Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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. 

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 private deployment model of this solution and VMware for our storage provider. Our primary use case of this solution revolves around our clients. We have different tiers of storage. We use the Pure Storage FlashArray for our tier-one storage, our higher-level storage to support not only multi-tenant clients but also our private cloud clients, and to provide them with an all-flash storage solution.

We used to use a product called XtremIO which was a pretty significant improvement on the old way of deploying storage which was through standalone SANDS and we also used EMC VMAX. That was really expensive. We saw a vast improvement when we switched over to using the Pure Storage model over the XtremIO. It just made us that much more competitive. We were able to offer those workloads to our clients, we sold more, and we keep selling it.

VMware absolutely benefited our IT organization. VMware has always been just above the rest in terms of virtualization. I was not part of the organization prior to VMware being a prevalent powerhouse like it is today. But I know that back in the day of our organization, we used to have every server in a single box. Now, we've trimmed down so much of our infrastructure as well as some of our other client's that we've moved to VMware and it's been a significant improvement.

We are and we aren't running VMware on Pure. We have our ESXi hosts are not running on Pure Storage but we use Pure Storage for the back-end data stores that we run. We don't necessarily run the Hypervisor on Pure, but we run a lot of our client's virtual machines on Pure Storage.

The main driver of running VMware on Pure is for more IOPS. It's a growing trend in the industry that we have to have more clients that have more IOPS and low latency. It's an ongoing battle with the industry. When it comes down to it there's going to be a higher demand for even lower latency; even more speed, and more IOPS. We haven't hit that quite yet, but it will happen. It's just the nature of the business.

The joint solution has benefited our organization. It's with the ability to have the tier-one storage from Pure Storage that's allowed us to not only sell more at a higher cost but also it's allowed us to separate certain workloads from others. We have the tier-one storage, then we have tier-two storage on a different provider that allows us to have more storage, but also to really just give Pure Storage to those that really need it. This provides better performance for those VMs.

For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space. Everything needs more space. For us to have a solution that allows deduplication and that lets us deploy more on less.

It's a very stable solution. Even going through maintenances we can individually bring down certain nodes without any disruption in performance. It works really seamlessly with our current implementation.

The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be. In regards to storage and SANDS, it's very difficult to have a scalable solution when you're talking about hardware stores. It's just really difficult to do that. Overall, I think Pure does a good job with scalability.

I don't interface with technical support too much. Overall whenever I've had to interface with technical support it's always been a very positive experience.

We previously used XtremIO. We knew we needed to switch because of the trends in the industry. It's always going be a battle for consumer-based demands. Consumers are always going to demand more, and more; now. What that means is that you need to build apps that are quicker, faster; or have a more sleek run without as much code, or they're more highly available. That's what it really comes down to.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Pure Storage did the deployment for us. 

We have seen ROI. 

Pure was on our shortlist. There are not a whole lot of other competitors that do what Pure does. They architected their own SAND right from scratch and it's a versatile product.

It's a pretty simple and pretty straightforward solution. There's a lot of one pane of glass type of things that we have with Pure and I don't see much in terms of improvement.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. My advice to someone considering this solution is to just get it. 

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for all of our data. We use the deduplication feature and it is working well.

The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster.

The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature.

I have been Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately two years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is very stable.

We have not had an issue with the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray.

We plan to increase the usage of this solution.

The support has been very good from Pure Storage FlashArray.

The solution is simple to implement. It's a new kind of storage, it is very easy to use. It is similar to NetApp, it is straightforward.

We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves.

It is a very good product.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution.

The price should be lower.

I have been working with Pure Storage FlashArray for one year.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a stable solution.

It is a scalable product, but not for our needs.

This solution is used by 100 people in our organization.

I have not contacted technical support.

My main point of contact has been the reseller.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to install.

The installation takes one or two days.

We have a team of three to maintain this solution.

The reseller was able to assist us.

The pricing is rather costly when compared to similar solutions.

There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

We use flash storage for VDI architecture and database architecture.

It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use. We transferred our old architecture from hyper storage to all-flash storage. It made our business faster and more connected to our customers.

The dashboard is very friendly. We can see information about IPs and the bandwidth and every host who connects to it — it's very useful.

We really like the easy-to-use GUI.

The integration capabilities could be improved.

I have been using this solution for roughly three years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a very stable and reliable solution.

In our environment, there are only two nodes. We have three products. Each one has two nodes and they can't extend any further.

We haven't needed to contact customer support. 

This solution is very easy to deploy. Deployment took roughly half an hour.

I was not involved with the licensing of this solution.

We recommend this solution to our friends and customers. It's perfect.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

It is for storage.

It gives us capacity planning.

It saves us on administrative work.

The most valuable feature is its speed.

It is easy to use and manage.

The time to value of the solution is pretty quick.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

The technical support is great.

The technology that we had was outdated. We were using HPE SAN.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just followed the information on the screen: click, click, click. 

The start up process is very easy.

We haven't seen ROI yet.

The licensing is $100,000.

Darktrace, which we are also using.

I would recommend buying it.

We're providing some ESXi solutions to our customers with high performance.

We working now with VM Analytics to provide our customers some strategies about their VMs directly.

Asynchronous and synchronous replication between two data centers. Our platform is housed in two centers, and we're using Pure Storage for their replication.

We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform.

The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job.

They could improve the price.

It is very stable.

We did some add-ons months ago without any downtime.

Technical support is good. They are proactive about the upgrades and reactive when we have any issues.

Before working with Pure Storage, we were working with an SP and multi-tier solution. Most of our customers were looking for performance. So, we made the choice to have an all-flash platform with replication. At the time, Pure Storage was the only one to be able to provide some all-flash storage with replication, and replication was mandatory for our customers.

It is quite easy to set up.

We have seen a reduction in TCO.