Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Pure Storage is located in manufacturing plants. Basically, we have VMware clusters and those clusters are supported by Pure Storage, and those clusters are intended to support those manufacturing plants.

The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using. They have excellent rates of deduplication and compression. To offer 20 terabytes of storage, we just need maybe five terabytes of physical hardware. That's great. At the time, there was a notable difference as it was the only vendor with those numbers in terms of deduplication and compression in real-time.

Today other vendor software offers something similar, however, when it was just Pure, it was the best thing. I want to check again, however, usually, we use the Gartner charts to make decisions and start looking for different vendors and maybe the vendors we want to test. At the time, Pure was the leader in every aspect in terms of flash arrays and deduplication and all of that.

I don't really have complaints about the solution. It works really well. We are using Pure for something simple, which is just running a small VMware firm. That's why I don't have any other impressions. It works and I'm happy with it. I don't have any problems with the storage we have.

I’m not sure if there are features missing. I'm the one who chooses the technology; however, after the implementation, I don't have too much contact. I'm not in the operations, I'm not working with the console, creating or putting up a launch. I'm not doing that kind of operation work, so I'm not sure what might be missing.

When we start having some issues with transformer attacks and security threats, I had to contact Pure to ask about software patches. With other vendors, they contact us immediately. They would say, "Hey, we had these vulnerabilities. We need to install these patches, and this is super urgent. And we need to do it now." Yet, with Pure, in a couple of situations, I can remember we tried to go to them and send an email or open a support case to ask them, "Hey, I'm pretty sure you are aware of these threats. Are there any patches or updates available, so we can protect those systems?" There were patches available, however, for some reason, we had to ask. It was not proactive communication.

I want them to initiate contact and have automatic requests for their clients to get the patching. Especially if there are critical security issues. I would expect them to contact us immediately and tell us, "Hey, we identify the security threats, and let's plan together how to implement the security patches or whatever is needed to secure systems."

I've been using the solution for a couple of years. 

It is stable. We only had one issue during the last two years and the support team was able to help us really fast. For the most part it is reliable and the performance is good.

The solution is scalable. It's modular. You just need to put additional two unit expansions, and that's it.

The data storage is supporting a manufacturing plant. In the end, a lot of people are using those systems. I cannot say a number, however, there is a lot of people. There are probably more than 1000 per each side, considering the 24/7 roles.

Technical support was good. We’ve contacted them multiple times and they were great. They have been helpful every time.

It’s easy to set up and support is excellent. The administration console is super easy to understand and extremely intuitive. Even if you are not a storage expert, you can easily understand what you are doing. I like it - it's not complex at all.

We are just customers.

We have two different deployments. One is located in a big data center, and another two are in smaller remote data centers.

We have multiple data centers. We’re a manufacturing company and we need to keep a physical footprint in almost all our manufacturing plants and some of the branch offices. We try to put almost all of our workloads in the cloud, however, if there's a reason like latency or security or some stuff that prevents us from using the cloud, then that is when we put those systems in local data centers.

I’d advise potential new users to be careful during the scoping phase as some things will take up more room than you might anticipate or be hard to compress. Since this solution uses compression and deduplication, if you have a lot of databases or media files like videos or images, or that kind of information, it is not great when you try to compress and deduplicate. 

We have had some issues with that. One POC was supporting a call center, and this call center is recording the agents' screens as well as the audio of those calls.

That kind of information is extremely bad when you try to compress it. That's why, on that specific storage example, we had capacity issues. That specific application was eating almost all the storage. If you have different information, like application servers, a lot of repeated operating systems, if you have a hundred windows running on precisely the same version, that's great for deduplication and compression. That's something that the pre-sales team from Pure can help with; however, it is important internally to identify all those workloads as that could modify a lot, including what is the result in terms of the estimation of capacity required.

I’d rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use Pure Storage for multiple clients. One is a client related to postal services. We are using a database to manage six petabytes. 

The main benefit of Pure Storage is performance. We have critical applications running on FlashArray without any noticeable impact on performance. I can immediately see the difference between Pure Storage and the other arrays I've used. 

It has optimized the storage footprint, delivering savings to our clients by drastically reducing the cost of infrastructure and maintenance. 

Deduplication is an excellent feature. I also like the NAS and support.

The latest release contains bugs that shouldn't be in a production environment. Two incidents impacted our client, including hardware-related bugs. They need to be more cautious in testing before they release.

We have used Pure Storage for two years.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray nine out of 10. We have reduced downtime by 30 to 50 percent. 

We can upgrade Pure Storage without any latency problems.

I rate Pure Storage support. The response times are good, but they use third-party support. They come and work on hardware issues. Support is available when a client needs it. 

Positive

I have worked with EMC and IBM arrays. Pure Storage is simpler to manage than other arrays. If you already have an array but you don't have the budget for Pure Storage, I wouldn't recommend migrating. 

Pure Storage FlashArray isn't completely flash. It's a semi-hybrid that combines SSDs and SAS disks. IBM's flash array is also good in terms of performance. Pure Storage and IBM have comparable conformance. 

We had some complications configuring the NAS, and some features did not work for our environment. We achieved ready integration in one domain, but we had two domains in NDRRS. The deployment took less than a day, but we had to complete all the prerequisites. If you are using NAS, you must implement many things before configuring it and working with other teams. It takes maybe a week to complete the array configuration and bring it into production. One person is enough, and Pure Storage doesn't require maintenance.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case is SAP. 

Its ease of use has allowed us to stand up landscapes faster.

The most valuable feature is its upgradeability.

Pure Storage helps to streamline storage because of its simplicity.

What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it. 

We have never had an issue.

We just doubled it in size it was painless.

The technical support is fantastic and proactive.

Our previous platform did not support SAP.

The driver for us to implement Pure Storage in our SAP landscape was that it was SAP certified.  Additionally, it had really good numbers and reviews.

We plugged it in, and in an hour, we were using it. It is very straightforward and simple.

We deployed it in-house.

We did not displace any other technology with the Pure Storage purchase so it's doesn't have a traditional dollar ROI.  From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things.  

Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs.

We looked at Pure Storage, EMC and HPE. We chose Pure Storage because of its innovation.

I would recommend the product.

I'm a pre-sales architect. I architect, and I sell them as a partner with Pure Storage on the VAR side. Our customers use it for storage, mainly block-based storage and virtualization storage. Some solutions have both block and file storage, and some solutions only have file storage from Pure. 

It provides additional protection against ransomware threats. If you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or some kind of malicious attack, you can revert your data back in time to a previous version or snapshot.

One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table.

Scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades are also valuable. They're not using flash just for your tier one storage needs. They're recommending flash for data protection and archive backup, which is the way to go.

If you get the gold support, which is what I sell and recommend for my customers, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades, which is another feather in Pure's cap. They make several claims that once you move to Pure Storage, you can take your team of five dedicated storage admins and trim it down to just one person. Their mantra is getting customers out of the game of managing storage and letting the vendor manage the storage. They want to see their customers just consume storage. They have non-disruptive upgrades. You just set up the software and hardware and just consume the storage. They're continuously looking at the dial-homes, the logs that are automatically sent, and fingerprinting potential issues before they're even a problem. That cuts down on a lot of support tickets the customers have to open up. They'll proactively open up tickets when they see something in their analytics on a particular customer's array and recognize that one of their hosts might have a certain HBA with a fault or a bug. They reach out and open a ticket. So, you get your system upgrade, patched, or whatever is needed to resolve the potential problem.

I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. They can work on the price to make it more competitive.

Its stability is very good. I have not heard any of my customers having issues with FlashArray. It is very solid. They claim 99.9999% availability. I haven't had any problems with outages with my customers. 

They have another product called FlashBlade, which is a different type of storage appliance that Pure does for unstructured files. FlashBlade doesn't rank as high in reliability as their flagship FlashArray product does. The FlashBlade product is a notch below. It is a newer product or code, and I have heard of some issues with it.

Its scalability is very good. It scales up instead of out, which is typical for a block-based appliance. It is very easy to add expansion shelves or disks. You don't need to worry about shuffling drives around and creating RAID groups. This is all legacy stuff. Most vendors are now the same, but I really think that Pure led the effort for non-disruptive upgrades. They coined the term, and other vendors have since followed suit. They're the leader in the industry for that.

Their regular support is good. With gold support, Pure's support personnel takes care of both software and hardware upgrades. The only difference between free support and gold support is that you don't get free hardware upgrades with free support. If I understand the offering correctly, software upgrades are still included. 

If we're just talking about Pure Storage, it is straightforward and simple. You can get it up in minutes as opposed to hours that some of the other solutions take. Compared to its competitive solutions, Pure is very well known for its simplicity and ease of use, especially during setup and initialization.

A single 2U appliance from Pure Storage for block-based workloads, including rack stack and initialization, is ready to be provisioned to your servers in an hour or an hour and a half to the max. It is definitely straightforward.

If you get the gold support, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades. So, you don't have to manage storage. Pure takes care of that.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing.

They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance.

I would advise others to chose well. Prepare to have extra time on your hands to focus on your business's core needs and outcomes and not having to worry about the day-to-day maintenance of your storage appliance.

All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions. They might ask for customization level, but I think Pure is doing the right thing by its set-it-and-forget-it approach. Most customers don't need to fine-tune and customize their all-flash storage appliances anymore. It is not a legacy spinning disk appliance.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of 10. Its pricing sometimes plays a big part where customers might go in a different direction, and that's the only reason why I'm not giving it a 10.

I use Pure Storage FlashArray to provide LUNs or volumes for end users who want to work on a database for zoning, enabling them to operate effectively with end-user arrays.

The device gives us a lot of protection in maintaining our data in the storage. It gives high throughput across many locations.

We have faster data processing with low file consumption. This includes multi-terabyte databases in memory with read-write speed four times faster than any HDD. 

Pure Storage FlashArray offers numerous valuable features, such as low latency and high throughput. It has significant data protection in the form of snapshots. It allows data portability around the cloud and on-premises devices. Performance backup is also a key feature.

The support that we received from the vendor during upgrades has been very good. They instructed us very well through the remote connection.

I have worked with two types of Pure Storage FlashArray. So far, I have not found any issues. There is not a great need for improvement, but better pricing could be beneficial.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for three years.

It is stable. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

There is always downtime when working with production servers. I have to plan downtime of three or four hours when launching new servers or logging into new servers with new LUNs. If a lot of people are logging into a FlashArray server, it will require downtime if we have to modify anything.

It is scalable. I would rate the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

It is being used at a single location. We have 30 people using it.

Their support is too good. As soon as I log a case with them, they are always available. They are very fast. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have worked with different storage boxes such as Quantum, NetApp, and HPE, but they are different. They are block storage. Pure Storage provides a unique compatibility when working with LUNs and volumes, offering a totally different SAN product. It is also easier than the others.

The initial setup was straightforward and took about 40 minutes.

The solution has saved us time and resources. It has saved about 20% of my time.

I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved.

I would recommend Pure Storage FlashArray to anyone because it offers great resilience, high throughput, and excellent storage provision to users on SAN boxes. It simplifies the process of zoning or taking backups.

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

We use Pure Storage FlashArray for storage allocation, DR, replication, and performance. We are migrating both servers and storage to Pure Storage.

It has reduced downtime significantly, and the self-service upgrade feature allows us to handle upgrades smoothly through the console.

It has helped decrease our organization’s storage footprint. There is about 15% reduction.

The snapshot feature is valuable. It protects data based on the policy. We can schedule snapshots and have unalterable data. It reduces management efforts.

Vendor support is good. After raising a case, we get a response within an hour or two.

I have been primarily working with storage and have not fully explored other areas, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to performance reporting.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for one year. I have been using Hitachi Storage and Sun Storage on all legacy devices. We are migrating all these servers and storage to Pure Storage FlashArray.

Our experience with the stability of FlashArray has been excellent. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it an eight.

The scalability of the solution is quite good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

For a P2 issue, the SLA is 4 hours. They were able to resolve the issue within two hours. Just a month ago, we faced an issue, and they were able to resolve that within an hour. We got support immediately.

The technical support provided by Pure Storage is exceptional, and I would rate it a ten out of ten.

Positive

We have been handling all the legacy environments, such as Hitachi USP V/VM, Hitachi AMS, Sun StorageTek, and EMC. They all were at the end of life and out of support. We have more than 1,000 devices and servers. Our servers were also out of service and end of life. We planned to migrate all the servers and data into Pure Storage as single devices. Instead of using multiple storage solutions, we wanted to use a single one and move to Pure Storage. We also had to deal with different vendors for support. We wanted to have a single vendor.

With these legacy devices, we were not getting any support. When we had any hardware failure or some issues, we were not getting a solution. For any hardware failures, we were not getting the parts. That is why we thought of migrating to Pure Storage.

The deployment took about two months, primarily due to planning and the time taken for customer approval processes.

We are primarily using it on-premises, but we have plans to move to the cloud over the next one or two years.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a seven out of ten.

This solution has been part of a POC. We've been evaluating the solution. 

We went through many renditions of testing with a full load. Even if we pulled a controller out, there was just a blip of response, and it was still extremely acceptable within the limit of what we would consider acceptable - and we're talking about one millisecond here.

This code was mature. We found the hardware to be extremely robust. 

It worked flawlessly.

The deployment was fast. 

The plugin for the ESX, the VMware, was great. That integration is just perfect. They're enhancing it all the time, from what we can tell, so it works flawlessly.

Support is excellent. 

It was a very good proof-of-concept experience.

In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation. 

It's going to be a hard one to manage. They have most of what we were looking at, including some things that we're looking at down the road. The growth on this particular array is almost unlimited for most shops. I would say they still need more enhanced speed, however, that's always a thing with storage.

I've used the solution for six months. 

The stability and reliability are excellent. I would rate it nine out of ten in terms of stability.

The scalability was great. I'd rate it nine out of ten overall. 

We have 20,000 people who were virtual machine users that were just on the test load. 

There is potential to increase usage in the future. That said, it's not up to me right now. We're working with the vendor. 

They have very good technical support. The support model was great. They usually had things resolved in under four hours. Service is very fast.

Positive

The deployment is easy. It was implemented in 15 minutes, including SNAP policies. The process was extremely fast.

It required two people to set up the solution. 

We had the whole thing up and running in 20 minutes and probably was done in an hour for everything, including end-to-end connectivity and having ES6 running on it. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing is okay. It's somewhere in the middle. I'd rate it five out of ten overall. 

We are using an all-flash X-series deployment. 

I'd advise people to test it and give it a try. They need to pay attention to their data reduction rate while doing so. 

I'd rate it nine out of ten overall. 

We use the solution for VM storage in a private cloud model. The main motivations we had to run VMware on Pure were the simplicity and cost.

We're using the M70 R2.

We went from a four-cabinet VMAX array, where we paid $16,000 a month for a pod just for the array to sit in, and we took that down to seven U's of rack space in our existing co-lo facility. Not only did we save time, but we saved money, power, and air conditioning; all of that good stuff.

We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use. It's really plug-and-play. It just works and it works really well.

I haven't really had a bad experience or something I think that they can improve on. I'm not saying that to be really nice. The way the platform works, the way that their sales team works, the way their support team works, everything just works really well. If they could make it cheaper, that would be something.

It's stable and we've never had an issue with it. The array has just worked. It's been a little workhorse. It's just perfect in every way that I can think of.

Scaling is easy. You just plug in new disks, it sees them and it works. I can't explain it any better than that. You just plug it in and it works.

I have used Pure's tech support quite a few times. It's probably the best tech support experience that I've had. I love that, by utilizing Pure's SaaS platform, they let me know about problems that they've seen with other customers who are using the same version of the software or the same model array. They reach out proactively and say, "Hey, we've seen these kinds of things happen with other customers. You should do X to fix this so you don't experience the problems." It's something that most storage companies don't do nowadays. They make my job easier by being really proactive.

We were looking to get away from Dell EMC to some other platform, and Pure was the number-one disruptor in the market. Their story, their price point, and what they said they could deliver are what sold us.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took about 30 minutes from unboxing to actually being on the network and being able to utilize it in our VMware environment.

A Pure engineer was onsite with me to do it. It was very simple. He asked me about five questions about IP address and NTP, etc. Then he did the rest with a script.

We easily save, on just the basic costs for facilities, $16,000 a month.

We also evaluated Dell EMC, 3PAR, Nimble, Tintri, and NetApp.

Like I tell everybody else that I deal with, if you want to focus your time on doing more valuable things for your company, and you deal with storage on a day-to-day basis like I do, the best thing you can do is put Pure in your environment. It really is set-it-and-forget-it. I've come from the days of VMAXs where you're sitting there tweaking and turning knobs all the time to try to make sure that your storage environment is tip-top. With this, you literally plug it in, connect it and serve it, and then it does everything else itself. I get to focus my time on doing other things that are more valuable to the company.

On a scale of one to ten, Pure is an 11.