What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?

I have worked with two types of Pure Storage FlashArray. So far, I have not found any issues. There is not a great need for improvement, but better pricing could be beneficial.

The speed can always be improved.

Awareness about Pure Storage needs to increase. Currently, people mostly think of Dell and NetApp when it comes to storage. More documentation and presentation would help reach new users. They need to come up with new ideas and ways to improve their brand awareness. They also need to see if the system can handle creating a large number of LUNs at the same time. Any automation or a way of doing that could be helpful.

Currently, Pure Storage support does health checks. It would be beneficial to have a health check command that can be run from the CLI to ensure that all hardware components are functioning properly rather than having to enable remote access and connect to support for a health check.

Everything has been good, but we faced one issue last year while migrating volumes from one Pure Storage to another. The snapshots were not visible in the Veeam backup portal. Our disaster recovery plan was mostly based on the integration between Veeam and Pure Storage, and we faced a lot of problems. Pure Storage promised that a future upgrade would solve this problem by introducing a plugin.

I have been primarily working with storage and have not fully explored other areas, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to performance reporting.

Pure Storage FlashArray is fantastic. It shows and does everything I need, which is why I've used it for so long. However, improved reporting on the deduplication and compression functionality would be beneficial. While a general reduction in space usage is evident, it's impossible to determine the specific deduplication or compression rates for individual disk systems.

It does not require much improvement. They can maybe improve the file services. The focus is on block storage. They can also include file services such as NAS shares and CIFS shares. There should be provisioning of the file shares from a unified array.

FlashArray could improve on the administrative side. For example, when you need to upgrade the boxes, we can't do that ourselves. We need to open a ticket with support and have them do that for us. You don't need to be on the call with them. We tell them we have a slot that we want to upgrade, and they send us an email when it's done. I'm hands-on, but I don't have a way to play with the device. In terms of troubleshooting, there isn't much to troubleshoot. I can see the logs, and that's all. I wish they had more APIs to connect to other environments. They should expand their catalog. Right now, they have the top APIs, but Pure Storage lacks APIs for small companies. They have VMware, Oracle, and the top brands.

If I need to change or troubleshoot the dashboard, I cannot do it without calling support. If I want to move something critical, I cannot do it by myself. The dashboard blocks me from changing those critical things.

Pure is not designed to be a backup storage. It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups. It would be nice to get specialized backup storage with immutability, multifactor authentication, and very high deduplication and compression without sacrificing performance.

Pure Storage FlashArray is painful in certain areas, and because of this, in my company, we wish it was made to be a bit more user-friendly, especially in a VMware environment, so that it can be made less of a cumbersome process. I don't know if its less user-friendly nature in a VMware environment is indicative of some of the encryption features and other stuff of Pure Storage FlashArray. Pure Storage FlashArray would just be easier to manage if it didn't have to jump through so many hoops.

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.

Improvement-wise, Pure Storage FlashArray must support real-time incidents. I think that Pure Storage should improve its pricing. Currently, the solution fails to support file screening. I want to see the solution supporting file screening in the future.

The pricing could be better. It is a bit expensive.

I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release.

In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation. It's going to be a hard one to manage. They have most of what we were looking at, including some things that we're looking at down the road. The growth on this particular array is almost unlimited for most shops. I would say they still need more enhanced speed, however, that's always a thing with storage.

Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions. The amount of storage the customers receive is approximately 20% higher when you compare it with similar solutions. So it can be a problem when you are positioning the product.

Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features. The integration with other vendors, such as antivirus and security vendors they are lacking.

The only feature the solution lacks is self-backup. If you're working with different processors, you need to install different software tools to back up. But if it were directly available, it would make things very easy.

We're quite happy with eh solution overall. I can't recall coming across any features that were lacking. There was some complexity in the initial setup. While they've improved a lot, many features have been released recently and they are not that mature just yet. My understanding is they just released some features, for some transport services over the NVMe and then the file service. However, the file service is not so mature. I had some problems with the file service when we used it. Other new features, such as the active clustering over the FC, and the verification over the FC feature, we didn't use. We have to have a trial on it first before commenting on it.

The price of the solution can improve.

It falls far short of protocol support. Our customers frequently ask us how we can use NFS or if we can use it as a copy or something similar. If you have any suggestions, I believe they could use more protocol, and have easier automation. Automation could be simplified. For example, we can ask the storage to create a folder and then monitor it automatically.

It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do.

I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task.

We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups.

The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature.

This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve.

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.

Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included.

When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller.

FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool.

The price should be lower.

I think the areas that they have been working on for quite some time are the CIFS and SMB Shares, that is, being able to mount them directly. I think they're on the right track. One wish I have is that they will have a solution to help archive data to the cloud, that is, a Cloud Tiering Appliance.

There is definitely room for improvement. Overall, the solution is pretty good, although it does have certain gaps. There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side.

Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable.

I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays. It would be good if Pure Storage FlashArray gave a library-type access. Maybe, small box releases could be utilized for backup purposes such as Data Domain offered by other vendors.

The solution itself is pretty solid. Perhaps the time available for selecting upgrades or for scheduling things could be improved. On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial. In the next release, I would like for them to support file systems on the lower-end models, like the X-10 or X-20.

It would be nice to have a little more control. I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input. There's not a lot of options for the administrator compared to other solutions

The solution is not cheap. It's much more expensive than DataCore. It costs much more. The improvement I would expect from them is maybe more if there is integration with VMware. We are also using Amazon Cloud to provision snapshots or to move or to copy snapshots to Amazon. I would expect more integration within Amazon. Amazon has tree storage or last tier so we have that as an option instead of keeping it in Pure Storage as it costs a lot of money. If they offered a hybrid cloud, for example, it would be very helpful. The solution needs to ensure they have good integration with VVol. VVol is the future of VMware. I have spoken with Pure Storage engineers and they have an integration with vVol. They have a kind of plug-in for VMware to work with VVol, however, it's not mature enough. It's my understanding they're working on it to get it done on that side. More integration with the Windows Server for snapshots would also be helpful. One year ago I found that instead of having the new Pure Storage FlashArray on-prem, you can have it in Tokyo or you can have it in Virginia - it depends where you are. You can just pay a certain amount per minute and you can have a Pure Storage that you manage from your prem, but have it on Amazon. That may be in production. It will be a useful attribute.

The integration capabilities could be improved.

Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution.

We are not sure what needs improvement at this time, as we have not started using it in the production environment. It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated.

The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them. This is the only problem that we have in the two years of working with Pure Storage and it is not an important problem. The interface that this solution has is really good. It senses all the errors. We get good support from the vendor. The price doesn't really matter. It's very expensive, it can be cheaper.

The price of this solution is high and should be lowered. It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays.

As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it.

In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server.

I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers. We're going through a transformation where we are trying to run IT as a business. I need to know how much a VM costs, so I need to know how much the compute costs, how much the storage costs, and how much the backup costs. It's really difficult to go to every single product and try to decipher how much I've spent on each of the products. It's not always as easy as just dividing, saying well this must be the cost. I'd love to be able to get that data out of Pure and into vSphere so that I can just see, by VM, how much we should charge our customer.

From a software perspective, it's been great. They've done a lot of things with VM integration from the Pure side. I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution. The costs could be improved. They still have a very good value proposition. I'm not arguing that they're too expensive, but if they want to continue to increase market share, they're going to have to come up with better ways to get the cost down. The availability of QLC NAND is much cheaper, albeit at a higher latency.

In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google.

We only want to manage our virtual environment so this program has all the features we need. We're pretty straightforward customers. I don't see anything that needs to improve as we only use the standard features.

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

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.

As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use.

There could be better storage.

In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption.

The solution needs better IOPS for the storage. That's where most of the user requirements come from. We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help.

The capability from Pure as far as sharing out files and things of that nature is a little bit lacking. However, I know it's coming so I'm not upset that it doesn't exist yet.

I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side. I'd like to say "Hey, this particular VDI, what is the performance on that? How much IO is it using, what are the issues, what is CPU?" etc. I'd like to see that layout in the portal. That would be great for us.

I haven't really had a bad experience or something I think that they can improve on. I'm not saying that to be really nice. The way the platform works, the way that their sales team works, the way their support team works, everything just works really well. If they could make it cheaper, that would be something.

In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput.

The price of this solution could be improved.

We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter. I know that Pure Storage is working on this. They already told us, "Hereon out, we will be developing and only deploying HTML5 plugins." However, it's currently only in beta testing right now from what they've said. Getting that plugin out would definitely help us, because we don't have flash, or use it very actively. If we had that plugin in sooner rather that later, it would be awesome.

I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates.

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.

The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it. I would like to have better training. I would like to have an hour class or more online training.

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.

There are a lot of things to improve.

I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side. Some of the FlashBlade protocols could use a little love. There are obviously some new enhancements. There is no dedupe on the FlashBlade. It is compression only. There is no replication. So, Pure is going to try to partner that product with ObjectEngine to bring in some of those features, and I'm not sure how all of that will work out. I'm not familiar with ObjectEngine yet, but we'll see how it goes.

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.

We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that. Therefore, we would like to see improvements with the way it integrates with vCenter for picking up dedupe.

I would like to have support available in Spanish.

What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it.

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

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.

The documentation has gone along with the idea of "it's simple to use." In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around the movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that. It wasn't until we got to a point where we had changed out everything front-ending the platform, and got past that conversation and we rose up past helpdesk and fact sheets and documentation, and before we actually got to somebody who knew about it, there was community knowledge within Pure that knew that problem existed. Having that front and center, where we could have searched and looked for that information, would have answered our questions and caused me to rate it as a ten.

I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable. Of course, it is, after all, solid-state. It's not the same as "cheap and deep."

I don't deal with the day-to-day management of it. I'm sure that, from a technical perspective, the ones who manage it would be able to tell about you something that needs improvement. From my perspective of the acquisition and ongoing support, I don't see any.

There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality. It's just a question of what that will be and what does the future look like?

Everything could be cheaper. Other areas where we would always like to see improvement with products like this are in compression and deduplication. Increasing the overall storage efficiency of the platform would be great. One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade. That would be an intriguing and interesting feature for us. Other than that, we've not had any big needs or demands.

I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end.

Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers.

Replace SSDs in the lower-end unit. Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex.

They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about.

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

It needs to improve its price.

I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good. It is quite difficult to read documentation and get documentation. To get some things on the web, it is really easy. However, I would to have some in-depth information about how the product is working. From an API point of view, it's quite a complex product.

The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser. Hopefully, in the next release, this will be fixed.

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.

We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array.

The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so.

Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been. The latest problem, which we are currently dealing with as of today, is after the latest upgrade, utilization ran out because of the system's space. It is consuming more than it should. The deduplication and compression are not happening in time. The quality is always behind, and Pure Storage acts like it is a bug, and they have a new version that has a fix for it. So, it often goes into a cycle. Then, you keep upgrading, then the new upgrade may have some other problem. FlashArray is more geared towards bigger, organic workloads where our real need has been around other backups. While it has its own snapshot concept, it should have a separate backup system similar to what Commvault provides. Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations. This is an area that we have already discussed with our account team.

Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products. If Pure Storage had its features at parity with its competitors, it could move ahead.

A three wave application or multi-wave application synchronization would be an improvement.

The new features that they are coming out with are very compelling for us, especially now that they have a partnership with AWS it will get some traction in the coming year. We will certainly be going with VMC on AWS. It's very compelling for us now that it's working with VMware. There's nothing that they could improve on. They've been brilliant all the way through. We've had no downtime, no problems, easy installation; it just works.

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.

I would like to see box-to-box encryption on replication included in the next release.

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.

What is interesting, because we're moving mostly to the cloud, Pure Storage may be the one storage appliance which will stay after we are done with our migration.

Granular growth of the storage needs improvement. Right now, if I wanted to add storage, I have to buy a whole shelf. It would be nice to just buy a few drives. I would like to see data tiering to AWS.

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.

I would like to see more cloud integration.

The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing. I rated the solution as a nine out of ten because I knew about a disk failure. Other than that, it would probably be a ten. Disk failures are out of anybody's control.

I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product.

The big thing would be to simplify the compatibility to Openstack. The Openstack going into Nova works really well, but if Pure had a few more of those features that would be my win.

I would like for them to do testing on their upgrades.

There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there.

I would like to see them lower the costs. They could also include data mining in their next release. We have performance monitoring tools and it's hard to integrate them with this solution.

The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN. There was a situation where all of our LUN were essentially made illegitimate. They were corrupted by a redactor. We have snapshots enabled on the majority of our SANS and that was great, we were able to snapshot and restore. There was one data center that our SAN admins had not intentionally gone in and checked the box to allow for replicas to be created. Because of that, we lost that whole data center and everything that was on it. If there had been a checkbox that had been checked by default to have the snapshotting, they wouldn't have gone in and unchecked it and we would still have our data. It generated a lot more work on the server side to rebuild everything that was corrupted. Also, an additional feature would be replication from our on-premise to AWS that could then be used directly with the cloud. The way the VMware cloud is engineered is we have to have hosts up the entire time to run beats and to have HCX replicating things over to it. If we were able to have replication from Pure over S3 buckets, so that we only had to spin up the VMware host on demand, that would be a tremendous cost saving to us as Pure customers.

Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged. That's one thing they might have to look at because, if you are looking for storage, Pure is the player and the winner. But, if you are looking at HCI, Pure does not play in that area and that may prevent them from getting some deals.

We would always like to see higher performance, and lower pricing is always better. In general, they're going in the right direction.

They could improve the price.

Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing.

In the higher-education industry, things moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of their existing features. In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. I've done a lot of automation work using their existing features and tools, so I'm always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about extending their phone-home centralized analytics interface (PureOne) into a does-everything management console with a list of new cloud, WAN, and backup features, but this doesn't seem finalized.

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.

This may be available, but we are not using it. I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used.

We work with a lot of Oracle customers. We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM.

They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable.

Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics.

I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity.

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.