Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

Our primary use case has been our production Oracle campus management database environment. We use Oracle PeopleSoft as our campus management solution and underneath that we have about six terabytes of Oracle Database. Our most demanding use-case for Pure Storage has been hosting these high performance, transactional databases, while also hosting all of our other critical application storage needs (MSSql data-warehouse, BI/Analytics, VMWare).

As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit we saw, from our very first benchmarks, was that our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other changes. That increase in performance allowed us to then redesign our database environment in ways which had many knock-on benefits, primarily virtualization and automation. Our primary activity as DBAs is copying databases: making clones, doing refreshes, and creating development/test copies. We spend all day, every day doing this. Pure Storage's technology allowed us to automate these tasks, reducing a manual database-deployment process that started as a 12-hour turnaround to an automated solution that takes about 15 minutes.

The most valuable feature has been its performance. It has allowed us to virtualize our production environment, which has many secondary benefits, primarily involving the automation of database administration activities. Very close to that primary benefit has been the effectiveness of their data reduction technology, a combination of deduplication and metadata indexing. In our environment, nearly all of our databases are copies of copies. With Pure Storage's data-reduction technology we can host an unexpectedly large amount of functional data in an affordable amount of storage.

Also, their system-management REST API is excellent: well-documented and very easy to use.

In the higher-education industry, things moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of their existing features. 

In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. I've done a lot of automation work using their existing features and tools, so I'm always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about extending their phone-home centralized analytics interface (PureOne) into a does-everything management console with a list of new cloud, WAN, and backup features, but this doesn't seem finalized. 

We forget they're there. We plugged the first one in, then we didn't look at it for months. We copied more and more stuff into it over that first year and got more and more impressed at how effective Pure's data-reduction technology was. You copy more and more stuff into them and they just sit there, working away. Now that a lot of our daily operations are automated, we barely even log into them.

The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive. We really like its ability to host diverse additional workloads, categories of data, and vendor database technologies.

We have purchased a second array. We also added an additional shelf for capacity to the first array. The process of adding both of these devices took less than an hour in each case: The SE shows up, plugs stuff together, turns it on, and the data moves over.

We've been incredibly happy with their tech support. There was even an instance where we were having an unrelated problem with our production Oracle Databases. If you can imagine having your production Oracle Databases randomly reboot approximately every 12 to 17 hours for no reason that you can figure out. It tends to be something approaching a resumé-generating experience. Out of the blue, we received a proactive, spontaneous call from Pure Storage support saying, "We're observing something weird on one of your Fibre Channel connections. We think you should take a look at this one SFP optical connector on this one channel, because we're seeing stuff on the array which looks unusual." We looked and it turned out to be the problem. We were having this timing error that was causing our databases (because they were clustered) to lose track of the fact that they were part of a cluster. They would just reboot. Pure Storage support, using their phone-home data analytics, solved it, proactively.

They even showed up at our office, just in case it was the Pure Storage array's SFP, not the one in our fibre-channel switch. Our salesperson and sales engineer showed up within an hour at our location with a replacement SFP that we didn't even need. 

Therefore, we are very happy with their tech support.

It was very straightforward, to the point that our SE said, "Watch me as I do this. You'll never need to do this again. It will just sit here." The array set up, for our first array, from taking it out of the box to mounting the first volume, took less than an hour.

Pure Storage showed up, plugged it in, and we attached it to our Fibre Channel SAN and our iSCSI network. We were copying data within an hour and a half or so. Our Pure Storage team is great. There wasn't really an "implementation". No assistance was necessary.

Compared to legacy spinning disk, we have absolutely seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). I don't have an actual sort of number, but it's dramatic. 

In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for. It isn't priced for you to just go buy one off-the-shelf. It isn't a casual purchase. If you have an appropriate use case though--heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or workloads that just really need low latency and high throughput--you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage. For example, we are starting to use our second array for high performance computing, primarily machine learning, and for that sort of research analytics and heavy math computation you really need all-flash. 

We had existing relationships with vendors who had spinning disk technology. What we weren't getting was the type of flexibility for automation and copy management that all-flash technology offered with the same level of functionality. 

Spinning disk, if you're going to copy things, is zeros and ones on a piece of metal or glass, being moved to another piece of metal or glass. There is physics involved, physical changes. All-flash is largely a metadata-based environment, which means you can make copies of things by changing a few bytes in a table somewhere. 

Pure Storage was chosen because we wanted to move our university's database environment forward in terms of optimization and automation for everyday database administrator activities.

I work with a lot of different storage technologies, including other all-flash solutions, and Pure Storage stands out.

When researching or selecting potential purchase, start with performance, then try to narrow things down by looking at the additional functionality that a particular solution is going to bring into your environment. There are use cases where raw speed is everything, but almost no one is ultimately in that use case. Most people don't want it to be just fast. They want it to:

• Be fast.
• Make their DBAs lives easier.
• Make their VDI work. 
• Run their VMs in VMware in a more reliable, faster way, with better HA. 

Definitely investigate your options. Research a solution's whole set of functionalities, strengths and weaknesses, then compare that to your needs. Don't chose it because it's fastest, cheapest, etc.. Look hard at how you're going to be using it, in detail, over the next 18 to 36 months.

If you are using a storage solution in an enterprise, you need something that has an infrastructure, an ecosystem around it, a whole vendor environment. You're not going to just plug it in. You will want to use it in complex environments for important tasks.

This is why we have never implemented any sort of homegrown SSD or stripped-down, generic SSD storage arrays. We'd need to build all of those additional "ecosystem" features ourselves.

We haven't made a lot of use of Pure's built-in predictive analytics. However, they were beneficial in a couple of our storage capacity-planning discussions. We did use and trust them to understand when it was time to purchase a second //M20, which is the model of array that we use. Partially based on the built-in analytical projections, we purchased a second //M20 array and added capacity to our existing one.

Pure Storage helps to simplify storage. Some of the simplification that we observed simply comes out of its all-flash nature. We suspect that most other all-flash storage arrays in the enterprise would have shared a large percentage of that simplification. However, what Pure Storage adds, uniquely, is that their software is very much aimed at reinforcing and sustaining simplification. Performance is not the only goal; it is performance, simplicity, and ease of use.

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.

The core use for us is to test development.

Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray.

It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing—things like CPU and how it's coping.

For the next release, I would like to improve on certain functionality. They have a thing called SafeMode. So, I'd like some kind of SafeMode Manager because the SafeMode is a good feature, but it's very basic in its functionality.

I have been using this solution for three years. We have the I3 and I2 versions.

So far, it's been faultless. It is a stable solution. 

For us, it is a scalable solution. Traditionally, with Pure Storage FlashArray, there has been a problem with scale at the high end, but that's not us anyway. So, it's not something that concerns us.

It's probably around 150 users in my organization. 

I have spoken a lot to technical presales, and it's been fantastic.

The reason my company decided to use Pure Storage FlashArray rather than something else was the simplicity and proper simplicity of the solution. 

The initial setup is easy. 

It's not cheap. It's priced higher than the market.

I would definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten because the team is great, and it simply just works.

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.

We use this solution for everything. We have a mixed storage use. 

This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes, now, it takes thirty seconds. 

It has helped simplify storage. I don't have to go to the management counsel anymore. Everything else is taken care of by support teams in the background which is very good. 

The most valuable feature for us would be its speed. 

The data reduction is working well for the expected usage of VMs and other stuff like that. I do see it's not working very well for already compressed data which is expected. I know this solution is true to the expectation and how it's advertised.

I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works.

Stability is very good. I've only had two big problems with it in the last five years. 

Scalability is good. It's fairly easy for me to add capacity. 

I haven't had to use their technical support much. The few times I had to call them, they were very responsive. I was happy with them. 

We knew we needed to switch solutions because our last storage unit was running out of support so we needed a new one. We chose Pure Storage because we've been using it for a while back and knew that it's a good product. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

We used a reseller for the deployment. They were good, I didn't have any issues with them. 

It's expensive but compared to other solutions, you get what you pay for. 

If you're looking into this solution I would tell you that it's a product that's good for almost every scenario. If you have enough money, get Pure Storage. 

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. 

We are a reseller of Pure Storage FlashArray. Our customers use it for virtualization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

It has helped to simplify storage because it has a very easy graphical user interface.

Our clients see a reduction in total cost of ownership by around 40%. We have also found that the total cost of ownership of flash is lower than SSD implementations. I track a whole bunch of business markers on the cost of components. I do a lot of cost analysis for customers and I get pricing from all the component manufacturers; Ingram Micro, Toshiba, Seagate and then I compare the pricing. I do that almost every week. I constantly see that it's cheaper than SSD implementations.

The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward.

The performance analytics are moderate. It's not the best performance platform out there but it's the easiest to operate.

They need to find another way of doing data protection, RAID is not working very well. It takes performance away from the SSD.

I would like to have multi-cloud integration.

Latency needs a bit of work. It's pretty good but it needs to get below 300 microseconds. Then the data reduction would be excellent. On average I see twelve to one data reduction.

It's very stable.

It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that. 

I've used their technical support and would say that it's excellent. I would give them a ten out of ten. 

My clients know it's time to switch solutions because I run a proof of concepts where I test the manufacturer's equipment. If I find something that is a big difference then I let them know about it. Cost, performance, tools, and ease of use are all factors that we take into consideration when choosing to switch. We also chose this solution because of the Evergreen upgrade and the ease of use.

I also install Pure Storage for my clients. The initial setup is very straightforward and very simple. It takes me an hour to set one up.

My client's return on investment with Pure Storage is in about 7.3 months.

We also looked at Nimble, which is now owned by HPE, and E8, Dell EMC, and NetApp platform.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Not a ten because nobody's a ten. We haven't achieved perfection yet.

I would advise someone considering this or a similar solution to push Pure Storage for multi-cloud integration.