Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

The primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the product.

We are moving into a DevOps environment and CI/CD. Their departmentalization was an enabler because database is a service in the pipeline where the underlying risk factor has to be correct, especially the storage. This primarily applies to the driver and the infrastructure as a base, but the end game is to have a DevOps pipeline.

We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, e.g., our database team used to spend 93 days backing up and restoring databases. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us.

Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products.

If Pure Storage had its features at parity with its competitors, it could move ahead. 

One to three years.

It is very stable.

It scales well, around a petabyte.

We have an in-house engineer in one of our onsite offices.

The initial setup was straightforward. We started with about 60TB and have grown from there.

We have seen ROI.

We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space.

We did a vendor search, which included a big payments project across Asia-Pacific for a company that could do data provisioning very quickly. Then, Pure Storage was chosen. 

We also considered Dell EMC, HPE, and IBM. We picked Pure Storage because of its ratio per terabyte and speed.

Pure Storage is now our de facto standard product to use.

The analytics were gathered for this environment, and the environment is big. Production-wise, it is running Oracle, and performance-wise, it is running enterprise applications.

We do a lot of Oracle implementations and getting Oracle workloads to run faster and better. For a lot of our customers, they are looking at Pure Storage for its underlying storage. It makes everything a lot easier for them in terms of increasing performance, lowering operational costs, and making their day-to-day lives easier.

It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought. They know it works and it performs well. 

1. The performance that you receive and its ease of use. 
2. Being able to get it up and running in a very short order. 
3. Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great.
4. It takes away a lot of issues that customers were dealing with before. E.g., a lot of times, customers are dealing with performance problems when they migrate to Pure Storage that go away, then they don't have to worry about them anymore. Then, they can focus on other things, like automation.

We work with a lot of Oracle customers. We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM.

From our internal usage and our customers, the product is rock solid. We haven't heard of any issues or seen anything ourselves.

The initial setup is very easy. You rack the array, you plug it in, you connect a couple cables, and you can be up and running in under an hour.

Try it out. It is easy to get it up and running, and simple to migrate your Oracle workloads over to run an apples to apples comparison. The performance numbers speak for themselves. If you factor in the ease in terms of operations, as well as the cost of the array compared to other solid state arrays, it becomes a clear positive for Pure Storage.

All of our customers are looking at submillisecond latency, which is the common Pure Storage metric, and we have definitely seen it there. Everything has been great in terms of throughput and availability has been fantastic.

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.

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.