Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

SAN solution for Tier 1 storage for VMware, Exchange, SQL, and physical servers; trying to fit as much production load as possible on them.

The speed to deploy or move VMs is ridiculous. By migrating our important systems to the Pure arrays, we have removed any storage issues and questions when there is a problem of "is it the storage?"

The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive. The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size.

• Ease of setup
• Migration to it
• Upgrading
• Support responsiveness
• Kick-butt mobile app
• On box analytics and vCenter plug-in
• The ease of creating a snapshot for testing or recovery.

I cannot stress enough the stability, speed, and awesome deduplication and compression rates. The amount of data we have moved to it has allowed us to remove units four times the size. The mobile app is kick-butt and support has been topnotch.

Mainly, just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI.

None.

No issues.

It has been great; easy to work with to resolve cases or perform upgrades.

Yes, plainly put, it sucked and we wanted to get to a solution that was fast, easy to maintain, and reliable.

We had issues with it not handling the load and could never trust that it was serving data fast enough to not be causing issues.

Easy as pie.

In-house.

• Speed
• Time saved in management
• Availability
• No fingers pointing at storage as an issue.

It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for. I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue.

We looked at Nimble and EMC.

I never have to worry about its performance impacting the firm. It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.

I had high expectations and they have met or exceeded each one of them. It was an exciting day when I finally got them up and running.

We have a contract with Pure Storage, and we use it for VMware and database server storage provisioning.

We have multiple applications in the environment, and we are provisioning from Pure Storage.

The single pane of glass is important for us because we can view all the array details in one place. We can see the details about the capacity, utilized space, available or free space, alerts, and performance in one place. This overview is important.

It did decrease the storage footprint compared to other models and storage, but I do not have the metrics.

It helps to reduce the downtime.

We are not using any replication features. We only have storage provisioning, so the provisioning feature is good. The compression and deduplication are good.

It does not require much improvement. They can maybe improve the file services. The focus is on block storage. They can also include file services such as NAS shares and CIFS shares. There should be provisioning of the file shares from a unified array.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for one year.

There is no lagging or crashing. It is quite stable.

It is good in terms of scalability. We can scale up to a higher number.

I have interacted with their technical support. They were good at providing support when I requested.

Positive

We have different flash array systems from HPE GreenLake. Pure Storage is better than the HPE GreenLake flash array. Performance-wise, Pure Storage is better. The cost of Pure Storage might be high, but I am not sure.

It is on-prem. I do not know about its initial deployment because I was not there at the time of deployment. So, I do not know if its benefits could be realized immediately after the deployment. However, it has been effective in terms of utilization and capacity. We are now planning for different storage and doing the migration from Pure Storage to others because of the EOC limit that we have.

In terms of maintenance, there are firmware updates. We have to schedule a change window and then update the firmware.

It is good. Working with it is easy. Provisioning is smooth and good. The GUI and everything else is good. You can just do training with Pure Storage and get on with your storage tasks.

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

It's a very simple tool to use with extremely low latency and high performance.

Pure Storage FlashArray has improved the performance of applications.

Feature-wise, the solution provides direct flash storage.

Improvement-wise, Pure Storage FlashArray must support real-time incidents. I think that Pure Storage should improve its pricing.

Currently, the solution fails to support file screening. I want to see the solution supporting file screening in the future.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for four years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. Presently, five people in my company use the tool.

I rate the solution's technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process was straightforward.

My company saw a return on investment using the solution as it helped us reduce the time it took to access applications and reduced the space required in our data center.

Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive.

When considering the use of this solution, I suggest evaluating the price and taking into account its performance and potential to reduce the space in the data center. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

At the moment, we're migrating our complete infrastructure onto Pure Storage. All of our storage is going onto it.

We are using its latest version.

I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is.

Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations. 

In terms of features, we are really happy with it. We haven't had it long enough to give feedback on that.

I have been using this solution for a year now.

So far, it has been brilliant. We haven't really had it long enough to judge it.

It seems pretty good, but we haven't really tested it.

We have about a hundred users. We will possibly increase its usage. It will be done slowly.

It has been really easy to use. Their support has been very helpful.

We were using another solution. We switched because it was very old, and we were looking at something that was an SSD. 

I was not involved in the initial setup. For its deployment, we had a couple of engineers.

It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure.

We evaluated Pure and NetApp, and we eventually went with Pure. A positive point with NetApp was the price.

If it's financially viable for you and you can afford it, it's worth it.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We use the private on-premise deployment model. Our primary use case of this solution is for virtual machines. We just use it as storage for our vCenter environment.

It has improved my organization in the way that we have high reliability and faster access to our data.

It has improved our IT organization in the way that we are able to provide systems to our customers quickly and provide high availability and reliability for their applications. 

We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver was speed. The joint solution has helped our organization through speed of delivery and speed of applications.

The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution. 

In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption.

It's highly stable. It's one of our biggest successes. 

It's been really easy to expand storage with no downtime. It's one of the things we like about it. 

Their technical support is great. 

We knew we needed to switch to this solution because the industry is going away from spinning disks. We were on spinning disks, and the whole industry is going away from that. 

We are still using IBM but we are not happy with it. IBM has taken old technology and tried to make it new. Pure has started from the ground up and built it.

The integration was straightforward. 

Pure Storage did the integration for us. 

Our costs are around $100,000.

We also evaluated Nimble, EMC, and HPE 3PAR. We ended up going with Pure because of the architecture, speed, and support.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for its reliability, speed, and support. The support is awesome.

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.

We use our Pure Storage FlashArray system for all storage allocations and management tasks, accessed through its standard graphical user interface.

My team is responsible for operating and maintaining our storage applications, including hardware replacement and vendor coordination with Pure Storage. The implementation of Pure Storage FlashArray has been successful due to its reliability and user-friendly interface, which has minimized disruptions and allowed for efficient workload management.

Pure Storage FlashArray's single pane of glass simplifies administration, particularly for testing, offering benefits for all users.

The system's wide range of configuration options allows for the use of various products and adaptable cost structures for different storage scenarios. Pure Storage also presented opportunities for business growth and expanded access, with the primary benefits being its performance and user-friendly interface.

Pure Storage FlashArray simplifies maintenance and management with its intuitive GUI, making storage allocation and other processes easy to understand, even for beginners. This ease of use is a significant benefit throughout the entire implementation process.

From my limited experience with Pure Storage FlashArray, I haven't encountered any significant areas needing improvement. However, enhanced documentation and beginner-friendly guidelines would benefit users with less configuration experience.

I have been using it for almost three years.

I would rate the stability of Pure Storage FlashArray eight out of ten.

Pure Storage offers a wide range of configurable products that can help expand our infrastructure to suit various scenarios, providing business growth opportunities.

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

Customer service is quite good.

Positive

At the time we were moving to Pure Storage FlashArray, we were also  using  vendors like Dell EMC and Hitachi. I'm not clear why the business chose Pure Storage as well for the storage deployment, as I am more into the administrative and supporting side.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray eight out of ten.

We have deployed Pure Storage FlashArray in various data centers across multiple countries and testing environments. We have over 1,000 users in our organization.

Pure Storage FlashArray requires maintenance to avoid issues.

I recommend Pure Storage FlashArray due to its simplicity and attractive features. There's no particular reason not to recommend it.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray for databases.

Pure Storage FlashArray has helped our organization because it effectively (price/performance) stores databases and we do not need an every day/detailed  administration.

The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides.

The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better. 
I don't think NEW features are needed. And I want to point out that the Pure team regularly updates the functionality.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately three years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is highly stable. If we experience any issues the support resolves the issue immediately.

The scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray is good. We are able to upgrade changing disks and controllers and it is simple to do.

The technical support from Pure Storage FlashArray is perfect. If we have some trouble or we need to change something, we need to ask for support and they are helpful and answered immediately. 

I rate the technical support from Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of five.

Positive

I previously used IBM, HDS, LSI Storages.

The initial setup of Pure Storage FlashArray was simple. The process took approximately one week. 

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves and when we had some issues we contacted the support for assistance.

All vendor support engineers are good qualified. In case of escalation it was quick and effective.

The cost of the array includes the cost of the basic functionality. The Evergreen support includes free upgrades. This is not an inexpensive solution, you need to understand the value of your data before you buy it.

We evaluated Dell, IBM, HP, and Huawei solutions before choosing Pure Storage FlashArray, which was the best (3 years ago!).

We are wanting to expand and we are looking at other solutions currently, such as Huawei, which is a very good solution from China. However, the documentation can be difficult to understand and their support was not very good but they successfully try to improve it now.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.