Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We have a lot of MEDITECH electronic health records systems running on it, as well as some other ancillary applications, but it's core hospital EHR, predominantly.

We've seen a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. When we bought this product, the arrays that it replaced were just shy of about $1,000,000 apiece and they were the size of big refrigerators. The product that we replaced them with is a couple of rack units, like the size of a stack of a couple of pizza boxes, consuming way less power. There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself.

Everything could be cheaper. Other areas where we would always like to see improvement with products like this are in compression and deduplication. Increasing the overall storage efficiency of the platform would be great.

One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade. That would be an intriguing and interesting feature for us. Other than that, we've not had any big needs or demands.

It's been a stable product. In six years, we've never had downtime as a result of it. It's been very stable that entire time.

I believe it will scale nicely. We've not had reason to push that limit yet. We just haven't had a need to do that. I believe they've got a very broad portfolio so that we could scale it fairly dramatically beyond where we're at right now.

The approach that Pure takes is what they call it their Evergreen policy, where they will upgrade the brains of the storage array every three years at no additional charge. Many of the competing systems would require big forklift upgrades and fairly significant reinvestment to do the same thing. We are on our third Evergreen lifecycle upgrade so far, and it's been exactly as they advertised. 

When we look at return on investment over time, we've not had to replace or upgrade it during the timeframe that we've had it. As long as it's supported under maintenance, that continues to be an Evergreen process.

It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective, but I would say better than many in terms of performance and service.

The product is an easy ten out of ten. We've been very happy with it. We've found them to be a great value. Service and support is phenomenal. It's really hard to find reasonable things for them to actually improve it on.

Pure has become the main storage solution for our customers. It is mainly used for our customers' Oracle databases.

We are a Pure partner. What Pure has brought to us is a solution that our customers see has a lot of value. For the last ten years, there hasn't been a lot of differentiation between storage brands. We also deal with other products, other manufacturers, which are good products, but Pure is a different solution. It has allowed us to go with a different approach for our customers. When compared to different providers - I won't name them - there are other great companies out there, but Pure has managed to have a very different product with a differentiation that customers value.

Also, the guys who normally spend hours, or days, or weeks working with storage, trying to get something done, can do it in minutes with Pure. They save a lot of time, and they can do other stuff instead of managing storage.

The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure.

Also, performance. The box gives them extreme performance, but ease of use is the main reason they love Pure.

Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged. That's one thing they might have to look at because, if you are looking for storage, Pure is the player and the winner. But, if you are looking at HCI, Pure does not play in that area and that may prevent them from getting some deals.

With the customers that we have, and the references we have read from them, the stability is great. I have only seen 100 percent. I haven't had any failures, none of my customers has had any problem with the platform. So far, it's great. 

Technology, in general, is very good now, you don't have a lot of problems. But Pure is even better.

So far, the scalability is great. As a partner, what we want is to keep selling more and more products to our customers. One feature that Pure has is that it gives you even more storage as the company develops new functionality or does software upgrades. Even though it doesn't allow us to sell as much as we would like, our customers appreciate that. They have more capacity without investing any money. So the scalability is great.

Compared with other products, Pure's technical support is as good as anyone's, probably better. They have tools where the customer can see for themselves the performance and the statistics from the solution, so support is first-class. There are some third-party companies, that evaluate the technical support of different companies, and Pure ranks number one.

The initial setup is very simple. As a partner, we like to have products that need a lot of service because we make more money on the service than on the hardware. But with Pure being so simple, there is not a lot of consulting that is needed. That's one of the reasons why customers would rather buy Pure than other brands. While Pure does not allow us to make a lot of money on consulting, it is a very simple and easy sell to customers.

It's so simple that there is not much that an integrator or a partner needs to do on the Pure platform.

Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants. I don't have the exact figures, but roughly, in a five-year span, you would save at least 20 to 25 percent, especially on labor, on specialized people and training.

As to whether the TCO of flash is lower than SSD implementations, I don't have any specific metrics, but again, the implementation of Pure is, by far, simpler than other technologies. I wouldn't say we have lower implementation costs because of flash or because of SSDs, rather it's because of the software and technology of Pure.

Normally, when we go to compete for a customer, they are looking at all the most important brands. Dell EMC is part of most storage bids. There is NetApp and sometimes we face IBM. In our territory there is Hitachi, which is a great product, but usually it's not on the shortlist. Finally there is HPE. Those are the brands that we normally find we're competing with when we offer Pure.

In the end, so far, haven't lost one deal where we involved Pure. We have won deals against NetApp, which is a great product, we have won deals against Dell EMC - and that is the brand to beat. But when customers compare Dell EMC with Pure, there is no competition. Pure is, by far, better.

My advice is to buy Pure. I am very excited about this product. I would recommend that anybody who is looking at storage should really look at and consider Pure, and they will probably buy Pure.

The performance is great. In terms of latency, you can have failures in the system, and the system can keep performing as if nothing happened. It is a great product with great performance. For me, right now, it is the best storage solution in the market, by far.

I would rate Pure a ten out of ten and even 11. I have been in the business for 31 years. In the technology sector, most products are the same, they offer the same functionalities. Maybe 30 years ago, when EMC came out with their storage solution, it was something very different, but in the end, everybody offers the same thing. If you look at a Dell EMC box, or you look at HPE, or you look at Hitachi, they offer a SAN with certain performance, they have replication, they have Snapshots. Everybody has more or less the same thing. Pure has a different offer, because of the simplicity, the performance, and all the functionality that Pure is offering. It's a very simple package, it's what makes Pure different. That's why most customers choose Pure.

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.

Pure Storage FlashArray is our main SAN solution. It's for SAN for service for data storage.

It is very easy to use.

The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray.

It's a brilliant solution with brilliant support.

Pure Storage FlashArray has a lot of features.

The price could be better.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for three years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is an absolutely stable solution.

It's a highly scalable product.

In our organization, we have 1,500 users.

We have plans to increase the usage.

The support is excellent.

We were also using other technologies such as EMC, and Hitachi. We were using various other SAN storage systems. It was approximately three years ago.

We switched to Pure Storage FlashArray because it was easier to administer, and it is very powerful and fast.

It is not difficult to install.

It only requires one admin to maintain this solution.

As it's a SAN, it's a corporate solution, that requires experts.

It can be costly, but the return on our investment is extremely high.

Price is always an area that could be improved.

There are no licensing fees or other costs.

We have reviewed other solutions. We looked at a variety of options.

I would encourage them to try the solution.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a 10 out of 10.

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 are using the latest version. 

We are satisfied with the product. It is very good.

There is definitely room for improvement.

Overall, the solution is pretty good, although it does have certain gaps. There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side. 

We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for around three years.

So far, the solution has proven itself to be stable. 

The solution is very scalable.

The technical support is very good.

Prior to going with Pure Storage FlashArray, we were using the range of all of the Dell EMC products.

While all these products have their own uses, Pure Storage FlashArray is in a market of its own. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

It takes under two hours to accomplish. 

The pricing is reasonable.

The solution is definitely storage-centric and this it accomplishes very well.

I use the solution in my own company.

The solution is both cloud- and on-premises based. 

While I don't actually use the solution myself, as I provide services for and commission it for the customer, I have probably done this 50 times over so far. 

I definitely recommend the solution. It's very good. It does what it advertises and this very well.

As Pure Storage FlashArray is purpose-built, I would rate it as a ten out of ten. 

Our primary use case is to keep the disc for all the critical systems in the company.

The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc.

The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them.

This is the only problem that we have in the two years of working with Pure Storage and it is not an important problem. The interface that this solution has is really good. It senses all the errors. We get good support from the vendor. 

The price doesn't really matter. It's very expensive, it can be cheaper.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for around two years. 

Stability is very good. We haven't had any problems.

We have around 4,000 users. 

The initial setup was very easy. It took around two weeks. 

I would highly recommend this solution. 

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It has all the features we need. It tests all the software solutions that are currently available and that will be available in the future. You do not have to pay for any additional solutions that they purchase.

It's the back-end storage for all our virtual environments.

The performance is great.

The predictive performance analytics are good.

It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them.

It has been scalable so far.

We have also used NetApp, but not for all-flash. This is our first all-flash solution.

We were looking for an all-flash solution, and Pure Storage is the best solution right now.

Just give it a try.