Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

I rate the product at ten out of ten because the performance of the storage is just unbelievable.

I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end.

It's extremely stable.

It scales absolutely, to the highest level you can think of.

Pure did help us by coming onsite and deploying it.

We were previously using EMC. The difference is unbelievable. We are buying more.

The initial setup was very easy and straightforward.

Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop.

I would absolutely suggest this solution to a colleague or a friend because of the performance and reliability of the product.

The primary use case is block storage for retro machines running on VMware ESXi and Red Hat with Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs).

We have perfect run through times and latency. We have a cluster system using two machines on Active-Active with a synchronized mirror. 

The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements.

The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser. Hopefully, in the next release, this will be fixed.

We are not using it at the moment in production. Therefore, I can't talk about the stability of the system. The PoC and tests indicate that the stability is okay.

At the moment, we have one data pack. We think that we may buy another data pack this year to scale the system up.

I have used the technical support through the phone and online tool. I used them to upgrade the software, which work okay (as it was designed).

The technical support team provided the help that we needed.

We have been using another solution, IBM XYZ. We plan to migrate away from the IBM system to Pure Storage. We are planning to switch because of cost and performance. Also, the Pure Storage FlashArray is an upgrade in technology. All-flash storage arrays will be the future.

The setup is straightforward, not complex.

It has a very simple installation. Installation took about three hours, not one or two hours, but three hours. We had an issue with our network during the first installation, but now it is up and running. 

We used a consultant from Pure Storage.

We did not evaluate other solutions since our partners were using Pure Storage, so we decided to move forward with Pure Storage.

We are not using predictive performance analytics at the moment.

VMware is currently our main use case because it dedupes really well.

Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles. 

Firstly, dedupe is the most valuable feature. Hands down. Simplifying storage is also a big win overall. As far as the monitoring with the latency goes, we're not monitoring the apps to see how they're doing at different periods, which saves us time. We're just setting thresholds, walking away, and waiting for emails if they're broken.

The big thing would be to simplify the compatibility to Openstack. The Openstack going into Nova works really well, but if Pure had a few more of those features that would be my win.

It's been rock solid.

So far it seems good.

We've used them a few times, mainly with upgrades. They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good.

They gave us the rundown and was simpler than expected. They gave us the sheet and sent us off saying, "Hey, if you need us, give us a call." We just plugged it in and up it came.

We used a reseller, but then we did our own deploy along with their help. They came in and gave us a training course so that we could maintain it ourselves.

There are a lot of companies that give a solid performance and a lot of places you can get flash. The pricing wasn't that much different, It's really the simplicity that makes a difference. If the data starts flowing too fast, it slows things down and does it later. Those features are the winners for us.

We're constantly on the hunt, and we always keep three to four vendors in. Usually, it's been the bigger players, the IBM's, the EMC's. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but we were looking for something a little different this time around.

Our customers are using Pure Storage to replacing old storage infrastructure.

We have began to sell Pure Storage to our clients recently. A lot of these customers have become return customers because they have understood the model and its ease of use. This applies no matter the company's size, large or small.

• The automation: It allows engineers to focus on other things rather than doing the more manual tasks. It automates tasks, so the ease of use is extreme. It simplifies the storage.
• Their business model: Where you pay for your support, then you can have that support for X number of years. This way you are not worrying about your support going up three to four years down the line and having to change your infrastructure at that time because it becomes obsolete. This is a positive feature that clients are seeing.

Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing.

Stability is good. The feedback that we have received from clients has been great. It is a robust storage infrastructure

The initial setup is straightforward.

Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning. Once a customer gets a demo and starts using Pure Storage, sees it working with its ease of use, stability, and performance, this encourages them into purchasing the product. 

We have received good feedback from customers, in general, using Pure Storage compared to other competitors in this space.

We had an employee who used to work for one of the competitors, Dell EMC. After a year of selling Pure Storage with us, Dell EMC offered him a good job to come back. However, after selling Pure Storage, he was unable to go back to selling Dell EMC knowing what Pure Storage is capable of doing.

Pure Storage has the right business model and will be around for a long time. I wouldn't be selling Pure Storage if I didn't know it would be a success for the customer in the end.

They use an AI to understand what the capacity of the storage will be, how it will be used, and for maintenance detection. E.g., if the maintenance notices something will be going faulty, it uses its AI capabilities to understand what will happen and when it will happen, so you replace it before it happens. Another point a lot of companies is that it doesn't ever go down, because it will know before this happens. Therefore, you can be more proactive.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray as the storage for our virtual servers and our reporting databases.

FlashArray has allowed us to go all flash. There is no more worrying about how many IOPS our different storage tiers have and trying to buy more disks just to get higher performance. We simply don't worry about performance.

The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible.

I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity. 

The features of this product that are most valuable include the data reduction capabilities. Being able to write and read data at incredibly high rates of speed and reduce the footprint of your data by three to four times at least is invaluable. Also the ability to clone and snapshot the data with little to no additional size impact. In the database world this function has quickly become a must have and not just a nice option.

The organization in which the product is deployed had many instances of the cache databases. There were instances in production, backup, test, development and others. There were then copies of copies. There were updates to databases and refreshes, as well as exports for reporting. There were more than 20 instances of the same data that existed in production. The space reduction and cloning capabilities alone resulted in major cost and administrative overhead reductions across the board. That doesn’t even account for the ability to reduce RPO/RTO to very low expected time frames.

The overall scalability for this product could be improved as well as having a single console to management multiple arrays. The scale is constantly being addressed as SSD drives get larger so will the overall capabilities of the arrays.

I have used this solution for less than a year from POC to production deployment. [Pure Storage FA-420 and (2)FA450 array.]

There were no issues during the initial deployment of the array.

There have been no issues at all with stability. The only issue was on our side, procedurally - how we did our zoning needed to be modified. Instead of zoning in groups of hosts we needed to do individual zones for each host to the arrays separately. This had nothing to do with the array though.

There have been no issues at this point. There has not been a need to scale yet, however the scale prior to deployment was more than sufficient.

Customer service has been outstanding. During the HA testing in the POC period we had people contacting us to verify that status of the array before we had completed the testing phase. They are thorough and capable.

Implementation was flawless and any remote support they handled any questions we had with ease. There really haven’t been issues of any nature that required much technical savvy though.

We had not previously used an all flash array. We POC’d the next best competitor, but feature wise, overall system stability and space reduction numbers made it so that Pure was the clear leader.

It took about an hour to get multiple arrays installed and deployed. They were incredibly easy to setup and even easier to get online and provision storage.

We implemented through a vendor, but the manufacturer did the actual installation. There were no PS hours incurred for the installation from the vendor.

We evaluated through technology research: Whiptail, SolidFire, XtremIO and Pure Storage. Ultimately we POC’d XtremIO and Pure Storage.

Definitely take the time to perform a POC. There are multiple players in this market right now that have good offerings and specific environments are very different. Also, don’t get sucked into the IO race. At the end of the day, the number of thousands of IO didn’t really have that much impact on our product, because minimum IO reqs were far below anything, any of the arrays advertise and produce. Also, just because an array can do a million IOPs doesn’t mean it is the right fit for your environment.

This storage has to be the most well thought out and effective storage that I have had the privilege to work with.

We are a solution provider and the Pure Storage FlashArray is one of the products that we implement for our customers. I have installed three of them in the past month.

The primary use case for this product is high-performance storage.

This is the best all-flash storage array on the market. They were the first brand that provided access directly from CPU to memory to disk.

This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve.

The Pure Storage FlashArray is very stable.

This is a scalable product but not as much as the Infinidat InfiniBox. That solution is more expandable.

I have approximately 20 years of experience with enterprise solutions. These include various hyper-converged systems, all-flash storage systems, business continuity, and disaster recovery solutions for data assurance.

My experience is with products from a lot of different vendors. These include IBM, Dell EMC, Pure, Infinidat, and others.

The best features come included without any additional cost.

The InfiniBox is more expandable than Pure FlashArray. InfiniBox is more for big data than the Pure product.

The suitability of this solution depends on the customer's environment. Depending on the use case, we propose the right product. Pure Storage is not better than InfiniBox and InfiniBox is not better than Pure Storage.

In comparing products, I would rate Pure FlashArray an eight out of ten, InfiniBox a seven out of ten, Dell EMC products receive a six out of ten, and all of the other all-flash storage systems that I have experience with would be rated a five out of ten.

With PowerMax, there is a big difference in cost when you start adding more features.

The Pure Storage solution has only two active controllers and one passive controller. InfiniBox has three active controllers, and PowerMax can have up to six active storage controllers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.