Everpure FlashArray Reviews

I'm a pre-sales architect. I architect, and I sell them as a partner with Pure Storage on the VAR side. Our customers use it for storage, mainly block-based storage and virtualization storage. Some solutions have both block and file storage, and some solutions only have file storage from Pure. 

It provides additional protection against ransomware threats. If you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or some kind of malicious attack, you can revert your data back in time to a previous version or snapshot.

One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table.

Scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades are also valuable. They're not using flash just for your tier one storage needs. They're recommending flash for data protection and archive backup, which is the way to go.

If you get the gold support, which is what I sell and recommend for my customers, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades, which is another feather in Pure's cap. They make several claims that once you move to Pure Storage, you can take your team of five dedicated storage admins and trim it down to just one person. Their mantra is getting customers out of the game of managing storage and letting the vendor manage the storage. They want to see their customers just consume storage. They have non-disruptive upgrades. You just set up the software and hardware and just consume the storage. They're continuously looking at the dial-homes, the logs that are automatically sent, and fingerprinting potential issues before they're even a problem. That cuts down on a lot of support tickets the customers have to open up. They'll proactively open up tickets when they see something in their analytics on a particular customer's array and recognize that one of their hosts might have a certain HBA with a fault or a bug. They reach out and open a ticket. So, you get your system upgrade, patched, or whatever is needed to resolve the potential problem.

I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. They can work on the price to make it more competitive.

Its stability is very good. I have not heard any of my customers having issues with FlashArray. It is very solid. They claim 99.9999% availability. I haven't had any problems with outages with my customers. 

They have another product called FlashBlade, which is a different type of storage appliance that Pure does for unstructured files. FlashBlade doesn't rank as high in reliability as their flagship FlashArray product does. The FlashBlade product is a notch below. It is a newer product or code, and I have heard of some issues with it.

Its scalability is very good. It scales up instead of out, which is typical for a block-based appliance. It is very easy to add expansion shelves or disks. You don't need to worry about shuffling drives around and creating RAID groups. This is all legacy stuff. Most vendors are now the same, but I really think that Pure led the effort for non-disruptive upgrades. They coined the term, and other vendors have since followed suit. They're the leader in the industry for that.

Their regular support is good. With gold support, Pure's support personnel takes care of both software and hardware upgrades. The only difference between free support and gold support is that you don't get free hardware upgrades with free support. If I understand the offering correctly, software upgrades are still included. 

If we're just talking about Pure Storage, it is straightforward and simple. You can get it up in minutes as opposed to hours that some of the other solutions take. Compared to its competitive solutions, Pure is very well known for its simplicity and ease of use, especially during setup and initialization.

A single 2U appliance from Pure Storage for block-based workloads, including rack stack and initialization, is ready to be provisioned to your servers in an hour or an hour and a half to the max. It is definitely straightforward.

If you get the gold support, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades. So, you don't have to manage storage. Pure takes care of that.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing.

They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance.

I would advise others to chose well. Prepare to have extra time on your hands to focus on your business's core needs and outcomes and not having to worry about the day-to-day maintenance of your storage appliance.

All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions. They might ask for customization level, but I think Pure is doing the right thing by its set-it-and-forget-it approach. Most customers don't need to fine-tune and customize their all-flash storage appliances anymore. It is not a legacy spinning disk appliance.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of 10. Its pricing sometimes plays a big part where customers might go in a different direction, and that's the only reason why I'm not giving it a 10.

We primarily use the solution for storage. 

The administration is very easy and quite minimal.

The performance is very good.

The installation is pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is good.

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

We've been using the solution in two places. We have used it in Washington for six months and London for six months as well. 

We have found the solution to be stable. We've not had any performance issues and not have any stability issues with it. The performance is good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is scalable to an extent. Its deduplication ratio is quite good. You don't actually always need the full amount of physical storage, as opposed to the deduplicating amount of space.

Its scalability beyond a certain amount of petabytes makes it so that it is a separate system if you scale to that much storage. If you're a normal enterprise where you don't scale that much, it's fine. The X90 goes beyond a certain amount, and you have to have a new system that works as a separate system.

Across two locations, we have about 800 people. 

From the feedback I've gotten, for the most part, the technical support has been quite good. They know their product quite well and they've been quite responsive. We are satisfied with the support.

We previously used EMC VNX.

The solution is pretty straightforward. It's not too complex or difficult. 

I haven't personally deployed it, however, from the team's feedback, they had very little issues with regards to the deployment and bringing it up and then setting up. The deployment was within days or a week at a maximum. That was for the migration time. For migrating from the old storage to new, it might take a while, however, in terms of getting it up and running, it was days. It didn't take that long at all.

It's easy enough that the normal system administrators can take care of the storage. There's no one dedicated to managing the storage and it's not that complicated that it needs someone dedicated just to manage it all.

You do have a license that is required and you also have to pay for support.

The license we have is not a monthly subscription model.

For London and Washington, we had EMC VNX. At the time we were transitioning from the EMC to a mid-tier flash storage, and they didn't have anything in the market. We did look at others. We looked at the Nimble from HPE. When we were looking to purchase, EMC just came out with EMC FlashSystem. We didn't get to the IBM FlashSystem. 

We're a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

I use the solution for the storage of our database and to run some algorithms to analyze data we retrieve from the internet.

I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand.

Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure.

I have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is highly stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have five customers using this solution.

The technical support is very good.

The installation is the simplest I have ever done from any solution.

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves with the supervision of the integrator.

We have a team that does the maintenance and operations of the solution.

There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution.

I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

We make use of the solution primarily for storage and DR replication.

We use the most recent stable version, as the latest one is still in a beta stage and too new to be employed.

V-Vault is pretty new and its implementation is superior to that offered by nearly any vendor. It's easier to configure than most others and to import the V-Vault. A separate working machine is not required. 

I can't think of too many features that need improvement. There are no bugs, it just works and it's stable. The graphical interface is perfect and really simple. Someone who understands storage can figure it out within a couple of minutes. There are really no drawbacks.

The only minor issues that come to mind are that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad. Also, the solution should be cheaper.

I've been using the solution for the past 10 years. 

The solution is stable. It's superb. We've done upgrades in which multiple controllers were involved and, while changing from one model of the array to another, a single controller was removed. It is swapped out and a new one introduced. Once it's stable they proceed to the next one. We have never experienced an outage in any of the three companies in which I've employed the solution. Even when the controller went down, the arrays remained up.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has been amazing. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who is not super knowledgeable. The only time I entertained any doubts, whatsoever, is when V-Vaults first came out. Certain people were not very familiar with it, but this was short lived. As we were extremely early adopters of V-Vault, training was provided fairly quickly. While the general tech support was not up to snuff, within a month or two they were all trained. Since then, there have been no issues to report. 

In this company we used an IBM V 7000 and in a previous one, an EMC VMAX.

When comparing the solution to an EMC array or an IBM B7000, both of which I've used, Pure Storage FlashArray is light years ahead of everybody else. I've used a variety of these solutions and many of them are very complicated. 

Only two weeks ago we set up a new solution in a new location that we're building. It's pretty straightforward. There are certain internal matters that only the vendor can handle. But, that's fairly common with most good storage arrays. Besides this, it's really easy. The vendor is really simple to work with. One need only provide him with a list of the IP's he uses for management and replication. 

I did not do the initial storage myself, as I'm in Chicago and it is handled in Omaha, Nebraska. I did have to coordinate everything, however. We were sent a form to fill out with the name and IP use. At this point, the arrival of a technician is scheduled, who asks where the rack should be placed. At this point, it is racked, cabled up and all the initial IP configurations are introduced. This is the point at which the person can take over and start carving out the ones he wants or creating the V-Vault, should he so desire. The process is really simple.

The technician's visit lasted an hour-and-a-half. I've been doing this for a long time. So, perhaps, it took me another hour to configure everything, although the level of involvement can play a factor. We created two only and a V-Vault. Like I said, it's really easy.

The solution absolutely provides us a return on our investment. I've worked with other storage arrays such as one that IBM was promoting to us. It was the company's first attempt at doing an all-flash array and it bore much similarity to Pure Storage FlashArray. It took us a week to get it up and running. We added some development servers and the whole array went down. We lost everything. Such experiences really make one appreciate the stability and thoughtfulness that goes into the engineering and redundancy and scalability of the solution.

You could say that the licensing cost involves a one-time fee, at which point support can be renewed in what I believe to be three-year blocks. As long as a person keeps his support current he can upgrade to the newer version of the array, which can be done once every three to four years.

The solution could be cheaper.

We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee. Something that's really awesome about the solution is that the cost is all-inclusive of the features. There is no need to pay for replication or for any additional features. A person is entitled to employ these when they come out.

In my present company we have around 500 users, but my previous one had closer to 10,000.

In the current company, there are five or six of us that are responsible for overall maintenance and we handle everything. This is in contrast to the company before last in which there were three of us who handled nothing but our four different storage arrays. To be honest, Pure Storage FlashArray does not leave us with much to do. Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup. It frees us up to do real work.

My advice to others is that this solution is the best available. For someone who's not a storage admin, the support is awesome and help is provided gladly for unfamiliar areas. What's nice about the solution is that it very rarely breaks, which vastly cuts down on downtime. There is much redundancy and support is super proactive. This means that if a part goes bad they will generally know about it before we would. It's such a clean, easy to use, great supportive product. It really frees one up to do other things that are more important.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten, although I would give it a score of 50 were this possible. 

We put the solution onto the VMware environment and all the Microsoft SQL servers. We do the synchronization between two data centers, so that is has a very low latency. We just have a few milliseconds of latency which is a ready performance, and near perfect. 

If I compare it to SAN Symphony, for instance, it's much faster, much reliable level. 

The maintenance is very good. The support is very, very good. If you do any maintenance on it you have the support, and it's nice to know they are there to assist.

It's a very good product. It's very easy to manage everything.

With a snapshot, you can schedule it and you can remove it afterward. You can do a kind of production cope. That's very, very good now, and it's performing very well. The storage is amazing. It's so fast.

The total reduction you can expect is excellent. You buy the bundle storage and they give you a ratio of what you can achieve within it.

The mobile app is very helpful. I have an application on my smartphone. I view the latency in real-time on my app. You can see everything on your smartphone. You can also set up alerts on it, and things like this. I don't think you can do this on Dell storage. 

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.

I've been using the solution since 2019 and therefore it's not so long. It's a little bit more than one year - nearly two years now as we have started in August, 2019. 

5.3 is the latest stable version. They have a version 6 now, and 6.1 is in production, however, it's not as stable as the 5.3. We are running to the latest best stable version.

Previously, you were not able to scale the snapshot. You had to do it manually.

For a flash array of 11 terabytes that you buy in a bundle, you can provision for 44 terabytes. We still have six terabytes free. We can come to a ratio of four on full storage. You can optimize four times what they give to you. They give you a ratio from three to four. It depends on the application you have running. Not everything is taken on the storage. 

If you would like to expand, you can always just buy more storage disks. We will have to get a new license in two years and we might increase our usage then. For the moment, we have enough space.

Technical support has been very helpful throughout the process. They can assist during the setup process. They make everything very easy.

We also use the Dell EMC Storage Suite.

This solution is easier than what we've used in the past.

For me, in terms of setup, the process much easier than Symphony, for example. Before, we had DataCore and Symphony. With this product, it was easier to do the zoning on the fiber channel side. On the network side, it was easier. Everything it's much easier than other products if I compare it to Dell or to DataCore and Symphony.

The maintenance, if you have to upgrade the firmware or the version, is very convenient. The support is good also. And they are working now to integrate more in Amazon which will be helpful for us.

While it is my understanding that the solution is a bit expensive from a financial point of view, I don't know the exact costs.

The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more. I don't have the details anymore. I know it was much more than HP 3PAR and Dell Storage Center or DataCore. 

We have a five-year contract. We would need to renew it in two years or so.

We are just a customer and end-user.

With Pure Storage, you have two versions. You have the Pure Storage version 50 and version 10. 50 is a little bit bigger than version 10. With FlashArray M50, it's an X50R2, it's full flash. 

We have the product currently on-premises, however, we would be more open maybe to Amazon or some other cloud. 

I would suggest new organizations go with the product, even though it is new. Some companies are scared of new products. It's more mature in the United States. However, it's working well for us here in Europe. Even if it costs a little bit more, you do get more for what you pay. We've chosen the most expensive option, however, we have no regrets in that sense. It's been worth it. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's very easy to manage and works very well. The maintenance is also excellent. I'd recommend the solution. You don't have to do anything on the FlashArray. You don't have to deal with tier levels, or build and optimize something. Everything is done from the Pure Storage side. You're just using it, and that's it.

We use the FlashArray X20, M20, M10. We have regulations against cloud, so we're mostly on-Prem. However, we do use Office 365 for email and we have Azure for development on another team but I don't manage that team.

Our primary use case of this solution is to house data stores on virtual machines.

It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past and the support is extremely quick and responsive. 

The ease of management, cutting edge technology, and higher availability benefits our IT organization. 

We are running VMware on Pure. The main driver for this was the speed of the virtual machines and the ease of administration with Pure is pretty seamless.

The joint solution has helped my organization. Cody from Pure Storage has been a really big advocate for cutting edge technologies within Pure Storage. He's given us as a customer a lot of tools from his social media to help us do our jobs easier. That's been amazing. It's been awesome for us. The support's been great. Our SC has been great, and our sales reps have been great. Performance is awesome.

The most valuable features of this solution are the speed, ease of use, administration, and the support model.

We have the VMware plugin for Pure storage. It's the plugin that allows us to create a data store. It's super simple but we use it. It's in vCenter. The integrations have helped by making it quicker to deploy data storage.

If we have a LUN that is ready to have a data store put on it, rather than us having to give access to certain people to create data stores, they can just do it directly from vCenter and they won't have to have access to the array. It makes it easier. It's a little faster.

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.

Stability is very high. It's been amazing. They do non-disruptive upgrades that I have never seen anything like in the industry. For us, we can do upgrades in the middle of the day. We wouldn't accept that kind of risk, but we've accepted a lot more risks than we should using Pure and I've never been let down.

Scalability is very good considering the architecture that they're built around, which is the scale-up architecture. It's very good.

Before Pure, we had EMC VNX, and we were having the entire array reboot and we would lose a server room at a remote casino. All VMs would go down and have to reboot because the entire array would reboot. That happened at least three or four times and then that's what made us decide to pay for what I would say is around triple the cost, just to guarantee that that doesn't happen. To my organization, money is less of the concern as the availability. Nobody wants to get that phone call. We had EMC, it was bad. Support wasn't great. I wouldn't say it was bad but it wasn't great. What put us over the top was that Pure is stable.

The initial setup is insanely easy. It's so easy our sales guy can do it with Pure.

We used a reseller for the integration. The company was Pinnacle Business Solutions from Oklahoma city. It was pretty good. We were happy with it.

We absolutely have seen ROI in two areas. The ease of management has made it so easy that we don't have to have extra storage people or systems people. The data reduction has been very generous. We're getting roughly three and a half to one data reduction across all arrays. That's basically three VNXs right there, and three VNXs would cost more than a Pure FlashArray. That's a pretty decent return.

We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars. 

I wasn't a decision-maker in the decision-making process. Had I been, I would've considered Nimble All Flash Array. I wouldn't consider anything else. Everything else that I know of in the storage industry is not worth us having insanely low latency for that. That's not our number one concern.

They're the leader in the industry and everyone's chasing them. They're a cloud-native array that no one's ever done and their storage is excellent. Even if they weren't one of the fastest arrays in the entire industry, I would use them for their support model and ease of use.

The advice I would give to someone considering this solution is to look past the sticker shock which is return on investment. I would look at data reduction. I would definitely buy into what people say about their support, which is excellent. I would say that your company, whether you realize it or not, is going to benefit from being industry-leading, pushing the edge from a technology perspective, the ease of management, administration, and even the setup. It is well worth it.

I would rate it a nine and a half out of ten. I would rate it that high simply because I think if they can take advantage of QLC NAND and bring the costs down into a different market, it would be perfect. If they wanted to do a hyper-converged solution with this type of support that they have, they would be unbeatable. They're already unbeatable, but QLC NAND is going to bring the costs down for this all-flash architecture, and if you can cut the price of half of the flash array, you can be selling to small, medium business much quicker. It would be fantastic. 

In our company, we implemented a Pure Storage FlashArray for our VM virtualized environment. 

We do have vCenter integrated with Pure Storage. We use that application to deploy virtual volumes on our Pure Storage solution. We are still in the beginning stages, so we only have four virtual systems running on it. However, in the coming months, we will be migrating the bulk of all of our VMs over to vCenter and Pure Storage.

The inline deduplication and compression have exceeded our expectations. The rep from Pure Storage kept promising us 4:1, and we were very skeptic about getting that. We were anticipating mainly getting 1.5:1. So far, with the VMs, we have been running closer to 5:1 deduplication and compression, which is amazing to us.

It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done. With the old HPE system, there were quite a few more steps to have to deal with. Therefore, it has definitely reduced our management.

The simplicity is the most valuable feature. I do not have to deal with how to provision RAIDs or manage disks. I just plugin my disk groups, and it does it all on the back-end. I just identify the size and volume that I want and the host that I want to deploy it to, then it just shows up and works. It has been incredibly simple to use, and it is incredibly fast.

Simpler is always better in my mind. Just making it quicker and easier to deploy, then also making it so that there is less chance of error. 

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.

We have only had it installed for a few weeks.

To early to comment.

We are hoping that we get to scale up, at some point. My initial impression is that it should be very easy for us to expand just by replacing the disk groups or by adding a shelf. As far as my impressions of being able to scale, I think it will be pretty simple. Until we get to that point, I don't know.

We haven't really seen much on the performance side, because we only have five VMs in there right now. I can definitely say that it is extremely fast. It is much faster than our legacy HPE spinning disks. However, until we get a lot more servers on it, I won't know if we going to hit a bottleneck or cap it out at all. I don't think we will, but until we get more on there, I won't know.

The technical support is very easy to work with. 

We are replacing legacy HPE EVA and legacy Hyper-V systems moving to VMware with Pure Storage, as our storage solution.

We have a very old HPE EVA system. We knew that we needed an upgrade, because our system is 10 years old and out of support. We brought in a number of consultants to talk to us about whether we should upgrade our Hyper-V system or move to VMware. Thre or four consultants recommended (almost all of them) moving to all-flash. They highlighted Pure Storage as one of the industry leaders in all-flash storage. That is why we started working with Pure. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had a Pure Storage Rep onsite to help us install it. They had their installation guide with the steps outlining how to do this and that: x, y, z type steps. It only took us two hours to get it out-of-the-box, in the rack, turned on, added to vCenter, and have our first VM on the system. 

We had a Pure Storage rep come onsite and help us install the system. We had it up and running in just two hours. Then, he turned us around and had us enter a ticket to do a firmware upgrade on our system, because it was three versions old. 

The technical support was very responsive. They emailed us and scheduled it a couple days out. They talked us through how to enable the Remote Assist tunnel. We had that up and running, then the day came for the upgrade. They emailed us and asked if they could continue. Then 20 minutes later, they emailed saying, "Okay it is done. We will monitor it for 24 hours. Let us know if you have any problems." It was just amazing to me, because I don't have to touch it. I don't have to look at it. We had no downtime nor interruption to service, and yet the upgrade was done.

We have already seen ROI.

We have upgraded our legacy Fibre Channel system from 8 gig up to 32 gig with our Pure Storage. By just copying the first few VMs off to that, I was floored at how fast it would write and read to that system. I am really excited to see once I get more VMs on there how well it will handle all of it.

We just barely bought our Pure Storage, so we haven't been able to use Evergreen Storage subscription at all yet. However, it's a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm doing right now again.

We did evaluate the HPE 3PAR and HPE all-flash systems, because we were a legacy HPE environment, where everything we had was HPE. Beyond that, we didn't really investigate any other vendors. We read some white papers on Dell EMC, but we didn't talk to anybody about them.

Pure was very responsive when we talked to them when we were just investigating on what to buy. They were always the first ones to get back to us and talk to us. They came onsite multiple times to help us with any questions that we had. That level of customer experience was really helpful in making a decision.

We decided to go with Pure Storage more for the Evergreen Storage subscription. With Pure Storage, it was a little bit more to initially get it in, but then you have the Evergreen Storage subscription, which is essentially less than the support on HPE, and that came with the upgrades down the road. HPE subscription support would only cover failures. It didn't have any upgrades built in to it. So, if five years down the road, we went with the HPE system then we would have had to buy whole new storage array to upgrade it. That really played a lot into us wanting to go with Pure Storage. We didn't want to have to do this multiple times.

I have made recommendations to friends who work for other companies that are looking for storage right now to just go ahead and buy Pure Storage. From what I have seen, it will beat out any other storage solution.

From the performance that I've seen, the simplicity of how to use it, the responsiveness, and customer experience, it is one of the best companies that I have worked with so far.

I was actually branded as a SAN environment when we got Pure Storage. For me, it was learning that a SAN environment wasn't necessarily as complex as I thought it was. You have vendors out there, like Pure Storage, who makes things super simple and easy to use. 

I work for a company that offers outsourcing services for IT solutions. I work in system support and we are resellers of Pure Storage FlashArray. 

I'm a Pure Storage fan because I think this solution offers great performance. It provides fast access, is user-friendly and it's easy for us to support this product. The product is also very powerful with high-speed duplication which makes it easier to manage things. I understand that there is a new version of system operation that includes a self-protect configuration to avoid getting hacked. It's crucial for us here in Brazil where we need to be safe. 

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. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable, we haven't had any problems in five years. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have a close relationship with customer support and they are good. 

Positive

The initial setup is very easy, there aren't any problems. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

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.

Access speed and power consumption are most valuable.

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 have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable.

We did not have to do that, but it looks like it is.

It is very good.

It is our first solid-state array.

It is very easy.

It could always be lower, but it's okay.

I would advise others to have a go at it because it has worked fine for us. I would rate it a 10 out of 10.