Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

As a customer, we use them as our Tier 1 storage arrays. It has been amazing. It's extremely fast, reliable, and resilient.

We have done a lot of different things with Pure Storage. We have included some real-time analytics that we developed for our eCommerce website and run those on FlashBlade. We used FlashBlade as it was the only storage platform fast enough to keep up with that data flow.

We are able monitor I/O, latency, read/write, capacity used, and all the different metrics that the Pure gives us the ability to monitor.

It definitely affected the ability to capacity plan, but in a good way. We have all the visibility into the capacity, forecasting, and all the metrics that the solution provides us with.

It takes drastically less time to manage and administer the solution. We would have about three or four people who were dedicated just to work on storage with only one guy who could actually do the Hitachi replication, because it used old archaic technology called HORCM files. In the Pure Storage realm, this is not true. All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it.

When I was a customer, the most valuable feature is the ease of use. 

It is the whole package: The ease of use, cost, and the ability for it to perform at a level that traditional storage arrays just can't compete with.

It simplifies storage. In the old days, you had to go and decide what ports were going to go to what workloads, which was a lot of work. You had to set up replication. Now, everything is just a few clicks away. It is set up exactly like you would want it to be. That is what it does. It simplifies and optimizes the solution.

I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side.

Some of the FlashBlade protocols could use a little love. There are obviously some new enhancements. There is no dedupe on the FlashBlade. It is compression only. There is no replication. So, Pure is going to try to partner that product with ObjectEngine to bring in some of those features, and I'm not sure how all of that will work out. I'm not familiar with ObjectEngine yet, but we'll see how it goes.

The stability is great. We have had no issues. We have never had an issue or outage that has been related to Pure Storage.

We decided how big of a failure domain that we wanted to entertain. We decided to split three into what could have been one single controller interface system. However, at some point, if we lose 500 terabytes, what does that do to our company? Now, we have things like active clusters which mitigate a lot of these issues, but people still need to be wary about how they design their failure domains.

The support is great. The support has been amazing.

We thought we we going to go with the new version of Hitachi, and everything was going to fine: Lift, shift and replace with the new one. What we started doing was exploring the marketplace, then figuring out, "Is this the best option for us? Could it be simpler?" Because the Hitachi was a tank, but it was not simple to use. It performed very well, but it did not perform like an all-flash array does.

The analytics are great. Previously, we had Hitachi solutions, and it was very hard to understand what was happening with the array. One of the great things about the Pure Storage solution is you can instantly know just by logging in or checking Pure1. You can do it on your phone. Hitachi doesn't have anything like that. It's amazing that you can get this type of visibility from your storage array. All the analytics feed up into Pure1, and you can just see them whenever you want.

It used to be that people would buy Pure Storage arrays and they would use it for a single instance application, like an Oracle database. We never did that. We used the product to replace our entire giant Hitachi G1000 storage arrays. Everything that we had went to the Pure Storage arrays. We had three giant M70s that are now X90s which house everything the company was running when I was a customer.

The initial setup was very simple. They came in before lunch, and we had it up after lunch. Then, we were already starting to move workloads to it after that.

We have upgraded firmware controllers and physical controllers. It works exactly like they say it does, which is the best part. You don't even notice. Business runs as usual. You can replace a controller, it fails over to the other controller, and everything runs smooth as butter.

We used Sirius Computer Solutions for the deployment. They have been our partner and VAR for a long time. They know our environment very well and were with us every step of the way.

From a footprint perspective, we used to have big giant racks of storage on both sides of the data center. We would have to plan and have a hole where the future one would go. Now, we don't have to do that at all. They are just sitting in the rack right next to it.

We have a seen a reduction in TCO. It is definitely a cost-effective solution for us. We have seen ROI.

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription. We like it a lot. We recently upgraded from the M-series to the X-series FlashArrays. We used the Evergreen Storage solution and expanded our footprint.

We evaluated Hitachi, who was our current vendor. We evaluated Dell EMC for the VMAX and XtremIO. Then, we evaluated Pure Storage. 

We are also a NetApp customer, so we evaluated them. However, we don't run any block storage on NetApp, only files.

Do a fair evaluation. Be objective, look at the different technologies, and use the technologies. See what they look like and what you will to have to deal with when you're using the products. It's easy to make a decision based on bullet points, but it's hard to make a decision on actual use of the actual technology.

We are a Chef shop, so we integrate it into Chef and VMware, vRA, and vRO. We also use all of the plug-ins. The integration is easy, simple, and seamless.

For most of the workloads, the solution’s inline deduplication and compression has performed fine. We had a few workloads that were already precompressed, so when you put those workloads on top of a storage system that does compression and dedupe, they don't compress again. So, they tend to eat up a little storage. Therefore, we specifically targeted some third-party applications, like IDERA SQL Safe, and tried to remove them from the environment. This way Pure Storage could then compress and dedupe those SQL backup files.

We are from Texas. Power is like ten cents a kilowatt. Texans apparently don't care that power is cheap. From a power requirement, it definitely has used less power, but we didn't use that as a metric to look at.

Biggest lesson learned: Why didn't I switch sooner?

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for all of our SAN storage for our VMware environment

The solution has benefited our company because of the ease of use and the performance and reliability.

The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level.

The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately eight months.

The solution has been highly stable and we have not had an issue.

I rate the stability of Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

We have one person that using the solution to manage it.

We do not plan to increase our usage.

I rate the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

I have not used support often but my experience was good.

I rate the support of Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

Positive

I was not there when the initial setup was done, but we recently we swapped the controller and it went smoothly.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a good investment.

The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive.

My advice to others is for them to plan and try the solution out.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

We put the solution onto the VMware environment and all the Microsoft SQL servers. We do the synchronization between two data centers, so that is has a very low latency. We just have a few milliseconds of latency which is a ready performance, and near perfect. 

If I compare it to SAN Symphony, for instance, it's much faster, much reliable level. 

The maintenance is very good. The support is very, very good. If you do any maintenance on it you have the support, and it's nice to know they are there to assist.

It's a very good product. It's very easy to manage everything.

With a snapshot, you can schedule it and you can remove it afterward. You can do a kind of production cope. That's very, very good now, and it's performing very well. The storage is amazing. It's so fast.

The total reduction you can expect is excellent. You buy the bundle storage and they give you a ratio of what you can achieve within it.

The mobile app is very helpful. I have an application on my smartphone. I view the latency in real-time on my app. You can see everything on your smartphone. You can also set up alerts on it, and things like this. I don't think you can do this on Dell storage. 

The solution is not cheap. It's much more expensive than DataCore. It costs much more. 

The improvement I would expect from them is maybe more if there is integration with VMware. We are also using Amazon Cloud to provision snapshots or to move or to copy snapshots to Amazon. I would expect more integration within Amazon. Amazon has tree storage or last tier so we have that as an option instead of keeping it in Pure Storage as it costs a lot of money. If they offered a hybrid cloud, for example, it would be very helpful.

The solution needs to ensure they have good integration with VVol. VVol is the future of VMware. I have spoken with Pure Storage engineers and they have an integration with vVol. They have a kind of plug-in for VMware to work with VVol, however, it's not mature enough. It's my understanding they're working on it to get it done on that side. More integration with the Windows Server for snapshots would also be helpful. 

One year ago I found that instead of having the new Pure Storage FlashArray on-prem, you can have it in Tokyo or you can have it in Virginia - it depends where you are. You can just pay a certain amount per minute and you can have a Pure Storage that you manage from your prem, but have it on Amazon. That may be in production. It will be a useful attribute.

I've been using the solution since 2019 and therefore it's not so long. It's a little bit more than one year - nearly two years now as we have started in August, 2019. 

5.3 is the latest stable version. They have a version 6 now, and 6.1 is in production, however, it's not as stable as the 5.3. We are running to the latest best stable version.

Previously, you were not able to scale the snapshot. You had to do it manually.

For a flash array of 11 terabytes that you buy in a bundle, you can provision for 44 terabytes. We still have six terabytes free. We can come to a ratio of four on full storage. You can optimize four times what they give to you. They give you a ratio from three to four. It depends on the application you have running. Not everything is taken on the storage. 

If you would like to expand, you can always just buy more storage disks. We will have to get a new license in two years and we might increase our usage then. For the moment, we have enough space.

Technical support has been very helpful throughout the process. They can assist during the setup process. They make everything very easy.

We also use the Dell EMC Storage Suite.

This solution is easier than what we've used in the past.

For me, in terms of setup, the process much easier than Symphony, for example. Before, we had DataCore and Symphony. With this product, it was easier to do the zoning on the fiber channel side. On the network side, it was easier. Everything it's much easier than other products if I compare it to Dell or to DataCore and Symphony.

The maintenance, if you have to upgrade the firmware or the version, is very convenient. The support is good also. And they are working now to integrate more in Amazon which will be helpful for us.

While it is my understanding that the solution is a bit expensive from a financial point of view, I don't know the exact costs.

The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more. I don't have the details anymore. I know it was much more than HP 3PAR and Dell Storage Center or DataCore. 

We have a five-year contract. We would need to renew it in two years or so.

We are just a customer and end-user.

With Pure Storage, you have two versions. You have the Pure Storage version 50 and version 10. 50 is a little bit bigger than version 10. With FlashArray M50, it's an X50R2, it's full flash. 

We have the product currently on-premises, however, we would be more open maybe to Amazon or some other cloud. 

I would suggest new organizations go with the product, even though it is new. Some companies are scared of new products. It's more mature in the United States. However, it's working well for us here in Europe. Even if it costs a little bit more, you do get more for what you pay. We've chosen the most expensive option, however, we have no regrets in that sense. It's been worth it. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's very easy to manage and works very well. The maintenance is also excellent. I'd recommend the solution. You don't have to do anything on the FlashArray. You don't have to deal with tier levels, or build and optimize something. Everything is done from the Pure Storage side. You're just using it, and that's it.

Our primary use case for this solution is for tier 1 critical applications on-premises. 

Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integration developed by Pure by integrating with vRealize.

With this program, all of our applications are able to perform faster and this enables us to provide faster platforms and services to our customers and employees. This solution is, therefore, a huge benefit to our IT organization. 

VMware is basically the platform that our entire on-premise residence runs on and we incorporate vRealize, vOperations, and SRM. We're also looking at partnering with a backup solution Zerto, so it just gives us a lot more flexibility.

What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability.

In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput.

The stability of this solution is extremely solid.

I am very impressed by the scalability Pure offers.

I haven't had any need to make use of the technical support team yet.

We realized that we needed to invest in a new solution when we ran out of space. We didn't really switch over to Pure, we basically just put the non-critical apps on our Unity storage and brought in Pure to be the tier 1 for the performance of critical applications. We had a few programs on our shortlist, like Dell EMC and Pure. We actually have all three on-site currently. 

The initial setup was very straightforward and we used FlairTech for the deployment. 

I would like to see a reduction in the cost and speed, but I still think that this program deserves a ten out of ten rating. My advice to others would be, if you can afford it, get Pure. 

We use this solution for general, primary storage in an on-premises deployment.

This solution has improved our performance. We run a lot of security tools that scan for different things, and this would greatly impact our other storage arrays that were either spinning disks or hybrid storage. Even though we did see an impact on Pure, none of our applications that ran on Pure had experienced any problems.

Part of it was to simply go to an all-flash technology that shielded us from that, but it was also that the toolset was very valuable. We could quickly see how we were performing. With some of the other vendors' tools, it's really hard to know where the problem is or how it's performing. You just see the results. You see the symptoms of the problems, and it's hard to come to understand where they are coming from.

This solution is simple to install.

It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity.

We use the Evergreen Storage model so that we will get upgrades as they are needed, or as we expand. It has helped us meet some financial challenges we had internally. In the past, we had to buy whole trays of disks from another vendor. It's too much money because we typically bill people ahead of the project. This solution has helped us meet the spending needs of our customers, and allow us to be more flexible.

I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers. We're going through a transformation where we are trying to run IT as a business. I need to know how much a VM costs, so I need to know how much the compute costs, how much the storage costs, and how much the backup costs. It's really difficult to go to every single product and try to decipher how much I've spent on each of the products. It's not always as easy as just dividing, saying well this must be the cost. I'd love to be able to get that data out of Pure and into vSphere so that I can just see, by VM, how much we should charge our customer.

The stability of this solution has been great. We did have a recent problem but it was probably poor capacity management on our part, where we allowed the system to become too full and it was unable to do its own correction. Besides that though, it runs great. It's very low-touch compared to some other vendors we have used in the past. In some cases, we used to really have to have an expert to run the storage network and now with Pure, that's not as important. Once it's installed and ready to go, it's very easy to maintain, very easy to provision new space, and very easy to expand the hardware. It's been transformational just in the way that you consume the product. It's a service now.

We tend not to do too much expansion but we can easily scale with the way we have structured our purchasing model on Pure. We can add small chunks as we need capacity, and we can once or twice a year add, which is kind on our budgets. It's kind on the IT people, as we don't have to fight our way through approvals because we're buying very massive amounts of expansion. It just makes it a little easier for us to do our own jobs internally.

I have never contacted technical support for this solution.

We needed to do a lifecycle replacement, and we also knew that at the time that flash was just really starting to take hold. We had used a hybrid model before and we weren't necessarily satisfied with that product from another vendor.

We evaluated three products and Pure just really outshines them on the pre-sales. On the financing side of it they were more flexible. Today I would look at it and say that it's much more of an OPEX model, similar to Cloud, and as we try to promote our own on-premise cloud, that continues to be important to us. We want to be transparent about cost all the way back to our customer.

My understanding is that the initial setup is generally easy compared to some other implementations we have done for storage in the past.

Pure's consultants assisted us with the deployment, and we liked those guys. Our pre-sales team is really great to work with and I have never heard any complaints about the
support teams. That's typically an indicator that it was an acceptable service. 

Well, as a personal perspective and from my team's perspective, we've seen a lot of return on investment. It is difficult to quantify monetarily. For example, we had one business unit that used Pure, they were the first, and it was supposed to be an evaluation at the time. We were going to come back later and do further evaluation of storage, but it performed so well that we didn't even think of evaluating again. When we needed to replace the other arrays, we went straight to Pure and life-cycled them into Pure in every segment we have. I think we only have one non-Pure storage array in the environment now, so that speaks volumes when it has worked that well.

In IT, we don't necessarily care about costs. We care about how much of a headache it is to make sure it keeps running and it was a win on both sides. It worked well in all areas for us. The other vendors weren't yet there, as Pure hit the market faster. Maybe the other vendors are catching up but it's going to be harder for us to walk away from Pure now that we have it working well.

Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models.

Prior to choosing this solution, we evaluated Dell EMC. We looked at Nimble but they weren't all-flash at the time so they didn't last very long. I am sure that we probably looked at an HP product but I don't think we ever really wanted to do business with them.

After implementing this solution, we did see the performance impact. The performance had increased, although our customers did not see it. So as IT, on the backend, we could tell that something was happening but it didn't impact our customers. That is big for us because a lot of times, you have outages that IT recognizes that don't impact your customers. Those are the good outages. When you have an outage that impacts a customer then those are the bad days.

VMware greatly benefits our IT organization. We are about ninety-five percent virtualized, and it's made it tremendously easy to support the number of servers that we have with the number of staff that we have. It increases the ability to provision and de-provision. The whole server lifecycle is much simpler than when things used to be hardware only. It allows us to leverage our spending better because we can use the whole platform.

We have been running VMware for fifteen years, but the reason we have Pure there is so that we have a general workload platform there that can meet any and all needs for our customers. Only for very specific customers do we develop anything different. It gives us the power to run pretty much any workload besides maybe AMP-analytics or artificial intelligence, so it allows us to be very flexible. A lot of times, our customers don't know how to ask for the resources. They say "Just make it run". Our response is that we have a tool that is flexible and powerful enough to basically handle any request because our customers sometimes don't know how to size for their applications.

Running VMware on Pure helps because it makes it easy for IT. The virtualization makes it easy for IT to withstand outages, to do refreshes, and to make changes. With Pure, the all-flash gives you the speed to endure bumps in performance and it shields you against performance slips on your network. In the past, with spinning disk technology, you would feel the pain. You customers would experience the pain. We help the customers by not spending so much time dealing with the hardware. It's like "said it and forget it". We set it up, it's running and now we try to spend more time working with our customers to understand what they want to do and less time on the back end just trying to make sure that everything works.

I think we are using a plug-in with vCentre, which allows our system administrators to see into the storage. In the past, they would have to reach out to the storage team to try and understand if there are any performance problems. Now they can see that right away as they are troubleshooting, so instead of having to get two or three seniors together to troubleshoot, we can get one person in vCentre. They can do most of the high-level troubleshooting right away and only if it has developed into something they can't figure out, do they need to engage multiple people. This all allows us to respond quickly to the customer.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider the impact on your employees. You want your employees to be successful so that your business can be successful. Don't look at just cost because any salesman can come in and make a proposal that looks appealing to you, whether it's over a one year period or three year period or otherwise. Especially when you deal with the very large vendors like Dell/EMC, who can bundle so many products together, it makes it easy for you. You have to also consider that this tool was so easy for us to implement that instead of spending three to six months fighting implementation, it was in so quickly that we were on to other efforts. There are a lot more soft costs that would have been there that we were able to avoid.

To summarize, I would suggest that you think more than just about the money and the investment, but the service level. For us, we needed support at international locations, and we took all of that into account.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is virtual machines.

We can now quickly roll out multiple instances of virtual machines or FlashArray storage, more than we could before.

Speed: Things function pretty quickly for our SAN management team. We have seen a good reduction in the amount of total storage space that we're using because of the deduplication.

It runs fast and is easy to use, and our SAN manager likes it.

The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing.

I rated the solution as a nine out of ten because I knew about a disk failure. Other than that, it would probably be a ten. Disk failures are out of anybody's control. 

The stability is good.

It seems highly scalable.

From what I have heard, the technical support has been good.

We went with Dell EMC first. When we had a ton of trouble with it, we dumped it for Pure Storage.

We are fairly new to using it, so we'll have to wait to see what our data usage is over the next year or so.

The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments.

It simplifies storage. Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth.

In our environment, we use Pure Storage FlashArray for VMware storage. We have a few hosts that are used for creating virtual machines (VMs) and provide storage to them. We also use it for providing storage to databases.

Using Pure Storage FlashArray has reduced downtime significantly. With its replication feature, the downtime is almost negligible.

Pure Storage FlashArray is much better than the traditional storage we had. It is good for reducing downtime.

We also have some traditional storage tools that are being used in our environment. We have some servers that are still using traditional storage. I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be much better than traditional storage because it has a GUI interface. It makes the process of allocating the storage much easier, and most activities are automated. It is like clicking a button for every task.

I like its simplicity. It is very user-friendly.

Currently, Pure Storage FlashArray is mostly being used for high-performance environments that have low latency requirements and high workloads. For environments that do not have such high requirements, it could be costly. It would be beneficial to have a separate pricing point for environments with lower performance requirements or less workload.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately 1.5 years.

I have not observed any crashes or issues with Pure Storage FlashArray. It has been running smoothly without any stability problems.

In terms of scalability, we have enough storage allocated through Pure Storage FlashArray, and I believe it would not present any difficulties if more scaling is required.

The quality of support is good. The response time is good. They do not take much time to respond. They ensure someone is always available to address any issues. There is no leniency in their work. I find them good in terms of response.

Positive

I have used some traditional storage tools, such as VPLEX XIO. The difficulty there was that provisioning and reclaiming storage was very tedious and required a lot of human effort. Using Pure Storage FlashArray has made this process much simpler and efficient. I am happy to use it.

When I started using Pure Storage FlashArray, it was already being used within the environment. It was easy to learn and use. It only takes a short time to understand how to use it efficiently.

It does not require much maintenance. They do make frequent updates and the upgrades smooth. We can do the upgrades without any downtime. There is no impact on the environment when the upgrades are made. So far, it has been good.

I have not worked with other Flash solutions. I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be a reliable product. It has features for backup and restore and it integrates well with cloud environments. For high-performance environments, it is cost-efficient and user-friendly.

I have not spent much time using the dashboard that we get with Pure Storage FlashArray, but I know that if we have any performance issues, we can monitor them through the dashboard.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten. I have been using it, and it has been performing well enough. It has helped me with my work. It has made my work much easier, but there is always scope for improvement.