Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

It is the SAN backbone for our company. We have multiple SANs, all Pure at this point. It runs everything from tasks to business intelligence to enterprise applications.

Snapshot recovery has been very helpful. When there have been snapshots that we've had to restore it's been easy for our SAN team to make those available for our server team.

There are a couple of things we really like: the flash storage, the deduplication, and IO times are very good. The snapshots are also fairly useful.

The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN. There was a situation where all of our LUN were essentially made illegitimate. They were corrupted by a redactor. We have snapshots enabled on the majority of our SANS and that was great, we were able to snapshot and restore. There was one data center that our SAN admins had not intentionally gone in and checked the box to allow for replicas to be created. Because of that, we lost that whole data center and everything that was on it. If there had been a checkbox that had been checked by default to have the snapshotting, they wouldn't have gone in and unchecked it and we would still have our data. It generated a lot more work on the server side to rebuild everything that was corrupted.

Also, an additional feature would be replication from our on-premise to AWS that could then be used directly with the cloud. The way the VMware cloud is engineered is we have to have hosts up the entire time to run beats and to have HCX replicating things over to it. If we were able to have replication from Pure over S3 buckets, so that we only had to spin up the VMware host on demand, that would be a tremendous cost saving to us as Pure customers.

We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us. 

We have around 5 Pure Storage SANs and several of them are maxed out on trays.

We are currently having a situation where one of our VMware hosts is not being detected. It has been told to us that it has been presented to Pure, but the VMware host is not capable of seeing it. The support has been working with us, although it's not an instant fix.

It was cheaper to purchase Pure than it was to stay with the SAN we had because of the support costs. 

Pure Storage is a good price and it's a solid product for the price point. Only two or three times over the last 5 years have we had Pure flash drives die to a point where they had to be replaced, so the reliability is also very good.

In the past we've considered EMC, Dell Compellent (Dell EMC), NetApp and of course Pure Storage. We had Dell Compellent in the past and there were some issues with the implication and the way that it used storage. We had firmware trouble with it, which drove us away to seriously consider other brands offerings. We considered EMC, except EMC was expensive. Pure came in at a better price point than EMC and performed better than Compellent.

When we do a mass migration of data to the Pure SAN, it along with any other SAN out there still has to deduplicate that. So, it arrives in a large chunk before it can finally shrink it down to what Pure is capable of reducing it to through deduplication. Now that we have streamlined our environment on the VMware side, we're able to dump stuff in a large amount. However, for those dumpings we have to wait for Pure to sit and chew on it and then de-duplicate it before we could move the next large amount over there.

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.

Most of our customers who use Pure Storage have one of two scenarios: 

1. They have production data with high performance requirements running out of Pure Storage, and they want an efficient way to make a copy of that data onto some other storage for backup and DR purposes. For this scenario, we have integration with Pure Storage that allows us to very efficiently leverage their APIs to capture that data without the need to do things like repeated full copies of that data, leverages their snapshot APIs and differential APIs which tell us what's different from one snap to another to another.
2. The customer has their data, maybe it is on Pure Storage or it's on some other array, then they want to use Actifio to get a copy onto a Pure Storage array. 

For example, an Oracle user might need to make a copy of a large Oracle Database. They would want us to spin that database up in one or more lower, testing, or QA environments. These environments sometimes have high performance requirements, which could be met by placing a copy on Pure Storage on them.

Another example is a customer who has Oracle Exadata. Obviously, Oracle engineered systems have very high performance, and they don't want to have all of their test and dev copies in that Exadata platform, because of the cost of the platform. Therefore, Pure Storage, combined with Actifio, captures the data efficiently from the Exadata environment, then stores it on the Pure Storage disk. We then present that data to their test servers, which can be the Exadata Compute Servers or it can be any non-Exadata Linux-based Oracle servers. Then, they can have great performance because of the high speed delivery of data from Pure Storage using Actifio.

1. The performance of the high speed FlashArrays. 
2. They have a good API set. Their flash snapshot technologies are efficient. 
3. The deduplication in the array, which is one of the main reasons that it's a cost effective platform, and combining it with the snap technologies, allows the product to be remotely controlled, manually controlled, or scheduled. It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution.

They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable.

Customers don't talk about problems, outages, or crashes with Pure Storage, while I do hear this with some of the other vendors that I have dealt with. I have nothing but the highest regard for Pure Storage when it comes to stability.

The setup is straightforward. Anyone who is familiar with setting up Pure Storage can set it up with Actifio in the mix. Anyone familiar with Actifio can integrate it with any back-end storage. Actifio runs, in most scenarios, as a virtual machine. We use whatever storage the hypervisor gives us. Setting up Pure Storage to present the storage to a hypervisor, like VMware or Hyper-V, is run of the mill, and the most common use case there is. 

It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point.

If I want a product which has reliability and high speed, and Pure Storage is the first name that comes out of my mouth. I recommend them.

These days, most storage products, with a few exceptions, are simple to operate. The market has made a huge emphasis on simplicity over the last five to seven years. I don't know that Pure Storage is simpler than anybody else's product, but it certainly is in the category of simple and easy to use.

I work for a company that offers outsourcing services for IT solutions. I work in system support and we are resellers of Pure Storage FlashArray. 

I'm a Pure Storage fan because I think this solution offers great performance. It provides fast access, is user-friendly and it's easy for us to support this product. The product is also very powerful with high-speed duplication which makes it easier to manage things. I understand that there is a new version of system operation that includes a self-protect configuration to avoid getting hacked. It's crucial for us here in Brazil where we need to be safe. 

The only feature the solution lacks is self-backup. If you're working with different processors, you need to install different software tools to back up. But if it were directly available, it would make things very easy. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable, we haven't had any problems in five years. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have a close relationship with customer support and they are good. 

Positive

The initial setup is very easy, there aren't any problems. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for Microsoft SQL. 

This solution was installed at my organization before I got there but having worked with it in the past, I would say that the responsiveness with any SQL applications has remarkably improved.

It has simplified our storage. It's a "set it and forget it."

It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive. It's hard to monetize the difference in performance that we're seeing, but it's obviously there and measurable.

Performance is the most valuable feature. 

Very stable. I'd give it a ten out of ten. 

We've got two arrays. Capacity-wise, we've over-subscribed on storage, so we haven't had to expand them at this point. 

Technical support is very responsive. We had an SSD fail and they replaced it within 24 hours.

Previously, we were on Dell EMC. We went with HyperFlex in a hyper-converged environment. We switched because we really wanted our SQL on SSD.

It's expensive, but it's worth it.

I would rate this solution a nine because I've worked with NetApp in the past, and other vendors as well in storage. I didn't find the content quite as intuitive as what I got in NetApp but in terms of hardware and all that, it's a 10. It's just that one little issue. 

I would advise someone considering Cloud flash storage that it's the way to go, with SQL. Definitely, Pure Storage is at the top of the game for that. 

We use it for our financial core storage.

It has been a good product. It has a lot of good features on it.

Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both. Therefore, we are NCA compliant.

The solution has minimized the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.

It has helped by shrinking our space requirements.

The encryption is its most valuable feature.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are pretty good.

Its ability to simplify storage seems good.

The stability is very good. It has been stable.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is very good.

We need the encryption at REST. That is why they wanted this solution.

We used an integrator, Jack Henry, for the deployment.

The cost has room for improvement.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, and Dell EMC.

Look into Pure Storage because it seems to be a good solution. 

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.

We have workloads that demand high IOPS, so a lot of speed, fast access, time, and overall high performance.

Its ease of use is a very big thing for our customers. It's easy to set up and easy to maintain. The support is automated, which is very good. 

• Performance
• Deduplication
• They work well with Oracle and other database workloads.

They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about.

It is very stable.

It is easy to scale.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward from what I heard.

The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive.

NetApp is the biggest competitor, then SolidFire, and not so much Dell EMC anymore.

When our customers are deciding on a storage solution, we talk about their needs and what they need as an outcome for their business. We usually show them how easy Pure Storage works and how fast it. These are strong points for most customers.

Try to get a demo, then test it.