Everpure FlashArray Reviews

It provides better performance for our desktops.

It has positively affected our space requirements.

We have reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.

We haven't done as much capacity planning as we should have. I am sure it would help us.

The most valuable feature is its performance.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are very good.

The upgrade architecture is very good.

Our data reduction rates, latency, and availability are all good.

The stability is very good. The stability and performance are the best things about the solution.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have undergone an upgrade of firmware.

We have seen a reduction in TCO.

The cost has room for improvement.

Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade.

We did an evaluation of Dell EMC, Pure Storage, and NetApp.

I would recommend trying it. We like the product, and it works well.

We use it for our financial core storage.

It has been a good product. It has a lot of good features on it.

Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both. Therefore, we are NCA compliant.

The solution has minimized the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.

It has helped by shrinking our space requirements.

The encryption is its most valuable feature.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are pretty good.

Its ability to simplify storage seems good.

The stability is very good. It has been stable.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is very good.

We need the encryption at REST. That is why they wanted this solution.

We used an integrator, Jack Henry, for the deployment.

The cost has room for improvement.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, and Dell EMC.

Look into Pure Storage because it seems to be a good solution. 

It's the back-end storage for all our virtual environments.

The performance is great.

The predictive performance analytics are good.

It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them.

It has been scalable so far.

We have also used NetApp, but not for all-flash. This is our first all-flash solution.

We were looking for an all-flash solution, and Pure Storage is the best solution right now.

Just give it a try.

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. 

We use it as reliable storage.

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

The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially.

Reliability and performance are its most valuable feature.

Its ability to simplify storage is great.

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

The stability is tremendous.

The scalability is great.

The technical support is great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression works fine.

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

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

It is for storage.

It gives us capacity planning.

It saves us on administrative work.

The most valuable feature is its speed.

It is easy to use and manage.

The time to value of the solution is pretty quick.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

The technical support is great.

The technology that we had was outdated. We were using HPE SAN.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just followed the information on the screen: click, click, click. 

The start up process is very easy.

We haven't seen ROI yet.

The licensing is $100,000.

Darktrace, which we are also using.

I would recommend buying it.

As a customer, we use them as our Tier 1 storage arrays. It has been amazing. It's extremely fast, reliable, and resilient.

We have done a lot of different things with Pure Storage. We have included some real-time analytics that we developed for our eCommerce website and run those on FlashBlade. We used FlashBlade as it was the only storage platform fast enough to keep up with that data flow.

We are able monitor I/O, latency, read/write, capacity used, and all the different metrics that the Pure gives us the ability to monitor.

It definitely affected the ability to capacity plan, but in a good way. We have all the visibility into the capacity, forecasting, and all the metrics that the solution provides us with.

It takes drastically less time to manage and administer the solution. We would have about three or four people who were dedicated just to work on storage with only one guy who could actually do the Hitachi replication, because it used old archaic technology called HORCM files. In the Pure Storage realm, this is not true. All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it.

When I was a customer, the most valuable feature is the ease of use. 

It is the whole package: The ease of use, cost, and the ability for it to perform at a level that traditional storage arrays just can't compete with.

It simplifies storage. In the old days, you had to go and decide what ports were going to go to what workloads, which was a lot of work. You had to set up replication. Now, everything is just a few clicks away. It is set up exactly like you would want it to be. That is what it does. It simplifies and optimizes the solution.

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.

The stability is great. We have had no issues. We have never had an issue or outage that has been related to Pure Storage.

We decided how big of a failure domain that we wanted to entertain. We decided to split three into what could have been one single controller interface system. However, at some point, if we lose 500 terabytes, what does that do to our company? Now, we have things like active clusters which mitigate a lot of these issues, but people still need to be wary about how they design their failure domains.

The support is great. The support has been amazing.

We thought we we going to go with the new version of Hitachi, and everything was going to fine: Lift, shift and replace with the new one. What we started doing was exploring the marketplace, then figuring out, "Is this the best option for us? Could it be simpler?" Because the Hitachi was a tank, but it was not simple to use. It performed very well, but it did not perform like an all-flash array does.

The analytics are great. Previously, we had Hitachi solutions, and it was very hard to understand what was happening with the array. One of the great things about the Pure Storage solution is you can instantly know just by logging in or checking Pure1. You can do it on your phone. Hitachi doesn't have anything like that. It's amazing that you can get this type of visibility from your storage array. All the analytics feed up into Pure1, and you can just see them whenever you want.

It used to be that people would buy Pure Storage arrays and they would use it for a single instance application, like an Oracle database. We never did that. We used the product to replace our entire giant Hitachi G1000 storage arrays. Everything that we had went to the Pure Storage arrays. We had three giant M70s that are now X90s which house everything the company was running when I was a customer.

The initial setup was very simple. They came in before lunch, and we had it up after lunch. Then, we were already starting to move workloads to it after that.

We have upgraded firmware controllers and physical controllers. It works exactly like they say it does, which is the best part. You don't even notice. Business runs as usual. You can replace a controller, it fails over to the other controller, and everything runs smooth as butter.

We used Sirius Computer Solutions for the deployment. They have been our partner and VAR for a long time. They know our environment very well and were with us every step of the way.

From a footprint perspective, we used to have big giant racks of storage on both sides of the data center. We would have to plan and have a hole where the future one would go. Now, we don't have to do that at all. They are just sitting in the rack right next to it.

We have a seen a reduction in TCO. It is definitely a cost-effective solution for us. We have seen ROI.

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription. We like it a lot. We recently upgraded from the M-series to the X-series FlashArrays. We used the Evergreen Storage solution and expanded our footprint.

We evaluated Hitachi, who was our current vendor. We evaluated Dell EMC for the VMAX and XtremIO. Then, we evaluated Pure Storage. 

We are also a NetApp customer, so we evaluated them. However, we don't run any block storage on NetApp, only files.

Do a fair evaluation. Be objective, look at the different technologies, and use the technologies. See what they look like and what you will to have to deal with when you're using the products. It's easy to make a decision based on bullet points, but it's hard to make a decision on actual use of the actual technology.

We are a Chef shop, so we integrate it into Chef and VMware, vRA, and vRO. We also use all of the plug-ins. The integration is easy, simple, and seamless.

For most of the workloads, the solution’s inline deduplication and compression has performed fine. We had a few workloads that were already precompressed, so when you put those workloads on top of a storage system that does compression and dedupe, they don't compress again. So, they tend to eat up a little storage. Therefore, we specifically targeted some third-party applications, like IDERA SQL Safe, and tried to remove them from the environment. This way Pure Storage could then compress and dedupe those SQL backup files.

We are from Texas. Power is like ten cents a kilowatt. Texans apparently don't care that power is cheap. From a power requirement, it definitely has used less power, but we didn't use that as a metric to look at.

Biggest lesson learned: Why didn't I switch sooner?

It is our core storage.

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

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

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

Manageability is its most valuable feature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

The primary use case is for any server and database that has high I/O demands on disk.

It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have.

Our Pure Storage unit is really small, so we just move what we have to it.

• Speed
• Scalability
• The cost

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.

The stability is good. It hasn't gone down since we've had it.

From what we've been told, it looks like it would be really scalable if we purchased more. The licensing and scalability patterns are really cost-effective. We don't have to rebuy things in different tiers to just continue on, so we like that.

The technical support is really good. They are really responsive. For the call that we had, we had a call back within 15 to 20 minutes.

We noticed a dramatic increase in application performance when moving it from NetApp to Pure Storage.

Pure Storage seemed more cost-effective than NetApp. When we did our POC, we saw big performance gains between all-flash on NetApp and all-flash on Pure Storage. It was significantly better.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. They set it all up for us.

They pretty much manage the firmware upgrades for us, and they've gone well so far.

We dealt directly with Pure Storage engineers for the deployment, and our experience was good.

We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.

It is cheaper than NetApp.

There were several vendors we looked at. We also looked at Nimble, but we did not do at PoC of them.

We just liked the way Pure was pitched to us overall.

Get a PoC and see how it works out for you. See if you see an improvement with your apps and go from there.

We really like it. It is really speedy.

We use virtual servers on there.

We have tons of capacity on it.

It is fast and reliable. It works. 

For three years, we haven't had any trouble with it. It is reliable. Once it is installed, off it goes.

The scalability is handy. You can just add more drives. They automatically synchronize. You don't have to do anything but snap them in there. It is pretty easy.

I can't even remember dealing with technical support. 

We had tons of old physical servers and needed the storage room. It was more cost-effective to set this solution up for running our VM environment off it.

The solution is bigger and faster than what we had before.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and simple. 

We used Compunet for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

The solution has reduced our power usage.

The solution could be cheaper.

There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it.

I would recommend to go with this solution.

We have integrated the solution with VMware, and the process was seamless. We've never had any trouble with it.

Flash drives make an amazing difference.