Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

We use it for block storage workloads. We don't use a lot of the features on it.

It has reduced provisioning time. There is ease of management.

The availability and ease of use are the big features. 

Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see.

I have been working with this solution for about three years.

It has been really stable.

That's the only feature that isn't as good. It doesn't scale as large as some of the competitors, but they have started to make them bigger.

We probably have a dozen or so admins who use it, including me. I take care of its maintenance. It is pretty light in terms of maintenance.

It is being used extensively. We'll be increasing its usage. I'm on the networking side. Our IT group is a pretty heavy user too. Both of us will be increasing its usage, but their scale is a little bit bigger than ours.

I would rate them really high. On a scale of one to five, I'd give them a four.

Dell EMC and NetApp would be the two big ones that we used before. We switched because of the cost and the ease of use. Those are the two big ones. In terms of the cost, a lot of it was just introducing a second vendor.

Its setup was really straightforward. It took about half a day. It is pretty quick. All the cabling and facility stuff is usually the longest part.

We had the vendor do most of it. It is like a team, and there is usually one installer guy. Our experience with them was great. Our account team with them is really good. 

Its setup is easier than you think. It is a pretty straightforward deployment.

They have been correcting a couple of things. One of them was that they didn't really scale that large. So, we had to deploy a lot of arrays. They have started to make them bigger now. In addition, until recently, they didn't do a file on the FlashArray. Now, you can share files on it. They recently implemented that, but we haven't tried it yet.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It does everything we wanted to do.

We use it as reliable storage.

The virtual machines hosted on this storage are much faster. It boots so quickly that it is almost inconvenient.

The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially.

Reliability and performance are its most valuable feature.

Its ability to simplify storage is great.

I look at the performance metrics periodically, which are spectacular.

The stability is tremendous.

The scalability is great.

The technical support is great.

We were previously using a NAS, and it was not performing.

The initial setup was straightforward. I had done the preparation first. I had a good relationship with the presales engineer. It went as expected.

We did use an integrator for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.

We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI.

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature.

It is an excellent choice, if you can afford it.

We evaluated Tegile, Dell EMC, and Pure Storage. We chose Pure Storage for performance and cost reasons.

We have integrated the solution with VMware and vCenter. It went well.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression works fine.

I don't have the need for the predictive performance analytics.

The company seems to be engineering oriented, and I appreciate that.

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.

Anytime that you need fast storage. 

The back-end data reporting for Pure Storage is phenomenal. The data that you can see on the performance of your customers' array, so you can be proactive about upgrades or enhancements, and is a phenomenal tool to have access to as a partner. I haven't seen this type of stuff out of anything of the other storage systems.

Pure Storage has a lot of statistics which help out with capacity planning.

As a partner administrating the solution, the back-end reporting has positively affected the time involved in managing and administrating.

Performance is its most valuable feature. There is nobody else who is coming close, not that I have seen. 

They are on the money with the predictive performance analytics. They claim high performance, and they do have it.

There are things that they are doing with the interface all the time to make it better. It is not the easiest to work with, but it is getting close. As far as interfaces, I always liked Nimble's interface the best. Though, Nimble's interface has been stuck in the mud for the last three to four years since HPE took them over. There hasn't been a whole lot of changes to Nimble. Whereas, Pure Storage has been continuing to improve, which is pretty good. It is not top of the market, but it is getting there.

The UI reporting is adequate. 

The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier.

I can't think of a time I've had a problem with a Pure Storage array. You might get drive fail once in a while, but it has never been a problem. Usually, that will get reported in the partner dashboard and we will get an alert. Pure Storage will also get an alert. 

Nimble used to be the best if you had a part fail. It would be on your doorstep the next morning. It just showed up, every time. No questions. They have lost some of that with HPE. 

Pure Storage is still pretty good. I haven't heard any customers tell me that they just had a part just show up without even knowing anything was down, like I used to hear about with Nimble. However, usually they will get some type of an alert from Pure Storage, such as, "Looks like you lost a drive. Do you want us to send someone out or a power supply?" Then, get it out.

They are at least 30 percent faster than their closest competitor. It depends always on the differences on how you scale. I had customers get NetApp, who couldn't get anything out of it. They finally added another storage shelf and started getting some decent numbers. Well, instead of adding a couple more storage shelves, I could do that with one Pure Storage array. What if I don't need that much storage and don't want to have five shelves? You don't need that with Pure Storage, because one shelf will strain.

I don't have any massive Pure Storage installs. Probably the biggest ones that I have been apart of are five or six arrays.

I have at least three customers who have had other stores solutions and installed Pure Storage. There is no comparison. Their old storage solutions have now been relegated to archive, or they have ripped them out.

The initial setup can be challenging. If everything works the way it a supposed to, which it often does, then it is fine. However, when your encounter problems and you have to get into those local admin accounts, that can be a pain. You have to call tech, they need to look up what the password is, then send it to you, which can be a pain.

I would like to see a bit different setup. It would be nice if they have something where you can plug into the thing and see an HTTPS address, like with a bench setup. A couple of other vendors has upped their own Layer 2 protocol for discovery. As long as you are on the same network segment, it pops right up  and you can do the base config, then you are ready to log into it in about five minutes. Pure Storage's process is not bad, but it could still be better.

I have never had a problem with a firmware or controller update.

With the pricing, they have, it is pretty competitive to spinning disk.

I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it.

The competing vendors are NetApp, Nimble, and IBM. I don't run into a lot of Dell EMC. Customers pick Pure Storage for performance.

There is no comparison performance-wise. I also install Nimble for storage, and Nimble has flash and all-flash, as well. However, if you are looking at the performance numbers, these Pure Storage is just killing it.

I have integrated the solution with vCenter. There is nothing remarkable about it. It works. I have no complaints.

I think all vendors have a pretty decent platform for inline deduplication and compression. There are always little differences here and there, but I haven't seen anything remarkable with Pure Storage.

It is our core storage.

The manageability: Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators.

It has been nice to be able to see capacity and project usage. That has been helpful.

With the Pure1 analytics, we are able to identify whether the hardware that we are using today will meet our needs for tomorrow. That is probably the biggest thing for us. Also, the analytics has been great.

Manageability is its most valuable feature.

It is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good. We don't have to be experts in managing the storage. We can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product.

It has strong statistics and historical metrics with Pure1. Therefore, it has been everything that we have needed out of a platform.

We have undergone upgrades of controllers with mixed results. Some have gone well, and some have not gone so well.

We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals.

It has been stable. We haven't had any issues with stability. Though, when we have had issues, we have leveraged support and not experienced issues.

It is highly scalable. In particular, with the ability to view analytics and some of capacity planning, that helps us in this regard as well.

The technical support is strong and responsive. I would say response is probably the most important. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We worked with a field engineer on the deployment. Prerequisites and those kinds of things were shared and identified ahead of time. There wasn't a whole lot of guesswork.

The solution has reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage, which is one of its primary appeals. We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression work as advertised. I haven't had any issues with them.

We have used the predictive performance analytics. It has worked for us.

Biggest lesson learned: Having a strong support function is critical, especially when you're depending on it on an ongoing basis for maintenance and administration. 

The primary use case is storage for payment platforms.

We don't have anymore performance issues, which is good. 

The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage.

Performance and support quality.

We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions.

We have seen through time that it is perfectly stable. It has aged well. We were an early adopter in our company.

The scalability is very modular. When you need more storage or power, you change one brick, and you don't have to go through a long process.

Pure Storage has proven to be proactive with support. Even when we have small problems, they open a support case before we even notify them that there has been an actual issue.

We receive good quality of support from the first line of support, so we don't need to escalate or wait through a long process.

We clearly have seen the difference between having storage on Dell EMC or NetApp versus what we have now on Pure Storage. The investment was a clear win for us.

The initial setup was very simple. It's basically a few cables with two plugs. Plug it in, and it is that easy.

We did the installation in-house.

We have seen reduction in total cost of ownership.

We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products.

If you have doubts, do a proof of concept. Pure Storage is very happy to provide you with storage ahead of time that you can test for a couple of months. This way, you can test the performance and bugs, which makes it easier to sell to your company.

Everything is embedded that is something managed from end-to-end by Pure Storage. This is something really easy for us. We don't have to work with integration and the different subcomponent of the storage that we would have to use if it was SSD.

We are at about 3.0 to 4.0 in terms of data reduction.

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.