Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We attach it to a Cisco UCS for VMware.

The product has helped with speed. Previously, on disk, we would see latency issues with our SQL boxes. With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration.

• Resiliency
• Speed: It's fast. It's like I don't notice anything. 
• It's very easy to use. The GUI is simplistic, which can be nice.

The predictive performance analytics are great. I get everything I need to know: IOPS, latency, etc. The tech support works with me if I have any questions that need to be answered.

The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it.

I would like to have better training. I would like to have an hour class or more online training.

It is very stable. 

The only thing that we have ever had an issue with is connecting to the Cloud Mediator. Because we run in an active cluster situation, it has to connect to the cloud. Recently, we lost connection to the cloud, so it sent us alerts, making us all worried that our active clusters would separate. However, when the time came, it worked really well, and we were fine. Then, tech support fixed it, and it was better.

With scalability, you just add more shelves and buy new controllers. If you have the Evergreen Storage subscription, then you get new controllers every year. 

I can buy more storage, if needed. However, with the dedupe and compression, it will be a while before I need to.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to setup because everything was brand new. We had brand new Cisco UCS servers with the FIs that plugged right in. It was seamless.

We have experienced an upgrade of firmware controllers. The process is very easy.

Before my space was a whole entire rack. Now, it is 4U or 6U. Space has been nice, because now I can put other things in that rack.

The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years.

I would recommend Pure Storage. We have already done the research.

I could plan to do capacity on my Pure1 storage, and the deduplication works very well with it. For VMware, it has been a humongous savings. Once we get our file system onto it, we may see the dedupe work better, but we haven't got that far yet.

We have integrated the solution with VMware, which is great.

Our compression rates are 4:8:1. We are using it for VMware and our Oracle solution. It's a little higher on the Oracle solution. However, it has been great. 

For the IOPS, I don't think we ever really hit anywhere near what we thought we were going to hit. You always think you need more than you need.

I have found the whole deduplication and compression process enlightening.

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.

Our primary use case is SAP. 

Its ease of use has allowed us to stand up landscapes faster.

The most valuable feature is its upgradeability.

Pure Storage helps to streamline storage because of its simplicity.

What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it. 

We have never had an issue.

We just doubled it in size it was painless.

The technical support is fantastic and proactive.

Our previous platform did not support SAP.

The driver for us to implement Pure Storage in our SAP landscape was that it was SAP certified.  Additionally, it had really good numbers and reviews.

We plugged it in, and in an hour, we were using it. It is very straightforward and simple.

We deployed it in-house.

We did not displace any other technology with the Pure Storage purchase so it's doesn't have a traditional dollar ROI.  From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things.  

Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs.

We looked at Pure Storage, EMC and HPE. We chose Pure Storage because of its innovation.

I would recommend the product.

The primary use case is big data. 

SAP is very important for our business. We are running our management system on SAP, so it's very critical. We are running SAP S/4HANA and other ERP modules. We run our config on-premise.

The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is okay, but could be improved.

We switched because the performance was bad with our previous solution, and it was expensive.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed it in-house.

We have seen latency improvements.

We also evaluated EMC and HPE.

We really needed high performance with large amounts of data. We weren't happy with other vendors, and the speed and the volume of data that they could store, handle, and compress.

It has been quite satisfactory in performance and scalability. Since we adopted this only a year ago, we will see what happens in the long term, if they will keep up with their quality.

The primary use case is to run SAP applications on top of the flash solutions.

SAP is very important to our business. It's a key function. We are running ERP and CRM systems. Our systems run on-premise.

Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy.

The most valuable feature is the performance of Pure Storage underneath and that many applications, which are already integrated with it. I can use the system applications, e.g., for backup restore. Therefore, I don't need to buy them in addition to the product, as they are already part of the solution.

It helps to simplify storage, especially because we can do in-place upgrades and can grow on demand. I can pay on demand, so it helps me to simplify the usage of the storage.

It is super stable.

It has even improved the performance of SAP HANA.

The scalability is already there in both directions. You can scale the storage, as well as the compute.

The technical support comes out of one single stop. It is very helpful to have one single number to contact.

The initial setup was straightforward and simple.

Our HANA installation was a greenfield. So, we started the Pure Storage system with HANA.

We used a partner (integrator) for the deployment. We used Tech Data. Everything was based on design guides and reference architecture, our experience was very good.

There is some benefit in regard to total cost of ownership, because it's a condensed system. It saves a lot of space in the data center, saving power.

Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs.

I am pretty happy with the solution, as it is currently.

The primary use case is SAP. It work very well.

SAP is very important to our business. We are running all ERP solutions. Our configurations are run on-premise. 

It has easy implementation.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity. It simplifies the administration and backup.

The predictive performance analytics works well.

I would like to have support available in Spanish.

The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond.

The speed is very high on SAP from running it on Pure Storage, and the power on SAP HANA is much faster.

The scalability is good.

I would rate the technical support as a ten out of ten.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed directly with Pure Storage.

The ROI is very positive for the reductions in HANA.

We have seen a 5:1 reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). 

We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations by 2:1.

It's a simple, robust solution, which is very stable.

Pure Storage is very good and quick for backing up SAP HANA.

All of our production, development, and workloads run on it.

We were previously a legacy storage system. After moving to Pure, the stability and performance both dramatically improved. 

We don't have to worry about storage anymore. Previously, we had to babysit our storage system, doing things like managing the volumes, looking at the capacity, predicting when would we run out of space, and replication work. All of those created a lot of challenges with the previous system. Since moving to Pure, we no longer have to worry. We defined the policies once, and things mostly work.

Pure Storage simplifies the management, overall.

Flash is the most valuable feature.

Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular, where you can keep replacing components. That was definitely new several years ago. I would bet competitors are doing it now as well, but when they started, it was an innovation.

The real need that we have is around other backups. Obviously, it has its own snapshot concept but beyond that, having a separate backup system in the Pure ecosystem itself, in that space, would make it all integrated within a single organization and we wouldn't have to deal with multiple companies. That's an area where we thought Flash Blade could serve our needs, but it seems it can't.

Also, for one of our systems, the data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we moved over is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times. Because of that, we now need more storage. We are going to have to use the guaranty that they provide when you purchase: If it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs, then they will provide extra storage.

The stability, in general, has been perfect. 

The reason I gave a nine, not a ten, is the upgrades. With most upgrades we have had some kind of problem. They haven't been as smooth as they should have been.

The latest problem with which we are currently dealing, literally today, is that after the latest upgrade, the utilization went up, especially because of the systems space, which is consuming much more than it should. The duplication is not happening on time. Pure acts like it is a bug and that they have a new version with a fix for it. It goes into a cycle often: You keep upgrading and that new upgrade may have some other problem.

That's the primary worry regarding stability. Otherwise, the system works.

Technical support is good, but not as good as we would like. We have to get our Pure account team involved often, and they are stars. That always solves the problem. Support is available 24/7, but sometimes they're not as detail-oriented as we would like in investigating problems.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We recently added two more areas to our ecosystem and the set up was pretty good.

We used a reseller, SHI. Our experience with them was good.

Pure is expensive. But it comes with features so you get what you pay for. It's expensive compared to our old storage systems, but that is balanced by the reduction in the amount of effort human effort involved in& babysitting the storage system. So if you factor in everything, I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us, at least.

You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works. So I would really recommend using Pure Storage.

The primary use case is for on-premise storage.

I have personally used this solution for 15 years, and now, four years with my current company.

It's a product that we hardly ever call tech support for, because it just works. The performance and ease of use are all there, which is what we were looking for. We don't want to always have to call into tech support for something. It's one of those products where you forget about it because it just works.

It is an easy to use product for all of my team members.

Granular growth of the storage needs improvement. Right now, if I wanted to add storage, I have to buy a whole shelf. It would be nice to just buy a few drives.

I would like to see data tiering to AWS.

We put a lot of stress on it, and it is very stable. We have only had one tech support call in the last four years for a hard drive replacement.

The scalability works. We are using between 30TB to 50TB.

I would evaluate the technical support as good, I have a team who calls in for support, if there an issue. They have not complained to me about any problems.

The configuration was very easy.

The cost of the storage needs improvement.

We also evaluated Dell EMC and locally attached storage. We chose Pure Storage because it had the best performance of all the products that we tested. Also, its virtualization performance is extremely fast, and it has good ease of use.

Definitely test the performance, compression, and deduplication. You are going to get more out of the storage than what you anticipated.

We are a Cohesity customer. We have use cases where we integrated Pure Storage with Cohesity.