Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

We use it just for test purposes in our organization.

Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool. We don't use any special features in our organization.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for about six years. Also, I am using Pure Storage FA-420. I am a customer of the solution.

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

I can't comment on the solution's scalability since we use it in a test environment. From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable. It is only me who is using the solution in our company.

The solution's initial setup process was easy. It may look like a lot of work, but it is easy.

The solution is expensive.

It is an old storage we use for testing, and our production storage is IBM. It will be five years old since we are using the solution. We are also planning to buy a new storage solution. So, we are looking out into the market to see what we can buy.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it since I trust it is a great storage solution.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

This product is for database usage and consolidating performance.

The Pure Storage FlashArray provides us with faster data access. Our processing time is faster for tasks that used to take a long time before. Now, it's a lot quicker and more responsive.

The low latency and the performance, in general, are very good.

The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity.

Replication and active-active features are available.

The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in. For what the peak says, I'm very happy with it. However, if you compare it to similar devices with multiple controllers that are scaled-out, it's not a true active-active.

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

Over the past year that we have been using it, the stability has been good. That said, we're still testing it. It is very low maintenance; on the Pure side, they don't have much involvement apart from a bit of monitoring.

We've not had to increase the capacity yet but it does have the flexibility to scale if we need to. At this point, we have 25,000 end-users and we don't expect that to increase. Our user base is fairly static.

We have been in contact with technical support a couple of times. They are quick to respond and we are very happy with the customer support team.

The support plan makes it simple to plan ahead.

We have used other flash arrays in the past.

This initial setup is very straightforward. A couple of hours on-site is all that was needed for the engineer to complete it. It took that long to make sure that everything was in place and available.

Overall, it is very simple.

For the deployment, we didn't need many people but we do have a wider storage team that deals with it.

Installation was included with the purchase. We didn't do it ourselves.

There are no licensing fees aside from the support. The support plan is simple and quite easy to understand, and it covers issues such as hardware failures.

We evaluated all of the options that were presented to us at the time, and Pure won.

Feature-wise, there's nothing specific that is lacking for us at the moment. The features that are there now are really what we need.

Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is to run SAP applications on top of the flash solutions.

SAP is very important to our business. It's a key function. We are running ERP and CRM systems. Our systems run on-premise.

Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy.

The most valuable feature is the performance of Pure Storage underneath and that many applications, which are already integrated with it. I can use the system applications, e.g., for backup restore. Therefore, I don't need to buy them in addition to the product, as they are already part of the solution.

It helps to simplify storage, especially because we can do in-place upgrades and can grow on demand. I can pay on demand, so it helps me to simplify the usage of the storage.

It is super stable.

It has even improved the performance of SAP HANA.

The scalability is already there in both directions. You can scale the storage, as well as the compute.

The technical support comes out of one single stop. It is very helpful to have one single number to contact.

The initial setup was straightforward and simple.

Our HANA installation was a greenfield. So, we started the Pure Storage system with HANA.

We used a partner (integrator) for the deployment. We used Tech Data. Everything was based on design guides and reference architecture, our experience was very good.

There is some benefit in regard to total cost of ownership, because it's a condensed system. It saves a lot of space in the data center, saving power.

Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs.

I am pretty happy with the solution, as it is currently.

Provides awesome performance, and it's been able to shrink all of our data center from two-and-a-half racks to one rack and give better performance with SSD drives versus spinning disk drives. It has saved overall costs from our heat and power within our data center where we're now just powering up a 3U device.

More than five years.

It's very stable. We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade.

Scalability is great. Pure's model is adding more disk space to it and then getting a better controller to make sure you are going to stay with your performance. It's a wonderful model.

We have our dedicated resources that we have reached out to, but because there have really been no issues with anything, we're not on the phone with them constantly. Whenever we have had an issue or question, someone is always very responsive. They even come onsite for major issues, such as an NOS upgrade, just to hand-walk us through what we're doing.

Deployment was easy. I didn't do it. I am not a technical guy, but my team was able to get it deployed and then connected to our ESX environment within two hours.

Like anything, when you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it. But what you are getting for it, you are definitely seeing a good ROI.

We considered other options. I have used the others, EMC and NetApp, etc. We have looked at all of the platforms, and to see what Pure was able to do within a PoC environment meant that we never turned back our PoC environment. We just bought it and kept running with it. It was an amazing product based on what we had seen out there in the market.

I would definitely recommend it to colleagues. I have not only used it where I am currently at, but I have also used it at other locations before. I have recommended it to partners, and colleagues that I have worked with in the past, across the state of California.

It has allowed us increased performance along with massive consolidation of space and power. We went from a two cabinet EMC VMAX to a 12U racked system. Very impressive.

Compared to Pure Storage, the IBM V7000 has not improved anything yet within our environment.

The Pure Storage system is, of course, very fast and completely redundant. All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are performed online with no impact. The Pure Storage customer service is by far the best part of the product and organization.

We have found that the NAS portion of the software has limitations. For example, the number of Filesystems is limited, which is not the case on the EMC VNX. 

The service team assigned to the project has good, hard-working people, but we are not receiving the kind of care we should receive to get the project done.

As for IBM, they could increase the maximum storage capacity so more disk shelves can be added.

There have been no issues with the stability of the Pure Storage solution. By contrast, with IBM we have had performance and spiking issues for which IBM applied a workaround patch.

There have been no issues with the scalability for either Pure or IBM.

Customer Service:

10/10 for Pure Storage.

6/10 for IBM.

Technical Support:

Pure Storage is excellent, while IBM is only average.

The IBM V7000 was bought for just NAS and secondary storage and for use as storage for our AS/400 platform. We switched to Pure Storage because of the way the system performs and the fact that it does everything in 32K sizing. The IOPS are high and the support and customer service are exceptional.

Setting up the Pure Storage solutions was simple. It took 45 minutes to rack it and get it online. The IBM system was also fairly simple, taking about two hours to rack and get online.

Both devices were installed through one of our partners who did a good job.

We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both.

We evaluated EMC (which we already had), Dell, and HP.

The Pure Storage FlashArray is very good. Everything that Pure Storage told me is exactly what we have found to be true. It is the best production and implementation experience I have ever had.

Regarding IBM, the sales team was great, as was the technical team. I now feel that EMC VNX and NetApp are both better NAS systems. If I had to do it over again, I would stay with the EMC VNX for NAS.

We have not had a good experience with the IBM device. The installation and service were very good. However, the services to help us migrate our NAS data from an existing EMC VNX system have failed once already due to ACL permissions issues, specifically on how the V7000 NAS works. I have had to involved IBM Global Support by actually contacting high-level VPs. As of January 26, 2016, we have not successfully migrated our NAS data.

Pure Storage FlashArray is applicable for virtual environments, e.g. CSS, VR, and YouTube platforms. It's an NVMe data storage platform.

One of the things I like about Pure Storage FlashArray is that it has a high data reduction average, e.g. 4.5.

Pure Storage FlashArray is also advantageous for data centers in terms of rack space for maximum capacity.

Many high-end platforms from other vendors like Dell EMC or Hitachi, their backend has Active/Active architecture, unlike Pure Storage FlashArray which doesn't utilize an Active/Active architecture on the backend. Instead, it has an Active/Passive architecture. Its frontend is Active/Active, but its backend is not. I see this as a disadvantage of this product.

The highest storage capacity of Pure Storage FlashArray is the petabyte, and it should be expanded. This is what I'd like to see in the next release.

This product is stable. It's working very well. Our elementary response time is 0.5 milliseconds, and with 100,000 IOPS in our virtual environments.

The technical support for Pure Storage FlashArray is good. Support is quick and responsible. We get quick responses from the team.

The initial setup for Pure Storage FlashArray was easy. It was completed within one hour.

Pure Storage FlashArray was implemented by a local product solutions team.

I'm working for a telecommunication company, and we use different products.

We have five people in our company working with this product.

My advice to people who want to implement Pure Storage FlashArray is that it's a good NVMe solution, has a lower response time, and also good for entry-level storage purposes, e.g. small offices, small to medium-sized business, etc. It's also easy to use, e.g. comparable to an iPhone in terms of ease of use. This solution also works very well on the Active/Active version, for combining two storage.

I'm giving Pure Storage FlashArray a score of nine out of ten.