Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

All of our production, development, and workloads run on it.

We were previously a legacy storage system. After moving to Pure, the stability and performance both dramatically improved. 

We don't have to worry about storage anymore. Previously, we had to babysit our storage system, doing things like managing the volumes, looking at the capacity, predicting when would we run out of space, and replication work. All of those created a lot of challenges with the previous system. Since moving to Pure, we no longer have to worry. We defined the policies once, and things mostly work.

Pure Storage simplifies the management, overall.

Flash is the most valuable feature.

Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular, where you can keep replacing components. That was definitely new several years ago. I would bet competitors are doing it now as well, but when they started, it was an innovation.

The real need that we have is around other backups. Obviously, it has its own snapshot concept but beyond that, having a separate backup system in the Pure ecosystem itself, in that space, would make it all integrated within a single organization and we wouldn't have to deal with multiple companies. That's an area where we thought Flash Blade could serve our needs, but it seems it can't.

Also, for one of our systems, the data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we moved over is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times. Because of that, we now need more storage. We are going to have to use the guaranty that they provide when you purchase: If it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs, then they will provide extra storage.

The stability, in general, has been perfect. 

The reason I gave a nine, not a ten, is the upgrades. With most upgrades we have had some kind of problem. They haven't been as smooth as they should have been.

The latest problem with which we are currently dealing, literally today, is that after the latest upgrade, the utilization went up, especially because of the systems space, which is consuming much more than it should. The duplication is not happening on time. Pure acts like it is a bug and that they have a new version with a fix for it. It goes into a cycle often: You keep upgrading and that new upgrade may have some other problem.

That's the primary worry regarding stability. Otherwise, the system works.

Technical support is good, but not as good as we would like. We have to get our Pure account team involved often, and they are stars. That always solves the problem. Support is available 24/7, but sometimes they're not as detail-oriented as we would like in investigating problems.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We recently added two more areas to our ecosystem and the set up was pretty good.

We used a reseller, SHI. Our experience with them was good.

Pure is expensive. But it comes with features so you get what you pay for. It's expensive compared to our old storage systems, but that is balanced by the reduction in the amount of effort human effort involved in& babysitting the storage system. So if you factor in everything, I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us, at least.

You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works. So I would really recommend using Pure Storage.

It does everything they say it will do:

• It's very cost-effective compared to other big players.
• Adding storage to it after we bought it was not a shocking cost surprise.
• It integrates very well with VMware as we're using Site Recovery Manager from VMware.
• It's also tiny, it doesn't consume very much space. We're saving power and space in the data center. 
• It's really easy for us to manage.

I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason. I have other solutions that work, but I would use it if they had a little bit more fault-tolerance or if somebody explained to me that it's better than I think it is.

It's very stable.

Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems. They helped us figure out how to fix them, helped us coordinate. They did not need to do that. It's just stellar support.

They're taking really good care of us. Their support is on the ball. They're proactive.

We were using HPE 3PAR, which we liked, but this is much more cost-effective.

We own five Pure arrays. The salesperson came in and set it up for us every time. Note that it was the salesperson who was able to set them up for us.

I would definitely recommend this product to a colleague.

Our primary use case of this solution is for storage. We use it to ensure better application performance and to improve the user experience of the application. The cross-storage appliance improves the overall application experience. We have been using this solution as an on-premise solution. It has been useful for our critical applications.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that in the past we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain. 

We like that there isn't a steep learning curve and it is easy to learn how to navigate. It's also quite scalable and easy to implement.

I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS.

We see a lot of reliability coming from Pure Storage, mainly from the fact that over one and a half years, I haven't seen any disc failure especially compared to NetApp.

We use VMware but we have migrated most of the VM load to AWS. We also have Oracle ERP data warehouse and our internal lifecycle management system that is being stored on their storage. It's able to handle the entire load.

Technical support is good. I get pre-preemptive notices from Pure Storage support. They will notify me to check certain parts because there may be a possibility of an issue arising with those parts. I'll know to take a look at the data center and from there I will be able to tell whether or not it's a false alarm or it's an issue that's about to arise. The pre-emptive warning is helpful for us. 

We also considered Hitachi Storage and NetApp. Our decision was ultimately based on two factors: simplicity of the usage and overall performance. We ended up choosing this specific product because we had good support from the application team and we liked the performance coming from the product itself. 

I would rate this solution an eight because it is very reliable in the way that it fulfills its key objective of being performance driven.

If you're considering this or a similar product I would advise you to do a PoC to make sure that this solution actually fits into your environment. For us, we go through a cycle of about three months to do the evaluations across our different storage. One of the greatest challenges that our company had was that our company was not using Pure Storage and they were quite skeptical of the solution. With the results of the PoC, we proved to them that it is something that is going to be very useful for our business.

We use Pure Storage for most of our databases, as well as for other application binaries.

Our biggest database is the Oracle ERP. Right now, it is around nine terabytes. It has grown from four terabytes in the last five to six years. Initially, we were worried because most of our functions and processes got slower. We thought we might have to add more  infrastructure and upscale it from a CPU perspective. Then, we moved to Pure Storage, and we suddenly saw some of the processes, which were running slowly, sped up automatically.

We have also seen a reduction in the latency.

The most interesting feature is the speed at which it executes I/O. After moving to Pure Storage, I have noticed that our databases are considerably faster.

Our performance has improved by at least four times.

The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything. We have shared APPL_TOP on our Oracle ERP, which would require an NFS type of storage. So, we had to resort to building our own NFS VM, then attach Pure Storage to it, and have it go through the server. This didn't really serve our purpose, as it's a lot slower because it's now going through a VM installer NFS server.

While we know Pure Storage supports snapshots, we haven't been able to implement databases or replication using them.

It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it.

It looks like it is scaling pretty well.

I have not used the tech support.

We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Use Pure Storage for databases. I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases.

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for data protection. We keep our backup data on the solution.

The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management.

Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately one year.

The stability of Pure Storage FlashArray has been stable.

We have had some issues with Pure Storage FlashArray capacity. We were guaranteed capacity which we did not receive.

The solution is scalable, all storage solutions are scalable.

We do not have end users of this solution, but all of our data from the company is going to the Pure Storage FlashArray.

We plan to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

The support from Pure Storage FlashArray is very good.

The initial setup of Pure Storage FlashArray is quick and was not a difficult process.

We used the reseller to do the implementation of Pure Storage FlashArray. It took one engineer from the reseller and one engineer from my team.

We have approximately 10 users who are managing Pure Storage FlashArray.

Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a seven out of ten.

Pure Storage Flash Array is used for data storage.

Pure Storage Flash Array has helped my organization by having the ability to have access to our data immediately.

The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring. 

The price of the solution can improve.

I have been using Pure Storage Flash Array for approximately seven years.

Pure Storage Flash Array is highly stable.

The scalability of the Pure Storage Flash Array is good and it is easy to do.

We have approximately 2,000 users in my enterprise that are using the solution. The whole company is using the solution.

The support from Pure Storage Flash Array is amazing. I have never seen a vendor support a product this well. They knew challenges even before my team was able to figure them out.

We were using another solution previously and we switch to Pure Storage Flash Array because we wanted the latest and greatest solution.

The initial setup of the Pure Storage Flash Array was of a medium range of difficulty. It was not easy or difficult. The full deployment was not very difficult.

I rate the initial setup of the Pure Storage Flash Array a two out of five.

We use a consultant from Pure for the implementation of the Pure Storage Flash Array.

We have seen a return on investment from using Pure Storage Flash Array.

The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contact clarity. We went with the Evergreen plan and I don't have clarity on what am I supposed to pay each year or every three years. There was not much contract clarity.

We evaluated every solution at the time before we chose Pure Storage Flash Array.

My advice to others is to evaluate the Pure Storage Flash Array. Do a proof of concept if you can it is a fantastic solution.

I rate Pure Storage Flash Array a ten out of ten.

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.

The Pure Storage array houses our entire production environment. Production consists of VMware 5.5 on three HPE DL360 G7 hosts.

I don't really need to worry about storage anymore. I can focus on more critical issues. I log into the array interface maybe once every month to see what my deduplication ratio is and that is about it. 

It is difficult to say what features are valuable. It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore. 

I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. Sure, it is great to see usage, trends, latency, and all the common stuff. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware.