Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Our primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the project.

The analytics that we gather is used for just one environment (which is big in the banking industry). Production wise, it's running Oracle. Performance wise, it's basically running enterprise applications.

Once the project was enabled with data persuasion and we had Pure Storage behind it, there was a lot of saving storage. Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes. 

Infrastructure as a base is important, but the end game is to have the DevOps pipeline, which is the most valuable feature. 

A three wave application or multi-wave application synchronization would be an improvement. 

The company started off with a small chunk of the product. Now they have moved up to where Pure Storage became the direct responder in our Australian office, they said it was very stable on their end.

We have a capital of storage with EMC, our previous solution. The fact that Pure has a petabyte of storage means that Pure Storage will become a de-facto standard in all the global organizations.

We don't use the tech support, but we have an in-house engineer in one of our offices.

The initial setup was really straight forward.

We needed to choose a new investment because our solution couldn't do data provisioning very quickly. The main solution that the bank normally had was EMC. We looked into HP, IBM, and Pure Storage. But, cost, rate per terabyte, and speed is why we chose Pure Storage. It was a no brainer.

Latency defines everything.

We use it just for test purposes in our organization.

Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool. We don't use any special features in our organization.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for about six years. Also, I am using Pure Storage FA-420. I am a customer of the solution.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I can't comment on the solution's scalability since we use it in a test environment. From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable. It is only me who is using the solution in our company.

The solution's initial setup process was easy. It may look like a lot of work, but it is easy.

The solution is expensive.

It is an old storage we use for testing, and our production storage is IBM. It will be five years old since we are using the solution. We are also planning to buy a new storage solution. So, we are looking out into the market to see what we can buy.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it since I trust it is a great storage solution.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

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.

What I like most about this solution is the simplicity of the array.

The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it.

The education, compression, and the speed to perform these are astonishing.

The array is really resilient.

The price of this solution is high and should be lowered.

It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays.

I have been working with Pure Storage for about three years.

The stability of the Pure FlashArray is 100%.

With respect to scalability, it would be nice to create a LAN or a cluster on top of multiple arrays.

The technical support is 100% and they respond really quickly. Their Evergreen support plan is astonishing. They are a leader in this regard.

I have worked with similar solutions from IBM and NetApp. The advantage to those solutions is that you can create a LAN on top of multiple arrays.

The price of this solution is high.

With respect to comparing other solutions, when you put all of the features in a box, leverage them and migrate your application to one of these arrays, it will give you a lot of benefits. Some people have compared benchmark performance tests against other arrays and from my point of view, overall as a whole package when you sum everything up, Pure Storage is the winner.

Overall, this is a very good solution and my main complaint is about the price. Out of all of the arrays that I have worked with, Pure Storage is one of the better ones.

I highly recommend both the solution and the company. My suggestion to anybody who is considering this product is to do the mathematics regarding the budget and the price really well because the rate can be expensive when it comes to upgrading in the future, either scaling it up or out.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for internal storage for all virtual environments. We also use it for the SQL database, Oracle and private cloud. The storage is used to manage the internal private environment.

Compared to what we used to use, it has improved the utilization. It has improved the statistics for all the users as well. It's better, and people are happy, but we're not quite there yet.

The joint solution has helped my organization. The users are more satisfied. They were looking for better performance, which they got once we moved them into Pure Storage compared to what we had before. Now they are trying to add more and more applications because they're getting better performance and stability. There's a lot of stability now. We have fewer problems, fewer outages.

The solution has a lot of automation features that helped us to deploy the environment faster and to speed the of rate integration. Integration has helped because it helps us to understand the user's requirements. Deployment is done faster, and their applications are more secure. They are reassured that their data is saved in their environment. 

The solution needs better IOPS for the storage. That's where most of the user requirements come from.

We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help.

The solution is stable. There are less complaints, less downtime. That helps us to work in that environment more effectively.

The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster.

Technical support is pretty good. They helped us with a holiday show in case we needed anything. So far, the product is doing well with less downtime, so we didn't have that much opportunity to use support. But anytime we've needed them, it's pretty good and all the issues are dealt with much faster.

We used EMC in the past. The reason we switched was the requirements of the users. They need better IOPS and better performance. That made us move to Pure.

The initial setup was straightforward. The hardware was installed by the vendor and the integration and the configuration pieces were simple.

We did evaluate other solutions, including IBM. The other vendors also had a Flash, but Pure was the best because of the performance. That's why we shortlisted them.

We are using the private cloud deployment model on the Azure platform.

The solution benefits our IP presentation. We have a lot of cost savings. We do a lot of virtualization compared to buying physical hardware. That's a major chunk of cost-savings for the company. 

We are running VMware on Pure. It offers better performance. The utilization and the requirements from the users suggest that they want to move into Pure.

I would definitely recommend that others go for this solution. They can start slow, but they can surely move forward.

I would rate this solution seven out of ten. I would rate it higher if the solution could help us troubleshoot better and if the performance itself was even better. The users sometimes complain that it's still slow.

Our primary use for this solution is storage. We have a private cloud deployment.

Using this solution has improved our consolidation ratio and it saves us a lot of space. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the support.

This solution is easy to use.

The price of this solution could be improved.

So far, the stability of this solution has been really good.

The scalability of this solution is really good.

Technical support for this solution is excellent.

Prior to this solution, we were using the IBM Storage Network. The support was not very good, and the feature set was very limited.

We needed something that was simpler to manage and maintain.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.

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

In terms of space savings, we were able to save a lot of money.

We evaluated a second IBM-based storage solution, and after that, Pure was the second one that we looked at. We heard so many good things about it that we leaned towards that way.

Using VMware has improved our IT organization by providing a stable virtualization platform.

We are running VMware on Pure, which was driven by our interest in consolidation. It has helped us by saving space over using less dense storage.

We have the Pure plug-in for the VMware environment. It has helped us with information monitoring.

For anybody comparing this solution to similar products, my advice is to look into the numbers. This product is definitely worth the price, and it is easy to use.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have all-flash for our SQL environment.

The product added speed to our SQL environment, so we receive a bit better compression. It did give us a little more space when I moved my SQL environment off the competitor onto Pure Storage. Therefore, I obtained a bit of space and saw an increase in performance.

They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth.

I like the five-year controller upgrade, easy-to-use interface, and performance.

They do a good job at ease of use for the interface. I don't have a big team, so its easy user interface has helped us be able to manage our data better.

I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates.

The product has not gone down in a year. So, I would say that it is stable. We haven't seen any high spikes in read/write latency.

Scalability seems pretty simplistic. You just buy more drives and slap them in the box, then tack it onto your current storage pool. It seems like it would be pretty easy to scale out.

However, I don't know about scaling up. I don't think they do extra data shelves, so you would have to buy a whole new unit.

We have only used the technical support for upgrades. They respond very quickly and are efficient at what they do.

A local VAR was talking about our challenges and some different solutions to take care of it. Pure just seemed like it could fit the bill.

We have Tegile and HPE 3PAR in our environment.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We were about to get the installation done within two hours.

We have done a firmware upgrade for the OS. We clicked the button to place the call in with support. They remote in with a time that we agreed upon to upgrade the solution. We have never had any problems with it.

We used the reseller for deployment, who came in and worked with our storage guy to deploy the solution. The reseller company was Sirius Computer Solutions. My local rep and his engineer were the ones who came in to install it, and it was a perfect experience. They are whom we have always bought storage through. We have never had any problems with them.

We watch latency, then our I/Os. We care about how much we're pushing through the box, then what latency the box for read/writes is hitting. I have seen a decrease in read/write latency since moving to Pure Storage by seven milliseconds.

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year.

We looked into a couple other vendors. I am currently still using one of the vendor. Then, with Pure, we looked into some solutions from Dell EMC or HPE. Pure seemed to be a bit more cost-efficient. It also had better reviews from what we could find online and with references.

Because they do the compression and dedupe on the backside, I have seen better numbers of the Pure Storage box than on the other competitors that I have in my environment.

Ensure you are looking at all aspects of what the device can do, what your company needs are, and try to see how Pure Storage can meet all of your company's current needs.

We have Pure Storage integrated with our vCenter. The integration was very simple and gives us a lot better insight into our virtual environment.

Pure Storage hasn't increased nor decrease our ability to manage storage, because the solution that we are moving from had a very easy to use interface too.

I don't really use the predictive performance analytics.

Biggest lesson learned: Longevity planning. Pure Storage, with their five-year upgrade for controllers, has helped me feel comfortable. Even as the company grows, I will still have a storage solution which will fit the environment.

We use it for performance, the capacity of deduplication, and compression of the data.

We are a small cloud service provider. When we put Pure Storage working on the services of our customers, most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services.

The storage is very simple. 

We can use more capacity because of the compression and deduplication.

The predictive performance analytics are good, easy to use, and simple to see. They are simple to understand, not complicated.

Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers. 

The solution is very stable.

Only one disk has a problem. The performance with that problem doesn't create problems for our customers. We are able to maintain the performance of the program.

We have already made upgrades now for two months. We think that the scalability is very good. If you want to go to another array or add more capacity, they will change it, if you have the support. So, we put more capacity on it. There is a simple way to do it which has a protection of investment.

We have only used the remote technical support in the case of the disk. They are very good. They acknowledged the problem quickly, identified it, and are always asking and seeing things, which in some cases, are more difficult for us to see.

Because of our clients, we needed a more structured solution with performance which was stable. So, we tested new storage, and Pure Storage was the one that revealed to be more flexible and simpler. 

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward.

For the integration, we used a reseller. It was so easy to put in place and put it to work. They did a good job, but I think we could also do it.

For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management. The total cost of ownership has been reduced. In the beginning, the investment was greater. Now, it is about a 20% reduction.

Using older techniques, we see that we can offer clients more capacity. The real capacity that we get to customers is six or seven times greater than the capacity that we have in place.

In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify.

It is a very good solution. It responds to all the workload problems that we have. It could be with some different workloads that the solution might not respond the way that it responds to us. Test it. People will be astonished with it performance and simplicity.

We have two arrays in two data centers. Normally, in the arrays, the latency is about 4.3 milliseconds per second, which is very good in all workloads. In terms of reduction, our customers are seeing about a seven to eight plus reduction in the capacity that they have.

The TCO for flash and SSD implementation are comparable.