Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

With Pure Storage FlashArray we have been able to deploy several thousand VDI servers, virtual machines, very quickly and efficiently. We were also are able to virtualize 80% of our workload, and we are planning to get 90 to 94% of our workload virtual. That's a huge reduction in the cost of hardware.

What I like most about this solution is that it is simple to bring in, install, and get it going. You can get it installed in a few days.

What's more, the compression ratio that we're getting is that our database portion is pretty high, so it saves a lot of money.

We have had no issues with the stability so far.

The solution is very scalable because it is fairly smooth and easy to upgrade. 

The technical support has been pretty good. The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing.

Pure was the first solution we used and now we use a couple more. One of them is an EMC product and then we also have a new start-up called Vector, so we currently use three solutions.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and the integration was very easy to do. There were no hidden features and the GUI was very straightforward. 

Traditionally we have been buying massive storing arrays from EMC and from Hitachi, but most of them were built for very high tier applications. For VDI with your desktop, you really don't need that so it was easier for us to go for an array that used high-speed devices, providing Hadoop capabilities because the nature of your desktops are literally the same. So we needed to look at newer technology, and this really was one of the first ones to be there, and it was very popular. We did a study on the market and found that VR was one of the leaders in this space, so we brought them in.

We ran into some issues with the program at first and we had to work around those issues to fix our problems. So at the end of the day, it wasn't really a smooth ride. It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure. That's why I would give it an eight or a nine out of ten. But definitely not a 10.

We use the solution on-premises and each array has a different use case. We have VDI, SQL, and General and the program provide better integration between the management and visibility of the solution. Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integration developed by Parrot and this gives us a lower level administrative access to more admins that don't have a background in storage.

VMware is extremely beneficial to our IT organization because we can scale as we increase our usage.

The solution has great efficiencies because it has scalability. It also becomes the core between our synergy of all our platform systems across the United States.

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption.

The solution is rock solid. Very stable.

The scalability of the solution is extremely costly.

The technical support is fair and the team was helpful.

We previously used Hitachi, 3PAR, and HP but we had performance limitations.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on.

An initial return on investment is easily visible. But scalability to the cost doesn't really show the investment costs. We're investing too heavy on the cost without seeing the value of the array or the efficiencies.

I am not sure what the costs for the solution are but it is embedded in the solution support.

I rate this solution eight out of ten because I saw a lot of growth beyond the performance capabilities. I do, however, want to see improved costs, integration, and encryption. Those are the big ones.

My advice to others would be to use your pre-sale targets as the layouts, as well as all your mitigated controls and requirements. Then forecast the capacity and performance metrics prior to your purchase.

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.

Our primary use case of this solution is for Citrix. 

We use the on-premise deployment model. 

Our previous SAN storage environment never performed with the same levels as this does. The performance levels and the storage have improved my organization. 

It has benefited our IT organization because we're a 95% virtualized environment and we're able to allocate resources as needed and manage our whole infrastructure that way.

We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver for this was to isolate our Citrix environment from the general SAN storage board.

The joint solution has benefited my organization in the way that it isolates it, giving peak performance and does not share it with other environments that have any infrastructures or competing resources.

The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution. 

It has been very reliable. 

We have had no issues with scaling up to whatever demands that we have.

I haven't had a lot of direct interaction with their support but VMware is very good.

We replaced another Legacy Solution. We wanted to maintain its isolated capabilities.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We haven't seen ROI. 

We evaluated EMC and HP.  

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The storage has been very good. I don't know that it's a large enough deployment across the boards to know how it would fit in the rest of the enterprise. 

We use it as our primary application driver for all of storage reasons in our data center for both our corporate and production environments.

We just did all-flash, and all-flash is better than anything disk related.

This was our first all-flash storage enclosure, so we saw huge boost in performance for all of our servers. It has definitely helped us in terms of performance, which is what we needed it for.

We don't have to build any type of storage device, which takes a long time for an IT guy to do. For storage, this makes it much easier when it is set up, because it can be done almost the same day that it is purchased.

The deduplication and compression are its most valuable feature. They have done a really good job, as they were able to shrink down 15 gigs into five gigs.

It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use.

I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier.

It has been stable. It has been running pretty much flawlessly, except for one power supply which died, and that was it. That power supply was then replaced by Pure Storage. The replacement that Pure Storage sent us did have a bit of an issue when it was placed, but after a tech went in there and fixed it, that was it.

I try to go in there and at least keep an eye on it every once in a while, but it mostly runs on its own. There is no real need to do anything.

We haven't really scaled up.

The technical support did a good on the one issue that we contact them for (the power supply).

We didn't have all-flash. We needed a lot of performance for all of our production environment, and for everything else that was connecting to us. That is what basically drove us to Pure Storage.

The setup was very good. For my environment, which is a cluster environment, they were able to pick that up and do that (and iSCSI) very well.

I had no issues with upgrading our firmware controllers.

You are buying a premium product, and it is worth it.

We were looking at Dell EMC. We were looking at a couple of other vendors, including NetApp. We decided on Pure Storage because of the deduplication and compression that they were advertising.

If you are researching Pure Storage, make sure you are getting the right amount of space set up for what you are doing because the compression will affect how much you are getting overall. You might think you are only getting ten terabytes or fifteen terabytes, but it will be a lot less.

We use it for Hyper-V on my end and OpenStack on the production end. The integration for Hyper-V was very easy. There was pretty much no effort to do it.

The UI is pretty good. I don't use it as often as I probably should, but it usually just runs on its own.

It's very good storage for what we use it for, very efficient. It's very cost-effective for the amount of data we have when we're crunching the numbers that we're crunching, for our algorithms which use a lot of processing power.

The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware.

We've never had an issue with scale as we've deployed to some of our clients.

Depending on the deployment, the configuration, and the size of the project, and some of our larger machine-learning deployments, where we have to put in an AI-ready infrastructure box, those projects tend to take a little bit longer. It's a newer product and they're still figuring all that out. But it's comparable to any other vendor up there.

ROI depends on what the clients are looking for as the outcome. If the client doesn't know what the questions are that they need to ask in machine-learning, they can spend a lot of money and get really poor outcomes based on the data and what they're trying to get out of it. That isn't really a Pure issue, it's more a business issue in terms of the outcome wanted by the client.

Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors, as we've looked at some of the other competitors on the market. Pure, for the quality of gear we're getting versus the price, is a good value for us.

One of the "buyer beware" issues would be, if you're going to buy a $1.5 million installment of Aries, which is the NVIDIA, it's got a high cost. If you just need a cucumber cart to be pulled on wheels, you don't need to buy a jet plane, although the seller might say, "Hey, this is the best, greatest, and newest." These are some of the things that you'd want to be aware of as someone who is looking to get into AI. Make sure you need that much because you could probably build a scaled-down version at a significantly lower cost.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. Pure is a partner of ours that we use for a lot of our machine-learning deployments and some of our smart-data applications which we build in Canada. We pursue the same clients together for some of the government contracts, and we use the FlashBlade for some of the storage for our machine-learning algorithms, with the NVIDIA DGX. We're exclusive to Pure, versus the other hardware vendors who are in the same place for flash storage. This is who we use and who we decided to go with, due to some of the innovation that they have within their stack.

In Canada, they've got a very good strategy where they're partnering with some of the good software vendors there, and they're making good relationships on the government side and with some of the VARs. They're doing a good job.

Everything is kosher with the documentation. They've been fantastic, a good partner supporting our pursuits. They have even delivered some prototypes for us, before we started using them, to some of our vendors. That way, we could have a sandbox where we could use some of their storage to create demos and proofs of concept for some of our clients.

• It has a small footprint, as the current system is only four units per rack.
• It's got good speed for the price, as it uses eMLC, an advanced type of SSD.
• It's very scalable, and we're not paying for capacity.
• We get free controllers every three years.

For VDI, there's a consistent user experience. Users don’t switch to VDI if it's not at the same speed as a laptop or desktop, and Pure Storage provides that.

It doesn’t provide enough information on performance analytics. For example, Nimble Storage has Infosight, which provides data; Pure Storage doesn’t have an equivalent. It has every other feature, but more data would be the only thing missing.

No issues with deployment.

It's really good and we've never had problem.

Also, it's very simple to use, and one of our customers described it as, “If you know how to use Facebook, you know how to use Pure Storage.”

I think it's actually easier than Facebook.

It scales very well. A new box contains three units, and uses the power of a toaster oven.

We haven’t had to use it. We ran into some issues, but found their technical engineer not as good as Nimble Storage's.

The setup is easy, but not as easy as Nimble. It took about five hours to setup.

There's no additional licenses needed, as everything is included.

Once you try it, you’ll realize how easy it is to use. It has almost every feature.

Our customers primarily use Pure Storage for virtualization, whether it is VMware or Hyper-V. They choose Pure Storage for its high-performance, low-latency, and reliable all-flash arrays, which are essential for efficiently running virtualized workloads, including critical applications, databases, and virtual machines.

I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity. I value its simplicity and artificial intelligence monitoring. It also integrates seamlessly with major platforms like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Microsoft SQL, while offering tight integration with backup software for faster restores. This connectivity promotes cyber resilience and can be leveraged for disaster recovery solutions.

I don't see any major issues with Pure Storage, but one thing to note is that Pure Storage can be seen as a premium product, and other vendors are catching up in terms of performance and features. However, overall, the feature set and performance are excellent.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for two and a half years.

It is highly stable, especially if you follow recommended patching and software upgrades. Pure Storage offers an officially published uptime guarantee, ensuring device stability, which is legally binding.

Pure Storage is very scalable. Even the smallest model can be successfully upgraded all the way to the largest model, which is a feature I haven't seen with other solutions.

Pure Storage's tech support is excellent. They use AI effectively, and their support team is highly reliable and responsive. Our customers have experienced no issues with their support.

Setting up Pure Storage is incredibly easy. You just plug it in, connect it to the network, and start building your storage – it is that simple. Deployment takes less than a day. Deployment is straightforward and typically manageable by a single person or resource. However, when lifting heavier equipment, like the larger Pure Storage units, it is recommended to have two people, but the rest of the setup can be accomplished via servers. Maintenance is straightforward. Once it is connected to the internet and secure communication is enabled, it sends monitoring data to Kubernetes and artificial intelligence in the cloud, providing early warnings of potential issues. This cloud-based AI can often assess the health of your device better than you can.

Our customers see a return on investment and value for their money with Pure Storage. They measure it through methods like net present value and comparisons to the weighted accumulated cost of capital, which provide a robust financial assessment.

It has a flexible, pay-as-you-go option.The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations, but this is the only major downside.

My advice for new users is to not be afraid to start using it from day one, but take the time to educate yourself on all the valuable features available to make the most of it. Since it is a significant investment, ensure you manage and protect the asset effectively. Overall, I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten.