Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

We use it for VMware virtualization.

We have VDIs, virtual desktops, which users log into every day. On the old storage, they would sometimes have three, four, or five-minute delays; it just because useless for five minutes. They couldn't do anything when they were logged in, because of the slowness. Now, with Pure Storage, we have totally eliminated that problem. This was the primary reason we purchased it and it has performed very well. We're very pleased.

It has helped simplify our storage. It's small, it's fast, and it's very simple to manage.

In one of our arrays we had a 35-to-1 data reduction, which is very outstanding. Not many places have that kind of benefit.

We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency.

We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power.

Finally, we love the predictive performance analytics. It's an excellent tool. It's something we were asking for in the past. When they rolled it out, it made a difference.

We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array.

Both the stability and scalability are excellent. It's a very stable environment.

You can scale easily. You can extend it online, change controllers online. Scalability gets five out five stars.

Technical support is very good. We are very pleased with support. We think that it's probably one of the best vendors we work with, as far as support goes; compared to NetApp, for example. Pure storage support people are very responsive and knowledgeable.

The old systems we had were just not doing the job, so we knew we had to change.

It was very easy to set it up. No complexity at all.

We deployed it ourselves.

We haven't analyzed it in terms of numbers, but we have definitely seen a very good ROI. There has been a reduction in our total cost of ownership.

We looked at Pure Storage vs Dell EMC, but we thought Pure Storage has newer, better technology developed from the ground up, whereas Dell EMC is a patchwork solution. In addition, the price was more favorable.

Give it a try. Get a system in on a trial basis, make a deal, and try it to see if it's something you can use.

I rate Pure Storage at ten out of ten. We're very satisfied with Pure Storage. They are a very good company, doing very good things.

Our primary use case of this solution is for storage. We use it to ensure better application performance and to improve the user experience of the application. The cross-storage appliance improves the overall application experience. We have been using this solution as an on-premise solution. It has been useful for our critical applications.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that in the past we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain. 

We like that there isn't a steep learning curve and it is easy to learn how to navigate. It's also quite scalable and easy to implement.

I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS.

We see a lot of reliability coming from Pure Storage, mainly from the fact that over one and a half years, I haven't seen any disc failure especially compared to NetApp.

We use VMware but we have migrated most of the VM load to AWS. We also have Oracle ERP data warehouse and our internal lifecycle management system that is being stored on their storage. It's able to handle the entire load.

Technical support is good. I get pre-preemptive notices from Pure Storage support. They will notify me to check certain parts because there may be a possibility of an issue arising with those parts. I'll know to take a look at the data center and from there I will be able to tell whether or not it's a false alarm or it's an issue that's about to arise. The pre-emptive warning is helpful for us. 

We also considered Hitachi Storage and NetApp. Our decision was ultimately based on two factors: simplicity of the usage and overall performance. We ended up choosing this specific product because we had good support from the application team and we liked the performance coming from the product itself. 

I would rate this solution an eight because it is very reliable in the way that it fulfills its key objective of being performance driven.

If you're considering this or a similar product I would advise you to do a PoC to make sure that this solution actually fits into your environment. For us, we go through a cycle of about three months to do the evaluations across our different storage. One of the greatest challenges that our company had was that our company was not using Pure Storage and they were quite skeptical of the solution. With the results of the PoC, we proved to them that it is something that is going to be very useful for our business.

Our VDI with VMware Horizon include 100 VM for office and graphics desktop with nVidia GRID, the low latency and the high deduplication permit to reduce storage footprint, power consumption and to increase the consolidation on few VMware Host.

We have consolidated all the VSI (55 VM) and VDI (100 VM) in the same storage, improving performance and overall virtual desktop acceptance.

The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression.

We liked the non-disruptive downgrade from FA-420 (POC) to FA-405 in production and the non-disruptive upgrade from FA-405 to M20.

Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved. The VVol support is just released in GA.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

There were no stability issues. It is always on from the first LUN deployment to VSphere.

There were no scalability issues. NDU and NDD were very simple, without interruption or performance decrease for its cluster nature, active/passive.

Customer Service:

I would rate the customer service as very high.

Technical Support:

They are all skilled. They upgraded the storage firmware from remote every time we asked via a phone appointment.

We have used 3PAR for VDI and NetApp for VSI. The new solution has a very low price/performance ratio. With the price of the SSD upgrade of our NetApp FA3220 and the one year maintenance of the old 3PAR, we bought Pure Storage with a three-year support agreement.

The initial setup was very simple. In two hours, we started to use Storage vMotion.

The product was implemented directly by the vendor’s team and they are very skilled.

In two years, we will start to save. With their Evergreen Storage subscription, we can enjoy protection of our investment.

Everything is included, so there is very simple licensing. F

We evaluated EMC XtremIO and NetApp FAS.

Test it in your environment in a PoC or in a Try-and-Buy to check your deduplication and compression ratios.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

IPv6 is now fully supported, Windows Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) is added in the latest firmware as supports for Docker APKG 1.0.1 and Dynamic Volume in the Purity Container Engine.

Our primary use case of this solution is to manage our virtual environment and storage so our entire VMware environment runs on Pure. 

The solution increases the overall speed of our systems. We run our virtual desktops off of them and there was a noticeable improvement once we moved from our old sand to this new sand. One could tell, the minute we switched to this program, everything ran a lot faster.

VMware benefits our IT board because all our servers are virtual, so it helps keep our footprint small. We spend less on hardware because all our servers are virtual. 

I find the speed of the solution its most valuable feature. It is really fast and it is also very easy to use. You can basically set it up and forget about it. You don't have to manage it on a day-to-day basis. I also like the plugins that go into beta where you can see there. For instance, if I need to extend a datastore I can go straight to the plugin and extend the data store, refresh the VAs, and see the new store. I don't have to log in and use my credentials, so I save time and it is easy.

We only want to manage our virtual environment so this program has all the features we need. We're pretty straightforward customers. I don't see anything that needs to improve as we only use the standard features. 

Once we've set everything up and running, we haven't really had an issue with it. So it's really stable.

Pure is our primary enterprise storage. We have a smaller one with about a 120 servers and a little over 400 virtual desktops. We have one 20 terabyte model and a 10 terabyte model. I believe it is scalable.

I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades. The service was pretty good. They knew what the problem was and they were able to remove in by enabling remote features. They shipped out a replacement and we swapped it out and shipped it back. I am satisfied with the technical support.

We used an older program, but it was too slow. The main reason for switching over to run our VMware on Pure was the speed and, after several meetings with other vendors, we decided to go with the all-flash model. We replace our programs every five years because we want the best performance.

It was pretty easy to set everything up. We used an integrator from Pure and we had to fill in a worksheet beforehand, so we gave them all the information they needed, like IP addresses and ports. It took less than an hour. 

We looked at Pure, NetApp and Nimble. Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis. If you want to upgrade, you can simply call in and they do everything on their side. NetApp, for instance, requires you to be on top of firmware, drivers and updating. You must initiate the upgrades, do the upgrades, follow all the steps. With NetApp, you need a lot of insight to manage it and it's difficult if you have only one person dedicated to that. 

I am a firm believer that everything has room for improvement, so I rate this nine out of ten.

We use the solution on-premises and each array has a different use case. We have VDI, SQL, and General and the program provide better integration between the management and visibility of the solution. Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integration developed by Parrot and this gives us a lower level administrative access to more admins that don't have a background in storage.

VMware is extremely beneficial to our IT organization because we can scale as we increase our usage.

The solution has great efficiencies because it has scalability. It also becomes the core between our synergy of all our platform systems across the United States.

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption.

The solution is rock solid. Very stable.

The scalability of the solution is extremely costly.

The technical support is fair and the team was helpful.

We previously used Hitachi, 3PAR, and HP but we had performance limitations.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on.

An initial return on investment is easily visible. But scalability to the cost doesn't really show the investment costs. We're investing too heavy on the cost without seeing the value of the array or the efficiencies.

I am not sure what the costs for the solution are but it is embedded in the solution support.

I rate this solution eight out of ten because I saw a lot of growth beyond the performance capabilities. I do, however, want to see improved costs, integration, and encryption. Those are the big ones.

My advice to others would be to use your pre-sale targets as the layouts, as well as all your mitigated controls and requirements. Then forecast the capacity and performance metrics prior to your purchase.

We use the hybrid cloud deployment model of this solution and use both AWS and Microsoft Azure as our cloud providers. Our primary use case for this solution is for mixed workloads. 

We are running VMware on Pure. Pure gave us the storage because we're a partner so we're running on it.

The seamless integration into the public cloud has improved my organization. It also benefits my IT organization in many ways. We sell it, we use it, and it makes us faster.

The joint solution, VMware on Pure, has helped our organization. It's tested a lot of stuff and been put in production. It's also used for customers.

Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integrations developed by Pure, any APIs that are available to be using.

It offers seamless integrations and has made it easy for us to do. It's a simple product.

The performance and the Evergreen maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution.

In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google.

The stability is excellent. 

The scalability is excellent and is very easy. 

Their support is very good, first-class. 

We switched to this solution because of the timing. We are using this solution in conjunction with a solution from EMC. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It only took us a couple of days to set it up. It was so simple.

We are an integrator and reseller so we did the implementation ourselves on one team.

We also evaluated NetApp. It was between NetApp and Pure. The reason we went with Pure Storage wasn't a technical decision, rather, it was just purely cost and the Evergreen maintenance that Pure provides. It just makes it easier when we have a new drive and a new chassis every three years.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It's simple. It's got great support and it's fast. It does what it's supposed to do. My advice to someone considering this solution would be to test it and build a proof of concept.