Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

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.

This product is for database usage and consolidating performance.

The Pure Storage FlashArray provides us with faster data access. Our processing time is faster for tasks that used to take a long time before. Now, it's a lot quicker and more responsive.

The low latency and the performance, in general, are very good.

The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity.

Replication and active-active features are available.

The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in. For what the peak says, I'm very happy with it. However, if you compare it to similar devices with multiple controllers that are scaled-out, it's not a true active-active.

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

Over the past year that we have been using it, the stability has been good. That said, we're still testing it. It is very low maintenance; on the Pure side, they don't have much involvement apart from a bit of monitoring.

We've not had to increase the capacity yet but it does have the flexibility to scale if we need to. At this point, we have 25,000 end-users and we don't expect that to increase. Our user base is fairly static.

We have been in contact with technical support a couple of times. They are quick to respond and we are very happy with the customer support team.

The support plan makes it simple to plan ahead.

We have used other flash arrays in the past.

This initial setup is very straightforward. A couple of hours on-site is all that was needed for the engineer to complete it. It took that long to make sure that everything was in place and available.

Overall, it is very simple.

For the deployment, we didn't need many people but we do have a wider storage team that deals with it.

Installation was included with the purchase. We didn't do it ourselves.

There are no licensing fees aside from the support. The support plan is simple and quite easy to understand, and it covers issues such as hardware failures.

We evaluated all of the options that were presented to us at the time, and Pure won.

Feature-wise, there's nothing specific that is lacking for us at the moment. The features that are there now are really what we need.

Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for our SQL server in an on-premises deployment.

Having a dedicated array for our SQL server is very nice.

We are running VMware on Pure, and the main driver for that is because it is all-flash. Also, we wanted a dedicated solution for our SQL environment. Running on Pure has given us the ability to scale out our SQL environments. We tripled our environment in the past three years since implementing this solution, and we have not had any issues with the storage keeping up with the workloads.

We are making use of some of the VMware integrations that have been developed by Pure, but we are really waiting for the copy data management part.

We are really enjoying the speed of this solution. The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice.

In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server.

We have had zero issues with stability once it is in. However, we have had issues with migrations to different cabinets or different arrays. We had one instance with an eight-hour outage in our primary data center because the upgrade to the controller failed, and the controller redundancy didn't work. It was an odd issue that we now have under control.

This solution scales well. The issue we had with stability is now under control, so we are able to scale out fine. We can just drop in new disks when we need them.

When we've had issues, technical support has been really good about resolving them quickly. I was on the call with them when we had the issue with the controller, and they were very, very helpful.

Our older solution was not very good. Pure increased our speed a lot. We needed to increase our storage because we were filling up the array. Our SQL footprint has greatly increased over the past three years.

This solution was chosen because we happened to be doing a POC when our previous solution failed horribly, and we moved our production to Pure. It was able to pick it up, which was the selling point.

The initial setup of this solution was pretty straightforward. It was a vanilla, out-of-the-box setup with nothing out of the ordinary. 

We used an integrator to assist us with the implementation and deployment of this solution. We were hands-off, but it seems that all went well because everybody is happy with it.

We have seen a good return on investment, mainly because we took our SQL Server workload out of the general population and we're able to get it separated, which is a huge advantage to us. The biggest boost is getting separation of duty.

I have used InfiniBand in the past. We are now looking at building a new data center, and the vendors on our shortlist are Pure and InfiniBand.

We are now starting to look at some of the copy data management tools that come with the new array.

This is now my go-to product, and I was an InfiniBand guy before. I like how there are database integrators on the Pure team that are actually there to help you tune your database workloads with their solution. I don't see that in a lot of other vendors.

This is a good product and the overall day-to-day workflow within it is great, but some of the issues that we've had with migrations bump it down slightly. The product is good, but it could be better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for desktop virtualization.

I have IOPS and IOPS input/output. The reason that we have virtualization required for the media is because of high IOPS and we're able to maintain it with PR. The encryption is pretty high. We like the encryption right on the storage.

I was able to put up more VMs using Pure. I'm running almost 3,400 VMs and VDIs on Pure Storage. This improves our organization because we can just set it up and we forget about it. Everything works. We do not need to worry about storage or bandwidth issues. Its ease of use is also helpful. The setup is very easy with Pure.

I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side. I'd like to say "Hey, this particular VDI, what is the performance on that? How much IO is it using, what are the issues, what is CPU?" etc. I'd like to see that layout in the portal. That would be great for us.

The stability of the solution is very good. After five years, I've had very few problems. In terms of problems, for example, sometimes I've seen some spikes in iOS. It came from our end, not from Pure.

The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I've got an A-side and a B-side.

The initial setup was very straightforward. I did the GUI configuration after Pure finished their end, so it was very easy for me to set up. They just did the back end. I did the physical setup. They came back and did the configuration on the heads and I did the GUI set up with the network configuration, so everything else we set up ourselves. The setting up volume was very easy.

Pure assisted us with the implementation. It was a beautiful experience because we had an older model on which the head had to be upgraded. They did it seamlessly. I had no drops in my VMs.

There has definitely been an ROI. In four years I've never seen another storage vendor that offers what's called an Evergreen solution. I should have my refresh next year, so I'm getting a brand new a controller with a minimal cost. By then we're going back and replacing the whole thing.

I did a POC with three different vendors. Pure won out due to its resiliency, adaptability and the IOS and the feature sets. I was able to pull up all three discs at the same time and it never failed.

We are using the private cloud deployment model.

We are running VM on Pure. The main driver around VM on Pure is the number of IOPS I was able to get out of the two controllers. That was the main reason I chose Pure.

I'm not using any plugin with the vCenter or anything else like that.

The advice I would give to others considering implementation is to do your investigation, do a POC, and try it out. Find out which fits your needs. Also, isolate your workload. Don't mix your workloads if you want to do a successful VDI deployment.

I would give the solution nine out of ten.

The sales and executive support have been outstanding compared to the rest of the market. I replaced another couple of vendors that I had in place for storage, who over-promised and under-delivered on their technical expectations, and who certainly over-promised on their ability to do conversions from one array to another. My upgrade paths have been simple on the Pure.

The documentation has gone along with the idea of "it's simple to use." In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around the movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that.

It wasn't until we got to a point where we had changed out everything front-ending the platform, and got past that conversation and we rose up past helpdesk and fact sheets and documentation, and before we actually got to somebody who knew about it, there was community knowledge within Pure that knew that problem existed. Having that front and center, where we could have searched and looked for that information, would have answered our questions and caused me to rate it as a ten.

I've never had an outage.

It's very scalable. I probably run about 10 million patient visits a year through the system. I've never had a problem. It's back-ending my entire medical record platform. It's a very stable platform.

Prior to Pure, the original implementations that we had for other vendors had been in place for about 15 years. This actually replaces another all-flash array product that had been in place for the three years previous.

From an investment standpoint, the support staff I require for it is greatly reduced, so I don't have the in-depth requirements that I had on other products. The challenges of getting into the product and manage it and moving away from older platforms for systems management disappeared, so that reduced my cost and expense for support. It's a lot simpler to implement and a lot simpler to manage, so I'm able to divert those resources onto other projects, so it's a pretty decent return on investment.

I definitely like the licensing model. It's a lot better than being "piecemealed" as a customer. I've been extremely happy. Cost-wise, it's been very effective. We're a nonprofit-based organization, so pricing is at the forefront of every conversation we have, and it's been a good marriage between the technical capability of the product, the software that we get, the service and support that we get. From a price standpoint, it's been very effective.

I looked at a half a dozen other products and Pure won over across the board.

I would absolutely recommend this product to a colleague. And I have done that already.

The Pure Storage array houses our entire production environment. Production consists of VMware 5.5 on three HPE DL360 G7 hosts.

I don't really need to worry about storage anymore. I can focus on more critical issues. I log into the array interface maybe once every month to see what my deduplication ratio is and that is about it. 

It is difficult to say what features are valuable. It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore. 

I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. Sure, it is great to see usage, trends, latency, and all the common stuff. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware.