Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Our primary use case is a big bucket of storage for VMware. We run our virtual machines mostly to make sure that we have our SQL databases sitting on Pure Storage, because it's the fastest storage which we have available.

It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive.

I like the fact that, by default, we encrypt at REST. So, with database encryption, we no longer have to layer it using Transparent Data Encryption, we can use the native storage. This helps lessen the performance impact and simplify configuration.

It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us. 

We are going to start using it as a filer. In January, we're going to migrate away from NetApp and use Pure Storage as file service. 

What is interesting, because we're moving mostly to the cloud, Pure Storage may be the one storage appliance which will stay after we are done with our migration.

Stability has been great. We just put in a new data pack recently. One drive failed, but other than that, it was very stable. I haven't seen a whole lot of problems. Also, when it comes to upgrading shelves and the evacuation process, which sound a lot scarier than they are, everything has gone smoothly. I am very happy with how it works.

With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process.

I contact technical support from time to time. They have been pretty good. I have the mobile phone for one of the tech support guys, so I call him. He usually gets the ground troops rallied if need be, so the support has been good.

I wasn't part of the initial setup.

We used a reseller for the deployment: Bridge Data. They provided good expertise and timely services, so we were happy with them.

We get about a 3.3 data reduction, which is good. That is not the total reduction, just dedupe and compression.

I would give Pure Storage a high recommendation. Go with Pure (or a flasher rate which is similar) because of the ease of management and performance. It makes life a lot easier, especially if you're a smaller shop it could be prohibitive to have a storage engineer on staff. So, get a systems engineer who can do storage. This is more common with Pure Storage, then with Dell EMC.

I have not used the predictive performance analytics all that much.

I really like the end-to-end VM monitoring. I will be putting that on pretty soon.

Pure has become the main storage solution for our customers. It is mainly used for our customers' Oracle databases.

We are a Pure partner. What Pure has brought to us is a solution that our customers see has a lot of value. For the last ten years, there hasn't been a lot of differentiation between storage brands. We also deal with other products, other manufacturers, which are good products, but Pure is a different solution. It has allowed us to go with a different approach for our customers. When compared to different providers - I won't name them - there are other great companies out there, but Pure has managed to have a very different product with a differentiation that customers value.

Also, the guys who normally spend hours, or days, or weeks working with storage, trying to get something done, can do it in minutes with Pure. They save a lot of time, and they can do other stuff instead of managing storage.

The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure.

Also, performance. The box gives them extreme performance, but ease of use is the main reason they love Pure.

Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged. That's one thing they might have to look at because, if you are looking for storage, Pure is the player and the winner. But, if you are looking at HCI, Pure does not play in that area and that may prevent them from getting some deals.

With the customers that we have, and the references we have read from them, the stability is great. I have only seen 100 percent. I haven't had any failures, none of my customers has had any problem with the platform. So far, it's great. 

Technology, in general, is very good now, you don't have a lot of problems. But Pure is even better.

So far, the scalability is great. As a partner, what we want is to keep selling more and more products to our customers. One feature that Pure has is that it gives you even more storage as the company develops new functionality or does software upgrades. Even though it doesn't allow us to sell as much as we would like, our customers appreciate that. They have more capacity without investing any money. So the scalability is great.

Compared with other products, Pure's technical support is as good as anyone's, probably better. They have tools where the customer can see for themselves the performance and the statistics from the solution, so support is first-class. There are some third-party companies, that evaluate the technical support of different companies, and Pure ranks number one.

The initial setup is very simple. As a partner, we like to have products that need a lot of service because we make more money on the service than on the hardware. But with Pure being so simple, there is not a lot of consulting that is needed. That's one of the reasons why customers would rather buy Pure than other brands. While Pure does not allow us to make a lot of money on consulting, it is a very simple and easy sell to customers.

It's so simple that there is not much that an integrator or a partner needs to do on the Pure platform.

Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants. I don't have the exact figures, but roughly, in a five-year span, you would save at least 20 to 25 percent, especially on labor, on specialized people and training.

As to whether the TCO of flash is lower than SSD implementations, I don't have any specific metrics, but again, the implementation of Pure is, by far, simpler than other technologies. I wouldn't say we have lower implementation costs because of flash or because of SSDs, rather it's because of the software and technology of Pure.

Normally, when we go to compete for a customer, they are looking at all the most important brands. Dell EMC is part of most storage bids. There is NetApp and sometimes we face IBM. In our territory there is Hitachi, which is a great product, but usually it's not on the shortlist. Finally there is HPE. Those are the brands that we normally find we're competing with when we offer Pure.

In the end, so far, haven't lost one deal where we involved Pure. We have won deals against NetApp, which is a great product, we have won deals against Dell EMC - and that is the brand to beat. But when customers compare Dell EMC with Pure, there is no competition. Pure is, by far, better.

My advice is to buy Pure. I am very excited about this product. I would recommend that anybody who is looking at storage should really look at and consider Pure, and they will probably buy Pure.

The performance is great. In terms of latency, you can have failures in the system, and the system can keep performing as if nothing happened. It is a great product with great performance. For me, right now, it is the best storage solution in the market, by far.

I would rate Pure a ten out of ten and even 11. I have been in the business for 31 years. In the technology sector, most products are the same, they offer the same functionalities. Maybe 30 years ago, when EMC came out with their storage solution, it was something very different, but in the end, everybody offers the same thing. If you look at a Dell EMC box, or you look at HPE, or you look at Hitachi, they offer a SAN with certain performance, they have replication, they have Snapshots. Everybody has more or less the same thing. Pure has a different offer, because of the simplicity, the performance, and all the functionality that Pure is offering. It's a very simple package, it's what makes Pure different. That's why most customers choose Pure.

From the first test that we have conducted, we are very satisfied with this solution.

The interface is easy to use.

At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way.

We are not sure what needs improvement at this time, as we have not started using it in the production environment.

It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated.

We are in the process of implementing this solution, but we haven't started using it in the production environment.

The vendor was helpful during our implementation.

The initial setup was easy, with help from the vendor.

We have had help from the vendors, they have been very close to us, helping us all the way.

We decided to go with the Pure Storage solution because of the business model that they presented to us.

We have hired Pure Storage and a distributor to help out at the beginning but mostly we deal with Pure Storage directly.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

It is storage for our database system.

The access in our system is more reliable and provides our users better speed.

For flash storage, the speed access is its most valuable feature.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression is very good.

The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before.

There are a lot of things to improve.

They make a reliable storage. We use it as a very critical system, and we don't want any corruption on our system.

Since our design is a high availability design, it can work 24/7.

The product is scalable.

The technical support is very fast.

Previously, we used Oracle, Hitachi, and SAN storage. We switched because we needed storage that could be accessed and support our system very quickly.

The initial setup was straightforward in configuring the database and storage.

We used a Pure Storage partner for the deployment. They were very good, supportive, and responsive.

We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing.

The features that we wanted have already been added.

We integrated the product with VMware and vCenter. It was a very simple configuration to integrate the VMs and have them read our storage.

It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future.

I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable. Of course, it is, after all, solid-state. It's not the same as "cheap and deep."

It's a very stable product, all self-contained and very well-supported as well.

It's definitely scalable. It can grow with a company's needs.

It's one of the easiest out there, in terms of installation.

It's a great return on investment, based on the mission. When you're interested in high-performance there isn't much else that competes with it.

We looked at everything. In dealing with this, we got mission-specific. It's like different kinds of planes or sailboats: What's the mission? For this high-performance mission, that's what Pure is about.

I would recommend it to colleagues. When performance is important, that's what Pure is all about.

I rate the solution at ten out of ten. Solid-state storage makes a lot of sense, they're 100 percent solid-state when you need that kind of performance. The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money.

We run our production Oracle workload on it.

We have been able to scale it to ten terabytes. Whereas, before we were stuck.

The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes.

I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product.

Stability has been really solid.

The technical support has been fantastic.

We were previously using Dell EMC.

We used an integrator for the deployment.

We have seen ROI. Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks.

It makes things ten times easier.

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.

Our VDI with VMware Horizon include 100 VM for office and graphics desktop with nVidia GRID, the low latency and the high deduplication permit to reduce storage footprint, power consumption and to increase the consolidation on few VMware Host.

We have consolidated all the VSI (55 VM) and VDI (100 VM) in the same storage, improving performance and overall virtual desktop acceptance.

The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression.

We liked the non-disruptive downgrade from FA-420 (POC) to FA-405 in production and the non-disruptive upgrade from FA-405 to M20.

Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved. The VVol support is just released in GA.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

There were no stability issues. It is always on from the first LUN deployment to VSphere.

There were no scalability issues. NDU and NDD were very simple, without interruption or performance decrease for its cluster nature, active/passive.

Customer Service:

I would rate the customer service as very high.

Technical Support:

They are all skilled. They upgraded the storage firmware from remote every time we asked via a phone appointment.

We have used 3PAR for VDI and NetApp for VSI. The new solution has a very low price/performance ratio. With the price of the SSD upgrade of our NetApp FA3220 and the one year maintenance of the old 3PAR, we bought Pure Storage with a three-year support agreement.

The initial setup was very simple. In two hours, we started to use Storage vMotion.

The product was implemented directly by the vendor’s team and they are very skilled.

In two years, we will start to save. With their Evergreen Storage subscription, we can enjoy protection of our investment.

Everything is included, so there is very simple licensing. F

We evaluated EMC XtremIO and NetApp FAS.

Test it in your environment in a PoC or in a Try-and-Buy to check your deduplication and compression ratios.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

IPv6 is now fully supported, Windows Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) is added in the latest firmware as supports for Docker APKG 1.0.1 and Dynamic Volume in the Purity Container Engine.