Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

We use this solution to assist with our on-premise database workloads; In conjunction with our Oracle database and SQL server database.

Within our organization, there are roughly four people using this solution.

Pure Storage has been of great value to us as it provides us with a lot of great tools, especially for monitoring and capacity planning.

Also, Pure Storage is extremely user-friendly. 

The solution itself is pretty solid. Perhaps the time available for selecting upgrades or for scheduling things could be improved. On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial. 

In the next release, I would like for them to support file systems on the lower-end models, like the X-10 or X-20. 

Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed.

I have increased the capacity during working hours with no impact on production at all.

Their technical support is excellent. Once we raise a ticket, they respond very quickly. Even better, their support is proactive. In most cases, they are the ones contacting us, not the other way around.

The initial setup was extremely simple. It takes about half an hour to get it up and running. 

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good.

I trust them — their reputation is outstanding. Pure Storage is an amazing solution. I would totally recommend this technology. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Pure Storage a rating of ten. 

If you're skeptical, there is a free demo that you can use to test it in your environment. Just give it a try, test out all the features, and experiment.

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. 

Production storage for a lot of virtual machines. As a service provider, it is very important to have something with this much performance.

• Cuts VM deployment down to seconds. 
• Cuts latency under MS. 
• Amazing performance. 
• Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle.

• Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry.
• The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive. 

I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it.

The dashboard of the product provides a lot of value to the administrator. It provides everything needed in a single view.

The product improved the organization functions by increasing system response time and productivity. Before the product was installed, applications ran poorly, and slow, which affected the productivity of the workforce. Once the product was in use, the applications ran quickly, and the workforce did not encounter any bottlenecks and became more productive.

The product could improve by providing the capability to support NAS storage – CIFS and NFS. Currently, the product only supports block storage (SAN).

The solution has been in place for three years.

There weren’t any issues encountered other than firmware upgrades that needed to take place.

The capacity we needed did not cause any issues with scalability. However, fairly large companies may have issues expanding. The controllers are limited to a certain amount of storage. When that capacity limit is reached on what the controllers can handle, another set of controllers will be needed to compensate for the additional storage.

Their support and customer service is excellent. They monitored our storage arrays and knew about issues we had when they were reported. They assisted and made themselves available for some work where help was needed.

I would rate their level of support an 8/10. Only because issues require escalation during off hours, but they do respond when issues are escalated.

The technology the company had were from two competing vendors, but none had flash storage. This was the first time the company ever used flash storage.

The deployment was very quick. It is one of the easiest storage equipment to implement.

The initial setup was very simple. The storage array comes very compact with minimum amount of hardware so it’s not bulky equipment which gets delivered in pallets. The setup instructions are extremely easy.

The product was installed by the vendor’s SE. Their level of expertise was a solid 10/10.

There was a case study on the product. The work performed by four people is now capable of being performed by one person because of the applications running faster.

All the software is included in the hardware at no additional cost , unlike some of the other storage vendors who charge for certain features such as encryption, replication, etc.

We looked at the other offerings from existing vendors but we took advantage of the free POC and also the special introductory rate.

Based on my experience with the product, I would recommend it. I have never experienced an outage with the product or had any support that was below excellent. But there are other products in the market which compete well, however, I do not have any experience with the other products’ pricings and support.

We use the on-premises deployment model of this solution. Our primary use case is for virtualization. 

Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications.

It benefits our IT organization in the way that it drives down costs, allows us to migrate servers from one data center to another, and gives the flexibility that having bare metal servers wouldn't allow.

We run VMware on Pure and our main driver was for cost and performance.

The most valuable feature is the speed. 

We are taking advantage of the VMware integrations developed by Pure. 

As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use.

The stability seems good. It doesn't go down very often. 

I haven't contacted their technical support firsthand. 

At the time we were evaluating a whole bunch of different solution platforms, and a lot of times it came down to use case, workload, and cost. 

We are using this solution in conjunction with EMC. We might still be using both for different workloads. 

We used a reseller for the integration. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's a solid product but all products can improve. It's technology, it's not always going to do what you need it to do. It can go down from time to time, but it's been pretty solid so far.

I would advise someone considering this solution to talk to a Pure Storage engineer to see if it fits your needs. 

We've been using this solution for four years. We are on-prem with Pure and we are not using any of Pure's off-prem product. We do have experience with a variety of storage in AWS. For us, it's still two very different things, we like Pure Storage because our key business systems are still on-prem. It's been extremely reliable and gets the job done. 

Our primary use case is for Oracle databases, data warehouses, and mission critical apps. 

This solution has improved my organization because we can easily snapshot and share the same storage platform for non-production production and so we've been able to get very high performance from non-production environments as well. 

The ability to seamlessly and easily upgrade storage capacity and upgrade to a completely new generation of the array are the most valuable features. 

There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there. 

In the early days, we had issues with stability right up to an actual crash during an upgrade. That was three and a half years ago and since then there's been a dramatic improvement. We've found the product to be extremely reliable. 

Scalability is near excellent. In terms of provision capacity, a total footprint is over 400 terabytes provisioned out to systems in my organization. 

Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk. 

We considered different products from Dell EMC and NetApp. We didn't choose Dell EMC because it was a cost issue. For NetApp, there was an ease of use difference and we felt that Pure Storage was an easier product for our team to use. We chose Pure Storage primarily because of its combination of performance and ease of use. 

I would rate this solution as a nine because of the scalability and upgrade flexibility. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to take the opportunity to take a look at the product. Take a demo and actually run through day to day operations and see how easy and reliable it is. 

We use it for VDI.

We used to run VDI under other storage. The performance wasn't great, but when we moved to Pure we got less than a few microseconds in performance. Latency is the most important aspect for us.

The performance.

We would always like to see higher performance, and lower pricing is always better. In general, they're going in the right direction.

It's very stable and it's very fast. In general, a lot of times VDI with our older system was up and down. Sometimes we ran into performance bottlenecks. Pure helps stabilize things, at least from a storage perspective, to stabilize the I/O performance.

We haven't reached the stage yet, specifically on VDI, where we have to scale.

Technical support is great. They make it simple.

Our previous solution was slow. We ran into a lot of I/O bottlenecks. I had wanted to get Pure into our environment for a few years. They lowered the price to the point that the price-to-performance fit our budget.

The initial setup was straightforward, very fast. We had done a PoC before.

We used a reseller, ePlus. They worked closely with Pure, with their engineers.

When users don't call wanting to kill me, that's ROI. The internal VDI performance was bad and, from an IT perspective, we had unsatisfied customers. Our ROI is that we don't get angry customers calling to say the solution doesn't work.

The price-to-performance is good. I looked at Pure about three to four years back, but the price-to-performance wasn't right for us. Now, it's right.

Try a PoC. Work up a PoC and you will really see a performance improvement.

For our purposes, Pure doesn't really simplify storage. We just needed the performance for VDI. Our enterprise system is on another storage system.

Overall, I would rate Pure at nine out of ten. I'm leaving them room for improvement but, so far, we are satisfied with Pure Storage.