going over to the upgrade, and so on. We are quite prepared. We can schedule ahead and be ready for these things. That's something which I like - the selective approach - and everything is on the cloud which helps Pure reach out to their customers and gives these new features. 

Its ability to use multiple services such as the file services, the block services, backup, fast backups, lightning backup, and so on, is great. These features are something that StoreServ or HP doesn't have. They have multiple products for that. Pure tries to bundle them together. That's something which I really like. It reduces the footprint and helps me sell this a lot more to the customer.

Pure Storage support could be a little better. 

The pricing can be a bit high.

In general, I'm quite satisfied with what product they have on offer, and what new features are being released.

I've used the solution for a while. 

The stability is good. The performance on offer is excellent. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Technical support needs improvement.

With respect to them being able to respond, they're more marketing people, less technical. Some of these technical SMEs who I've worked with on Pure Storage, they're really good. However, overall, some accounts still have that thing in their mind that the support isn't as great as some of the bigger companies like Dell or HPE.

That said, that's not the experience for me.

I've also used 3PAR. Performance on Pure Storage is a lot faster than 3PAR.

The initial setup is easy. It's also quick to upgrade. A company shouldn't have issues with the process.

They're okay with the pricing. They're expensive compared to some of the hyperscalers today. When it comes to a private cloud, enterprise-class, where we're looking at highly encrypted, high-performance, highly reliable systems. I might not go with Pure. If I can go with the data center class, I can go with Pure Storage. For enterprise-class, I would still lean back to Hitachi or Dell.

We are partners.

Most of my accounts have multiple storage arrays, and Pure Storage always happened to be one of them.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're pretty happy with it overall.

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for data backups.

The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray.

We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately one year.

The solution is stable with low vulnerabilities.

The support is very good they quickly react to problems.

We previously used a Hitachi hybrid storage solution with both traditional storage and flash storage.

The initial setup is very simple.

We have two administrators that support this solution.

The price of the solution is not expensive.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a ten out of ten.