Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We are in the health industry and use this product for block storage. We have VMware hosted on our Pure FlashArrays and we have a Citrix environment. We also have Oracle running as our SQL database. Our VMs run from Pure.

We have also done a couple of PoCs with the Blade solution for using the file share system.

One of the requirements from our developers and test and development team is that from time to time, they want to clone the production environment. We are able to accomplish this within seconds, using a script. This is one of the best parts that I have seen. This feature is not available with other storage solutions.

Performance-wise, it is giving us a very good result.

We are happy with the data compression and deduplication capabilities.

The interface is user-friendly and very easy to use.

Taking a snapshot and cloning data is very easy to do. We can create a script and it will clone the environment. Similarly, we can replicate the environment from one site to another site, and we can restore the environment where we choose.

The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard. For example, I can see all of the utilization and it has port monitoring capabilities. With other storage vendors, multiple tools are required for this, and there is an additional charge.

Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases.

Integration with VMware tools can be improved.

The reporting can be better.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for between five and six years.

This is a very stable product and we haven't had any downtime. We use this product extensively and I have seen that we have a 90% I/O load in our environment.

This is a flexible system that is easy to scale.

We initially purchased two FlashArray systems. One of them was small or midsized, and the other was high-end. Then, later, we started upgrading. As per the Everygreen contract, we get free upgrades. Every three years, we get a new controller upgrade, free of cost.

We have also upgraded our capacity and now everything is on the X series. We have four FlashArrays in total and all of our database users are connected to them. The infrastructure and database teams are directly involved with it.

The response from the technical support team is very good. We have not found any difficulties with their ability or engagement.

We have worked with solutions from HPE, IBM, and Hitachi. We don't work with any of these vendors now. We switched because Pure storage is much easier to manage. It is also more stable and it is very easy to work with.

For example, there is no shutdown procedure. If you want to power down the environment then you just unplug the power and that's it. Once you reconnect the power, it is up. With legacy storage, there is a shutdown procedure. You have to shut down the host, then the SAN switch, then the storage.

With legacy storage, there is also a procedure to bring it up. You have to power up the enclosures, then the controller, then the SAN environment, and then the server. We had to follow a long set of steps with more dependencies.

After a power outage, the storage devices from the other vendors did not always come back online. For example, we implemented a PoC with the IBM FlashSystem and a power outage occurred. The management tool crashed and did not come back up. We had to wait for IBM engineers to come and fix the issue. Whereas, with Pure, when the power came back on, the system came back online immediately.

The other storage systems were not as user-friendly. For example, I had a Hitachi G600 and I wanted to extend the block capacity. I had to spend between 30 minutes and one hour to complete it. It's quite complex. With Pure, that would be taken care of in seconds by going to the console, selecting the volume, and performing the reset.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy.

The day that we received the box, we unpacked it, racked it, and configured it. The next day, we were able to utilize it for production.

Upgrading the hardware, such as performing a controller upgrade, is a seamless process. We are planning to do a major upgrade and it will be done on the fly.

We engaged Pure to assist us with our implementation, and our experience with them was very good. The technical team came onsite for the deployment. If we have any problems then they will return to our site to help.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance.

You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced.

We completed a PoC with most of the leading brands.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that I can recommend Pure. We were the first customer for Pure Storage in the UAE. It's stable, reliable, and you can trust it.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Pure FlashArray is that it's user-friendly, easy to manage, and very flexible. You can scale out and it's easy to upgrade. The upgrade process is not complex and it can be done on the fly, without any disruption.

My main complaint is that the garbage collection mechanism draws heavily on the resources. They have integration with VMware tools, although they can improve it slightly, and I would also like to see some improvements in the reporting.

We have been using it heavily and all of our people are happy with it. This includes the DBA team. Whenever we have a requirement of it, it's very easy and it can be done within seconds. With our previous storage solutions, we had to spend more time looking into problems and they were not user-friendly.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

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. 

We have FlashArray and FlashBlade. We're using FlashArray primarily for VMFS storage tools for the VMware environment.

We have its latest version. It is on-premises, but we operate a private cloud.

We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin.

We do a lot of data replication as well, and the replication features are all easy to set up. The networking controls for setting up interfaces and sub-interfaces are also easy to manage.

We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform. The idea is that they would run a basic NFS or CIF share from the controllers. FlashBlade is the powerhouse for File and Object storage, but if you don't need all that power, a lightweight file function would make FlashArrays more versatile.

The other thing is multiple key support for encryption. The standard solution encrypts the whole array, but we also have certain tenants that use dedicated LUNs. So, it would be nice if, in addition to just supporting the VMware stuff, we could have a per LUN key. Even better would be interfacing with an external Key Management Server (KMS) so that tenants could manage their keys.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It is very stable. There are no stability issues. The bugs we've encountered have been nuisances or minor things, such as how some metrics are reported, but there hasn't been anything that has affected our service.

It is very easy to scale. We have about 4,000 users.

They are very good, but we are a large enough customer. We always deal with the same people, so it's not like we're going into the tier one service desk.

We previously used Dell EqualLogic. It was going under life, and it was just a legacy spinning disk with an SSD cache. So, the main reason for switching was just a tech refresh and an upgrade.

It is very straightforward and very simple.

We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it.

If you need a high-performance storage appliance that is easy to install and maintain, you pretty much can't go wrong.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of 10.

We make use of the solution primarily for storage and DR replication.

We use the most recent stable version, as the latest one is still in a beta stage and too new to be employed.

V-Vault is pretty new and its implementation is superior to that offered by nearly any vendor. It's easier to configure than most others and to import the V-Vault. A separate working machine is not required. 

I can't think of too many features that need improvement. There are no bugs, it just works and it's stable. The graphical interface is perfect and really simple. Someone who understands storage can figure it out within a couple of minutes. There are really no drawbacks.

The only minor issues that come to mind are that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad. Also, the solution should be cheaper.

I've been using the solution for the past 10 years. 

The solution is stable. It's superb. We've done upgrades in which multiple controllers were involved and, while changing from one model of the array to another, a single controller was removed. It is swapped out and a new one introduced. Once it's stable they proceed to the next one. We have never experienced an outage in any of the three companies in which I've employed the solution. Even when the controller went down, the arrays remained up.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has been amazing. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who is not super knowledgeable. The only time I entertained any doubts, whatsoever, is when V-Vaults first came out. Certain people were not very familiar with it, but this was short lived. As we were extremely early adopters of V-Vault, training was provided fairly quickly. While the general tech support was not up to snuff, within a month or two they were all trained. Since then, there have been no issues to report. 

In this company we used an IBM V 7000 and in a previous one, an EMC VMAX.

When comparing the solution to an EMC array or an IBM B7000, both of which I've used, Pure Storage FlashArray is light years ahead of everybody else. I've used a variety of these solutions and many of them are very complicated. 

Only two weeks ago we set up a new solution in a new location that we're building. It's pretty straightforward. There are certain internal matters that only the vendor can handle. But, that's fairly common with most good storage arrays. Besides this, it's really easy. The vendor is really simple to work with. One need only provide him with a list of the IP's he uses for management and replication. 

I did not do the initial storage myself, as I'm in Chicago and it is handled in Omaha, Nebraska. I did have to coordinate everything, however. We were sent a form to fill out with the name and IP use. At this point, the arrival of a technician is scheduled, who asks where the rack should be placed. At this point, it is racked, cabled up and all the initial IP configurations are introduced. This is the point at which the person can take over and start carving out the ones he wants or creating the V-Vault, should he so desire. The process is really simple.

The technician's visit lasted an hour-and-a-half. I've been doing this for a long time. So, perhaps, it took me another hour to configure everything, although the level of involvement can play a factor. We created two only and a V-Vault. Like I said, it's really easy.

The solution absolutely provides us a return on our investment. I've worked with other storage arrays such as one that IBM was promoting to us. It was the company's first attempt at doing an all-flash array and it bore much similarity to Pure Storage FlashArray. It took us a week to get it up and running. We added some development servers and the whole array went down. We lost everything. Such experiences really make one appreciate the stability and thoughtfulness that goes into the engineering and redundancy and scalability of the solution.

You could say that the licensing cost involves a one-time fee, at which point support can be renewed in what I believe to be three-year blocks. As long as a person keeps his support current he can upgrade to the newer version of the array, which can be done once every three to four years.

The solution could be cheaper.

We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee. Something that's really awesome about the solution is that the cost is all-inclusive of the features. There is no need to pay for replication or for any additional features. A person is entitled to employ these when they come out.

In my present company we have around 500 users, but my previous one had closer to 10,000.

In the current company, there are five or six of us that are responsible for overall maintenance and we handle everything. This is in contrast to the company before last in which there were three of us who handled nothing but our four different storage arrays. To be honest, Pure Storage FlashArray does not leave us with much to do. Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup. It frees us up to do real work.

My advice to others is that this solution is the best available. For someone who's not a storage admin, the support is awesome and help is provided gladly for unfamiliar areas. What's nice about the solution is that it very rarely breaks, which vastly cuts down on downtime. There is much redundancy and support is super proactive. This means that if a part goes bad they will generally know about it before we would. It's such a clean, easy to use, great supportive product. It really frees one up to do other things that are more important.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten, although I would give it a score of 50 were this possible. 

We use the private deployment model of this solution. In terms of our cloud provider, we use Azure, we are signing on with AWS, and we'll be using vCloud in the next quarter.

It replaced an earlier tier. It replaced 3PAR Storage and gave us faster performance than the single databases.

VMware has benefited our IT organization because we're 100% VMware, everything is running on it.

We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver was the performance for SQL servers. The joint solution has helped my organization in the way that the databases run faster. 

My organization is taking advantage of the VM integration developed by Pure. We've deployed it. I think it gives the storage administrator some additional insights on metrics. I don't think we're using it to actually manage the data stores. He's getting more insights on metrics. Pure has a VAAI plugin that allows you to manage the data stores. We're not doing that, but I think it gives them heightened analytics in addition to SD-Pure1, a web interface. The integrations have helped in the way that they're another dashboard to have. Somebody could think that the databases are running slow and our database administrator can look at that tool and say, "No, it's unique to your SQL databases, it's not the other VMs on the data stores."

The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad.

A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption.

It's very stable. 

It's scalable. You can hit a point where you fill up enough drives in the shelves. We're at that point now where we've got to expand. We've got to add another shelf.

Their technical support is good.

We have switched to EMC. They gave us more array for less money. 

The initial setup was very simple.

We used an integrator for the deployment.

Our ROI is that we're still running. It's been two years later, and we're still up and running with no downtime.

We looked at HP, NetApp, Pure, and EMC. EMC gave us better-performing storage for a better price. 

I would rate this solution a 7.5 out of ten. To get to a perfect ten they should be more competitive in their pricing. It's expensive. It's premiere storage but there are other premiere providers out there as well that are beating them on price, at least in our case.

The encryption is another area that needs improvement. It was huge. Right now we're at 82% on the Pure array. If they come up with that and pass to read through the more metric encryption, we would probably get 30 or 40% available disk space back, so it's huge.

We use the solution for the vendor support. It's a banking software system. It's an IBM system and it requires some Pure Storage for the backend and SSDs for performance. The vendor supports Pure Storage. 

It saved a lot of space, as far as physical space in our data center. The old sand took up an entire rack and this entire system to about 6U. It's about 1/10th of the space and the power too. You get those power savings and space. The speed has also vastly improved. It's a lot faster than what we had before. We've been running VMware for over 10 years now, so we're all virtualized at this point. The solution has helped us to virtualize everything. 

Pure allows us to upgrade hardware anytime we want and not have to worry about converting everything. It makes everything easier to switch from one vendor to another if we want to. We just recently updated our sand from a Dell EMC. It allowed us to move it seamlessly without having to do anything with the software because it's all VMware.

The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day. 

We're pretty complex. Back there, we've got three or four different systems. It's important that we have something that's easy to manage so we don't have to learn something completely new. This solution offers a GUI that you can just set up and it's ready to go. We had it up and running in three or four hours.

I haven't had any issues with stability. The solution has run since the first day we implemented it and so far has done everything they promised.

We haven't had to scale out yet because the solution is new to our organization, but I have heard it's pretty easy to do. Right now, we have a capacity of about 100 TB. We don't plan to scale right now. When we bought it, we sized it to allow for about two years of growth. So unless something unexpected happens, we should be okay.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed it in our VR site first. We got it set up in VR and made sure everything was working. Then we brought it into production and deployed it on the production side.

We tested it first on the VR site. We personally didn't test a unit, besides our VR site, which was about two weeks. Our vendor-approved it and they used it. We went on the advice of our vendor and got the system.

We implemented the solution with the assistance of a vendor. 

Our experience with that vendor was good. They had everything up for us and there were no problems. Everything worked. They pre-configured it before they brought it out and then they just set it up. 

So far, I'm not sure if there is an ROI, as the solution is brand new. It's too soon to tell.

We have a package deal on the solution because we bought it through a software vendor, so they packaged it with their solution. I don't know what the individual costs would be for the Pure side of it.

It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside.

We looked at two other solutions but we liked that Pure seemed a bit easier to use. That, and we had recommendations.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

VMware was one of the primary drivers when choosing Pure. One of the banking vendors that we use as a primary banking system had limited vendors that they support for storage and Pure was one of them. It was also recommended by a different credit union, which is why we went with them.

I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten.

I would definitely recommend them. They're recommended for a reason. They're not the cheapest, but the performance is, from what I read, the best, and it's easy to manage, so it's worth the extra cost.

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.