Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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 use FlashArray for proofs of concept and to bring the clients our infrastructure to test them. We have six clients using the solution. Most of them are using the ActiveCluster configuration.

I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities. The performance is extremely good. They have a complete replication set, including near-zero RTO and zero RPO. FlashArray integrates with all the new microservices technologies. It integrates with many products like Oracle, Cisco, Veeam, and Rubrik. 

I've been using FlashArray for four years.

FlashArray is highly stable. We don't have very many tickets in our support system. The non-disruptive upgrade works fine. We did a lot of this work for our clients without any problems. The flash disks are solid. In fact, we have very few issues with this infrastructure. 

Scalability doesn't require much work. The expansions are immediately used. We install more disks, which are automatically assigned to the volumes and the files.

Pure support is very proactive. They monitor our infrastructure in real-time, so they respond before we even open a ticket.

Deploying FlashArray is fast and straightforward. We can deploy the infrastructure in half an hour, but installing all the other things takes about two hours to provide the disk to the host. We don't need any help. We integrate the infrastructure with other vendors like Cisco, Veeam, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc., and it works fine. We only need one engineer to deploy FlashArray, but we have three Pure-certified engineers on our team.

Pure Storage doesn't have licenses. You buy the hardware, and all the software is included. The price of FlashArray is very competitive.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray 10 out of 10. If you are considering FlashArray, you can try and buy. Most clients who try the solution ultimately buy the product. 

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.

It is our core storage.

The manageability: Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators.

It has been nice to be able to see capacity and project usage. That has been helpful.

With the Pure1 analytics, we are able to identify whether the hardware that we are using today will meet our needs for tomorrow. That is probably the biggest thing for us. Also, the analytics has been great.

Manageability is its most valuable feature.

It is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good. We don't have to be experts in managing the storage. We can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product.

It has strong statistics and historical metrics with Pure1. Therefore, it has been everything that we have needed out of a platform.

We have undergone upgrades of controllers with mixed results. Some have gone well, and some have not gone so well.

We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals.

It has been stable. We haven't had any issues with stability. Though, when we have had issues, we have leveraged support and not experienced issues.

It is highly scalable. In particular, with the ability to view analytics and some of capacity planning, that helps us in this regard as well.

The technical support is strong and responsive. I would say response is probably the most important. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We worked with a field engineer on the deployment. Prerequisites and those kinds of things were shared and identified ahead of time. There wasn't a whole lot of guesswork.

The solution has reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage, which is one of its primary appeals. We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression work as advertised. I haven't had any issues with them.

We have used the predictive performance analytics. It has worked for us.

Biggest lesson learned: Having a strong support function is critical, especially when you're depending on it on an ongoing basis for maintenance and administration. 

The primary use case is for any server and database that has high I/O demands on disk.

It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have.

Our Pure Storage unit is really small, so we just move what we have to it.

• Speed
• Scalability
• The cost

We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that. Therefore, we would like to see improvements with the way it integrates with vCenter for picking up dedupe.

The stability is good. It hasn't gone down since we've had it.

From what we've been told, it looks like it would be really scalable if we purchased more. The licensing and scalability patterns are really cost-effective. We don't have to rebuy things in different tiers to just continue on, so we like that.

The technical support is really good. They are really responsive. For the call that we had, we had a call back within 15 to 20 minutes.

We noticed a dramatic increase in application performance when moving it from NetApp to Pure Storage.

Pure Storage seemed more cost-effective than NetApp. When we did our POC, we saw big performance gains between all-flash on NetApp and all-flash on Pure Storage. It was significantly better.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. They set it all up for us.

They pretty much manage the firmware upgrades for us, and they've gone well so far.

We dealt directly with Pure Storage engineers for the deployment, and our experience was good.

We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.

It is cheaper than NetApp.

There were several vendors we looked at. We also looked at Nimble, but we did not do at PoC of them.

We just liked the way Pure was pitched to us overall.

Get a PoC and see how it works out for you. See if you see an improvement with your apps and go from there.

We really like it. It is really speedy.

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 nearline storage.

Right now, we just have lab equipment that we test them on and we try to compare them with other solutions.

The thickness and the sizing for when we put it in the data center. Also, the performance and price.

It has good stability for our company.

It's granular.

The support is good.

Our storage is old, so we were searching for what would be the next good solution for us. We had an integrated solution with a supplier, so we were looking to get rid of this kind of model. 

The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple.

We used a retailer to buy it and it was easy.

Compuverde. But, we like to have data sheets and a more traditional storage than a complex unit.

I would rate this a seven out of ten because it's a good performance storage, but the price is a little bit high. Our predicted performance analytics is also going really well, so if you need faster storage and a good product, this is the one you should go ahead with.