Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

I help our customers build FlashArray. 

It is always out of the box, and ready to use. 

It is very simple to set up, and very simple to use.

The interface is easy to use.

It is very easy to implement.

It falls far short of protocol support. Our customers frequently ask us how we can use NFS or if we can use it as a copy or something similar. If you have any suggestions, I believe they could use more protocol, and have easier automation.

Automation could be simplified. For example, we can ask the storage to create a folder and then monitor it automatically.

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

Pure Storage FlashArray is a very stable product.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a scalable solution.

I am also working with Pure FlashArray X series and Pure Storage FlashBlade.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

My primary use case of this solution is array management. 

FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy. 

FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool. 

I have been working with FlashArray for the past two years. 

Compared to other products, this solution is more stable. We haven't had any performance issues. Oracle RAC and most of the Microsoft applications perform well on the block storage. 

This solution is easy to scale. 

FlashArray is best suited to a large company. We provide any kind of hosting service in our region, so we have multiple customers hosted in our data center. The environment is large and we have more than 25 different customers and terabytes of data. 

I'm satisfied with the support. Comparatively, it matches with Windows. I don't see any difference in the levels of technical support. 

The initial configuration, the base configuration, is really simple. Compared to other products, it's really easy. The racking and stacking will take time, but that has more to do with the data center operations, not specifically the Pure Storage configuration. I'll say this: once the base configuration of the storage array is connected with those cables, once the IP is assigned, the setup process won't take long. It won't take more than 30 to 45 minutes to complete the base configuration, and then it will be ready for provisioning the contract data. 

We implemented through an in-house team. We are the service providers in this region, so we did it ourselves. We only engage vendors and their local partners if there is any hardware issue or hardware replacement we need delivered. 

I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC.  

Overall, this is a good product and I would recommend it. I rate it an eight 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.

The primary use case is storage for payment platforms.

We don't have anymore performance issues, which is good. 

The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage.

Performance and support quality.

We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions.

We have seen through time that it is perfectly stable. It has aged well. We were an early adopter in our company.

The scalability is very modular. When you need more storage or power, you change one brick, and you don't have to go through a long process.

Pure Storage has proven to be proactive with support. Even when we have small problems, they open a support case before we even notify them that there has been an actual issue.

We receive good quality of support from the first line of support, so we don't need to escalate or wait through a long process.

We clearly have seen the difference between having storage on Dell EMC or NetApp versus what we have now on Pure Storage. The investment was a clear win for us.

The initial setup was very simple. It's basically a few cables with two plugs. Plug it in, and it is that easy.

We did the installation in-house.

We have seen reduction in total cost of ownership.

We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products.

If you have doubts, do a proof of concept. Pure Storage is very happy to provide you with storage ahead of time that you can test for a couple of months. This way, you can test the performance and bugs, which makes it easier to sell to your company.

Everything is embedded that is something managed from end-to-end by Pure Storage. This is something really easy for us. We don't have to work with integration and the different subcomponent of the storage that we would have to use if it was SSD.

We are at about 3.0 to 4.0 in terms of data reduction.

We use this solution for storage of critical data and for storage of replicated backups. We use Zerto replication software. We write all of those backups to Pure Storage and then we use those in our disaster recovery scenarios.

It helps us simplify our storage because we use it for a specific use case of replication between sites. We have two data centers: a primary data center and a secondary data center. We got a Pure Storage device in each location and we do backups of critical data in both locations and then replicate them back and forth between the sites. This is the biggest thing it does for us. 

We have seen a reduction in total costs of ownership. Most of the data that's on the Pure came off of Dell EMC VNX. The money I saved by not renewing maintenance on the Dell EMC devices paid for the Pure Storage devices. I've saved a lot of money and gotten better-performing storage.

With every update we get, we get a reduction in the space used which has been pretty dramatic with each one of the upgrades that we've gone through.

The value of the storage in the way that it stores the data is a very valuable feature for us. We also like that it's robust and stable and that we get good support from them when we have an issue. 

We put very high stress on this solution and we've almost never had any problems with it. We originally went with a competitor's product and after about eight months and a lot of wrangling, we had them buy it back from us. Then we bought a similar Pure Storage product, and it's been great.

Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with. 

We decided it was time to switch because the other solution was terrible. We were using Dell EMC Unity and it never worked properly and was full of software bugs. Dell EMC couldn't fix it and they had no intention of fixing it. 

The initial setup was easy and we were able to sort data almost immediately. The time from racking to being in production was very short and very simple.

We used a third-party for the implementation. We bought it and we built in some professional services. They were great. Everything with Pure Storage is straightforward. 

The cost of implementing Pure Storage was less than the cost of continuing to maintain the Dell EMC solutions which is ROI for us. In addition to that, the more data we store, the more compression we get, the better it looks.

We initially looked at Pure Storage and Dell EMC Unity. We made the poor decision of going with Unity and eight months later we went with Pure Storage. 

I would rate this solution a ten because of the way the product works. It never blinks. Also because of the progressive support that we get from Pure Storage with updates and opening tickets on the device before we even knew that there was a problem happening. The entire experience of working with them has been great. 

I would advise somebody considering this solution to buy it. 

We have bare-metal boxes now so we are thinking of going Cloud. We have to have a hybrid solution because we're closer to the financial industry and we have regulations that require us to have on-premise systems. In that case, we would go with Pure Storage.

Now we can store more for a cheaper price as opposed to paying for larger devices and larger rack spaces which get outdated sooner and which we'd have to change every two years. It simplifies storage for us. 

There has been a reduction in the total cost of ownership. We did a cost analysis before buying Pure Storage. Now with Pure Storage, our developers work a lot faster and more efficiently which has definitely improved our productivity.

The most valuable features are the speed, cost, and that we get the best value for the money. 

It is stable. 

We switched solutions because we were looking to expand our storage and we looked at various options. We were having an issue with our previous solution in that we had to continuously upgrade solutions and had restrictions of creations of new environments. 

We used an integrator for the deployment.

Dell EMC was another vendor we looked at. 

I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper. We want to restrict the data set that's required to be on-premise to be kept on-premise and the rest to be moved to the cloud so that we just pay for what we use. 

If you're looking into Pure Storage I would definitely recommend Pure Storage if you have a need of having something on-premise. 

Since we're a database shop, we primarily do databases on Pure. Everything else follows from that.

We are doing a project in tandem with Boeing to develop a security solution for their Oracle databases. We've been doing it in the VMware virtual solutions lab, which is back-ended by Pure Storage. It's a very complex project. Pure made it fast enough that we could cycle through the things that we needed to cycle through to get it exactly right. We were able to do so a lot of times, to rev it enough to get it refined to where the process was exactly right every time. There's no way we would have had time to rev it that much had it been on anything slower.

It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues. As long as you don't max out the bandwidth of your connectivity, your Fibre Channel, then it doesn't matter. That has pushed the bottleneck down to the connectivity to the storage, as opposed to the different spindle groups on your storage. That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit.

We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure Storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates. Not only that, it helps dramatically speed the read coming back in, because you don't have to read it 400 times. Actually, the write doesn't hurt anything either because the write goes in once and then it gets deduplicated and that's that. It does help speed I/O because then everything is coming right off the front end of cache. Certainly, in terms of space, it's probably the most helpful.

1. It's really fast
2. It's fall-off-the-log easy to use. 

That is the strongest selling point. The ease of use is really nice.

In terms of the Predictive Performance Analytics, it certainly contributes to better overall performance and I'm a total fan of that. I've worked with some other flash storage vendors and the one that has the best overall offering, certainly, is Pure, the Analytics is part of it, whereas some of the other storage vendors haven't had as strong an offering in predictive analytics.

The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless. 

I'm assuming that the VVol implementation got fixed in the last little while. We ran into that last February, so it's been about eight months. I suspect that they probably have it resolved by now. Other than that, it's bulletproof.

We have never, ever run up against a bottleneck. It's a piece of cake to scale it. You plug in more and you keep going until you max out your bandwidth and then you put another storage controller in, a Fibre Channel controller, and go some more.

The guys in technical support are great. They're on the money. Our client, Chapman University, is on a first-name basis with the Pure support guys. You get really good interactive support from the Pure team.

I think our client, Chapman University, was on Dell EMC before they went to Pure. What I'm about to say are some of my impressions, I don't know that I know all the details that went into the decision. I think that they were just done with Dell EMC and that Dell EMC's all-flash solution was an afterthought, where Pure's was engineered from the ground up to be all-flash, as opposed to bolted on after the fact.

From what I saw at Chapman University, they wanted the increase in performance plus the decrease in power utilization and space and cooling in their data center. That dramatically mitigated a whole bunch of data center issues they had before. It didn't take nearly as much power to power it or to cool it and they reduced their footprint significantly.

I saw a little bit of the initial setup at Chapman University, and it didn't look all that complicated. It appeared to be pretty straightforward.

There Is ROI has come in saving personnel time, a lot of time. That pushes into the DBA staff, the DevTest staff, and the production folks, because we got their stuff to run 50 percent faster. We took it off the old physical hardware and virtualized it and got it to go 50 percent faster than the physical hardware running against Pure Storage.

That made it easy to rapidly provision DevTest environments. Things like that, that used to take hours and hours and hours, can now be automated down to one click of the button by the requester and another one or two by the approver. Then it just runs in the background and it's done in a couple of minutes.

It's hard to quantify the reduction in the total cost of ownership, but it's there, absolutely, particularly in the VS lab context and the channel context as well. It's so much faster, that not only has it eliminated the time that DBAs would have spent otherwise, doing tasks that take a long time to do - things like backup and the like - but it has also helped on the front end because you can do development and DevTest provisioning so much more quickly. It's hard to roll that into traditional TCO, but it's certainly part of it when you look at the entire organization.

Regarding finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations, I'm not sure I could quantify that.

Do it. I have zero reservations about recommending Pure to anyone who is looking for some really good all-flash. Pure is the way to go, for sure.

All-flash is great whenever you can get it but I really like the Pure offering. It's very robust. I heard the "chief scientist," the brains of the deal, explain how some of that stuff works at the bit and byte level and, being a computer science major, I thought that was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Pure works pretty well as is. I've been so busy using all the good stuff that it already does. I'm sure it can be improved, but we haven't got that far yet. We've been milking what it already does.

I hesitate to give it a ten out of ten because I'm sure it can be improved somehow. In terms of how it could be improved, I don't know. I'm pretty happy with it as it stands. Pure is the best thing that I have seen in that space so far, hands-down, bar none.