Everpure FlashArray Reviews

We're using Pure Storage FlashArray for VMware; we have all of our VMs on it, and we use it strictly for VMs, management, and also replication, doing the active DR replication.

Pure Storage FlashArray has helped us decrease the storage footprint in a significant way; the dedupe and compression that they have is really good, and we're getting about four to ten in the deduplication and compression.

Pure Storage FlashArray is very easy to use and easy to set up; it's not super complex, it's pretty simple. The interface of Pure Storage FlashArray is really good, helping out with creating volumes or LUNs. It's just very intuitive, making it easy to use. I'm not stumbling around trying to find everything. 

The best way to improve Pure Storage FlashArray is the active DR because that can get very confusing, especially when you're trying to test a failover and replicate back; better instructions on how to do that would help because we actually lost an entire volume when we were testing out some stuff as the fingerprint got reinitialized, and when you replicated back, it didn't know about that volume, causing a failure in that process. Better documentation on their failover would make a big difference.

I've been using it for three years.

I have not seen any instability with Pure Storage FlashArray.

The scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray is very good; it scales very well.

The quality and speed of support are very good; they will answer the phone and help you through the issue you're running into. I would give them a nine out of ten.

I've used alternatives such as NetApp FlashArray, and for the VMware side, we were using HPE 3PAR before we migrated off of the 3PAR onto Pure Storage FlashArray.

Pure Storage is really good on the LUN presentation; however, I haven't worked with Pure Storage for the NFS and CIFS side because that's what we were using NetApp for, and I think NetApp shines in the NFS and CIFS side. Regarding speed, the speed of the array is really good.

The deployment was quite simple and not difficult to set up. The only issues we encountered involved our security team and allowing traffic to go out to the Internet. We had to navigate various challenges to make everything work. We had it up and running within a day for the first time.

Since we were the government, we weren't allowed to let Pure control our systems, so we did all the upgrades ourselves; their upgrades are very frequent, making it a little difficult to keep up with them. We would stay on one version and not do any incremental upgrades; for example, we would upgrade from 6.15 to 6.17, sticking with the stable version instead of upgrading to a non-stable version. We would stay on the long-term release, and whenever that changed, we would move up to the new long-term release.

It required a whole team, about three of us, working on it and getting it built.

The pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray is in line with all the other vendors; they haven't priced themselves out of the market yet, and the Evergreen side of what they offer is actually really interesting because you can replace your head units or existing storage, and it just migrates, so it's actually really nice.

The dashboard is really good; as long as you're allowed to use it. We're not allowed to use it because we are a government organization, so not all of our Pure Storage showed up there because we don't allow internet access to that equipment. Overall, it gives you a way to see what you have that is presented out to Pure Storage, allowing you to have a central view of all your systems in one pane instead of having to go to all different clusters. 

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

I support Pure Storage FlashArray, so I use it for storage and do some automation; however, the main use is storage.

The solution has helped decrease our total cost of ownership thanks to the compression, so we don't need to buy as much storage as we use, which helps keep our costs down.

In Pure Storage FlashArray, the dedupe and compression are excellent, and performance is good too. 

We use the Evergreen architecture for our upgrades and scaling. The portal, which we use for upgrades, is exceptional, and it influences our ability to maintain uptime because we can do most tasks from there. The single management pane of glass works effectively, and the portal is excellent.

The solution has decreased our storage footprint, so instead of using an array with a higher capacity, due to the dedupe and compression, we can use a much smaller array to accommodate our data. It has decreased our storage by four times.

The solution has helped reduce downtime, and downtime is similar to most storage solutions, which have good resilience.

More cloud connectivity would enhance the solution. Something that could be slightly enhanced is additional AI capabilities. These areas have room for improvement.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray since 2008, so I have 17 years of experience.

For stability, I rate it a ten out of ten. We don't have many problems.

For scalability, I rate it a six out of ten. We reach a limit. We never reached this limit, however, the architecture allows you to go until a certain size, and after that, you have to buy another array.

The environment is used across multiple locations, spread around the globe. The number of users that use the solution is close to 1000.

I would rate the technical support for Pure Storage FlashArray as an eight out of ten.

Positive

When comparing Pure Storage FlashArray with other products or vendors such as Dell and IBM, I prefer it because the support and management are better and easier. The performance and cost compared to other disk and flash storages is probably better in cost, while the performance is the same today. The main advantage is in management and support.

It's easy to deploy. We have it across multiple locations.

The solution requires maintenance, and it is easy.

I would recommend this product to other users. It is a good product. 

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray overall as an eight out of ten. It is excellent. 

I think plenty of our customers find Everpure FlashArray's single management pane of glass important because they are telling us that they are using the management once a month or something like that. It's simple and not demanding on either the training or the maintenance. It's easy to find the assets even if you are not entering many times, and it's easy to perform changes. Now it's becoming even much easier because if you are working with seven or ten arrays in your environment, with Fusion, you can manage all of them with just one. Having access to one of those arrays, you can be performing operations as a whole with the rest. The latest upgrades and software functionalities they are developing make this even easier. You can even perform operations with Copilot, which is integrated. It's becoming easier and easier compared to other solutions. I know about Data on Tap, for example, or some other solutions of the other manufacturers. Compared to those, this is something that the customers are telling us. When they are buying Pure, they are finding that it's much easier and more robust.

I see room for improvement because the only moment you don't have room for improvement is when either you are dead or you are obsolete. There's room for improvement because the market is going to demand more and more automation, which Pure has a very clear roadmap about. The situation about pricing is uncertain, and nobody can tell if it's going to change and revert to a prior state. The difference in pricing could become a problem for Pure because the commoditization of the solutions could lead to a different price being a problem. Even though there are differences, you have to keep working to ensure those differences are related to the pricing and make sense. The gap and balance between pricing and features is important, and Pure should keep trying to be similar in prices, at least not just in the total cost of ownership for six years, but at the starting point. More room for improvements exists in general when you are in the market. Pricing and being different and making things easier for the customer is going to keep you in the market for a long term. Probably there are more things that could be improved, but overall, those two things are what I think they have to keep an eye on.

I rate the technical support of Everpure FlashArray really, really good. This is what the customers are telling us that they are most happy with. The technical support is what is convincing them the most that this is the best solution. It's very good compared to other support options.

I would rate their support as nine point five out of ten. The company is growing and it's difficult to keep the excellence and the level of quality that they maintain. The quality in this case is excellent. For a long time, the solution was ten out of ten. Now it's nine point five out of ten because we are so used to having responses in fifteen minutes and having so much excellent service that when it's just superb, it can sometimes leave the impression that they scaled to a huge size and it's quite similar to what it was.

My experience with the deployment of Everpure FlashArray is that it is easy to deploy. This was the main first reason I came to start working with Pure. I was used to deployments that could last for weeks, but the deployment of Everpure FlashArray takes forty-five minutes at maximum. When you have training and are trained, if this is not the very first time you are doing it by yourself, it could take a little more, but one hour at the most. This has been my experience for all the time we are working with Pure. It's not that there are more features today, but the complexity of installation has remained the same.

Overall, I am sure that Everpure FlashArray is the best option on the market. I have been competing with many other solutions, and the fact is that when I'm selling to any customer that is buying this solution for a long-term project, we are usually offering the Forever option for the maintenance. The Evergreen Forever program is valuable. A couple of our customers have had their SSD modules changed at no cost to NVMe modules with much higher capacities and much higher performance without any cost. They are keeping the promises they made ten years ago. This is quite important because most of our customers bought this solution three years ago or six years ago, and they expect the same in the next years. This is of utmost importance. The promises they were making at the beginning, they are keeping them. The pricing of the maintenance is so important. We are keeping the same cost to the customer for maintenance that we started seven years ago. This is really important when you want to keep a healthy infrastructure.

Nowadays, I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray reasonable as the difference between Pure and other solutions is almost not much of a difference. Pure is going to have the prices raised as the rest of the manufacturers because this is an environment that is the same for everyone almost. It used to be a difference, a premium of nearly thirty to fifty percent higher in the case of Pure Everpure when it wasn't called Everpure a couple of years ago. You had to speak to the customer and sell them the difference between the solutions because talking capacity to capacity, terabyte per terabyte, euro per euro and IOPS per IOPS, you have to make the customer see the differences, and the pricing was much higher compared. Nowadays, there's not much of a difference because the hardware cost has reached a point that is quite balanced with other solutions. Overall, if you are comparing some other solutions, they don't have a program like the Evergreen program. In the end, in a six-year term, all the other solutions are becoming more expensive than Pure. I would rate this review as nine point five out of ten.

Our customers also appreciate Everpure FlashArray. As I remember from my memory, our customers did not complain about Everpure FlashArray. The function is good, but the pricing and some of our customers prefer to upgrade the firmware or software by themselves. With Everpure FlashArray, you have to use an authorized engineer. I think this is a common concern from our customers, as they might prefer to do it by themselves.

Everpure FlashArray has helped decrease my customer's storage footprint. Our customers always use Everpure FlashArray as a performance or hot data storage solution. The compression ratio is very good, and the throughput is excellent.

I have used Everpure FlashArray's Evergreen architecture for my upgrades and scaling up.

Everpure FlashArray's continuous uptime capability is a really important function for my customer's ability to maintain operations.

Everpure FlashArray has helped to decrease my customer's storage footprint.

Everpure FlashArray has also helped to reduce downtime. The distribution and selling channel in Taiwan is not as strong compared to other countries, which is a consideration for our customers.

Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also have the NetApp AFF series or Dell Isilon.

I have been dealing with Everpure FlashArray for four years.

Everpure FlashArray is very good with AI development. I would say Everpure FlashArray is very suitable for low downtime and critical mission storage. Customers who need critical mission storage and those chasing performance should consider this solution. Our customers have to realize that if they want to iterate fast in AI development, they need to invest in Everpure FlashArray.

In the long term, I would recommend Everpure FlashArray. With the Evergreen program, you will always keep the hardware fresh, which is very beneficial. Our customers who may have an old NetApp with storage that is end of service or end of lifetime but is still being used for six or eight years in Taiwan are experiencing issues with old, unsecure machines that have no maintenance. I do not see this as very good because the machine just survives, but the productivity is very low. Everpure FlashArray always keeps the hardware fresh. Our customers can scale up or scale out, raise the performance, and expand the storage spaces by investing every year. From a sustainability perspective, I would say Everpure FlashArray is a better choice.

I would rate Everpure FlashArray's technical support as nine out of ten. It is excellent.

For now, our customers do not have the Evergreen program because of the price. Evergreen is an excellent product, but the total cost of ownership is too high. Our customers say that if they had Evergreen, they would upgrade their storage maybe every four years and could save on maintenance fees.

The initial deployment is very smooth. We always just connect to the network and proceed. It is a very good experience to deploy Everpure FlashArray.

Everpure FlashArray is more suitable with the NVIDIA DGX series because most computer science applications cannot build that much throughput to storage. If you are using the NVIDIA HGX, especially the NVIDIA DGX series, they can produce that much throughput and will stretch the performance. I would say Everpure FlashArray is more suitable for customers with performance requirements.

In the long term, I would recommend Everpure FlashArray. With the Evergreen program, you will always keep the hardware fresh.

The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can save their investment. We always lose because of the pricing issue.

Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also have the NetApp AFF series or Dell Isilon.

I cannot think of any negative feedback because I always prefer Everpure FlashArray. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

Pure Storage FlashArray is used for storage purposes.

The best features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the all-flash NVMe, which is the primary one, along with the increased throughput compared to other products, and absolutely close to zero downtime. Pure Storage provides immediate support during any break fixes or outages. In the past 9-10 years, there have been only three to four incidents with serious downtime, and Pure Storage was able to get back on our feet pretty quickly with each of them.

Having a single management pane of glass view is very important for me, as I have 90 to 100 Pure Storage FlashArray arrays. The Pure1 console allows me to access, monitor, and administer all the Pure Storage FlashArray arrays, making it absolutely essential to have the single pane of view. This is a handy way to manage all arrays under one single pane, and this likely goes for other customers as well.

Regarding downtime reduction, Pure Storage FlashArray has reduced downtime by about 98%.

Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to enhance this aspect compared to other products. Even though Pure Storage FlashArray has started working on automation, I believe small issues should be fixed automatically without requiring manual intervention from me.

When I say automation, I mean that Pure Storage FlashArray should be able to auto-recover from small failures, as I do not see it doing this right now. For instance, even if there is a port failure, it requires my intervention. At some point, Pure Storage FlashArray should be able to auto-repair and auto-resolve many of these things, unless it is definitely a hardware replacement, which I understand.

I work with American Express and Pure Storage FlashArray is used a lot. I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for the past 9-10 years.

Overall, Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped decrease my storage footprint, as I have other solutions. It did not consolidate the other solutions, since we do not work with one storage vendor. We have multiple vendors and products, starting with 30 arrays and now at 90 arrays, which is a pretty big leap we have made. At the same time, it did not encourage us to decrease our footprints on the other products, as we have multiple products for multiple purposes.

For 90 arrays for Pure Storage FlashArray only, we have 20 plus engineers using the solution.

Regarding support for Pure Storage FlashArray, I rate it a nine.

Positive

We have experience with other solutions such as Dell, NetApp, and HP. We do not have IBM, but we have Isilon, which is also Dell, along with some object storage and S3 compatible storage.

In terms of deployment experience with Pure Storage FlashArray, I find it to be pretty easy.

Deploying one array takes three to four hours if the rack and cabling are in place. However, a week is a standard time because we have to do a lot of rack and cabling and physical infrastructure as well.

We handle a lot of upgrades ourselves, but if there is something critical, the vendor comes into the picture. In terms of dependability, we are at 80-20, with 80% of the work done by ourselves and 20% requiring Pure Storage FlashArray's help.

Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped decrease the total cost of ownership.

Regarding pricing, I think we are around eight on this scale. When I first started with Pure Storage FlashArray, I would say the product was very cheap compared to other storage products. Starting around 10-15 years ago, and obviously to balance in the market, Pure Storage FlashArray had to increase their cost. While I still find it very cost-effective, prices have increased a lot in the past 10 to 12 years. Along with that, there are new capabilities, so I would go with eight.

In evaluating Pure Storage FlashArray against other disk and flash storages in terms of performance and power, I think it is on par with the biggest player in the market, which is Dell EMC. There are cheaper software storage solutions available in the market. Therefore, if Pure Storage FlashArray can work on the costing, it will be good for end-users like me.

We are actually using the self-service portal for upgrades. We started doing this for the past one year and are yet to make a transition to Evergreen. It is in the roadmap to use Evergreen because Pure Storage FlashArray has not actually given us the complete view for Evergreen, since a lot of our products are being onboarded on Pure Storage FlashArray. As of now, we are doing the self-service upgrade and it is in the roadmap to have Evergreen onboarded.

Regarding how Pure Storage FlashArray has helped with decreasing downtime, in terms of how it has decreased my storage footprint, I am unsure if I am referring to storage footprints on other products or not.

Pure Storage FlashArray does not require maintenance such as updates, upkeeping, or patching. It was a partner purchase, and I was not actually involved in the purchasing process, as we have a dedicated team. We have a long-standing relationship with Pure Storage FlashArray, so I think it always goes pretty smoothly. As we talk, we are still in the process of buying multiple Pure Storage FlashArray products, so the process has been absolutely smooth and the experience has been good.

I would recommend Pure Storage FlashArray to other users because, first, the speed that I get with Pure Storage FlashArray is not remotely possible with any other product at this price range, and second, the support is absolutely fantastic. For P1 scenarios, we get on a call with an engineer, and the engineers are mostly available throughout the day, whether it is a weekday or a weekend. When we need someone to join the webex, Pure Storage FlashArray joins in very quickly, which is not possible with the other products. We prefer Pure Storage FlashArray, which is why we have a lot of them. Pure Storage FlashArray is the primary solution at the moment for SAN and block storage. I would rate this review a 9.

The main use case for this solution is block storage. I deal with the transportation logistics industry.

It overperforms both in terms of storage capacity and throughput, and bandwidth capability. The single management pane of glass is pretty useful, and it's nice to be able to get a snapshot of the environment. 

We have a dedicated array for our data warehouse, for our SQL Server workloads, which has allowed us to empower the SQL team to give more frequent updates to the business so they can make data-driven decisions.

Based on the last Pure Storage FlashArray that we purchased, the only thing that could be made better would be the price.

I have been dealing with Pure Storage FlashArray for about two and a half years.

The stability of Pure Storage FlashArray is extremely good, as we have never had any issues during many code upgrades, and the controllers have been resilient.

Whether Pure Storage FlashArray is a scalable solution depends on the product you're in; we ended up buying a second array. Theoretically, we can do controller upgrades and get into a larger chassis, but there was a limit to how far we could go without needing to do a full migration, so I do not have direct experience with that.

I would rate the support with Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

Positive

We previously used Dell EMC as a different solution before switching to Pure Storage. The main reason we switched from Dell to Pure was that the management was more difficult, and we needed faster storage, specifically an all-flash solution.

It was quite simple to get online. We were fortunate that our account manager was able to come out and perform the array initialization before our go-live date. So, when we stuck it in a rack and got it online, it was already ready to go. The initial setup was straightforward. 

It's hard to determine the return on investment with Pure Storage FlashArray, as the last array we bought replaced the primary one we had run out of space on, and we moved where the SQL workload had been shipped over. Our current workload, particularly the SQL use case, would not be possible on mechanical storage, and the ease of use for the small team for the array is important for supporting that workload.

The pricing and licensing are straightforward, but I do consider it to be expensive.

I cannot say how Pure Storage FlashArray compares versus other disk or flash storage solutions in terms of sustainability, as it is not something we were interested in. In terms of cost, I believe Pure Storage FlashArray was probably competitive with other all-flash solutions, but the leading competitor had more complex management.

Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped to decrease our organization's storage footprint, as far as the physical storage or the space it's taking up in the rack. Our physical storage has not decreased because we have actually increased the number of arrays since moving to Pure, but our overall amount of data has also increased. Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped to decrease the total cost of ownership, and I believe our total cost has probably gone up, but that's balanced by our increased amount of data and number of use cases. I cannot say how Pure Storage FlashArray differs in terms of power. 

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten. It’s really good. The only negative experience I had was related to getting a replication figured out. We encountered a couple of issues with that once, but those problems were compounded by issues with our network architecture. 

I managed Pure Storage in my previous organization for various clients. We had clients from multiple domains, such as the financial domain, the automotive sector, and the banking industry. These customers had three different types of applications using Pure Storage. One of them was the Oracle Database with high throughput and low latency requirements.

The second one had time-sensitive functions, where a two-millisecond delay was acceptable but a five-millisecond delay was not. It required indexing and low latency.

The third type of use was hosting a virtual infrastructure, such as VMware VMs. These are the three areas where people used Pure Storage, specifically FlashArray storage, in their environment.

They offer a cloud-based solution where in one pane, you can see the entire cluster or Pure FlashArray Storage, even if it is spread across two locations such as America and Europe. You can do health checks to see how your storage is performing and what capacity is being used. You can also generate a report. If one of your clusters is having a capacity or load performance issue, from the Pure portal, you can do a simulation of future capacity. You can also check what kind of workload you want to have on a particular cluster. Based on that, it will tell you whether the upgrade is feasible or not. You can figure this out yourself through the portal as a user. You do not need to reach out to an account manager or a salesperson for that.

It provided simplicity. There was also the option to upgrade the storage cluster every three years. When older technology was becoming obsolete for a client, Pure Storage provided an upgrade path with minimal cost, specifically for controller upgrades. During that project, my interaction with Pure Storage facilitated the transition from an M50 to an X50 controller, which comes in the high-performance category. This feature demonstrates the adaptability and forward-thinking approach of Pure Storage.

It took our clients about a week to realize its benefits. It helped clients decrease their organization’s storage footprint. With the NVMe technology, the footprint was reduced. They were also able to save a lot of rack space and physical space along with the electricity usage.

In one of the organizations, people were having issues with the VDI infrastructure. Their data was hosted on a VMware platform, and the backend of those virtual machines, the VDI, was on Pure Storage. Something went wrong in the virtual infrastructure, and they were having long latencies. People were getting disconnected from their virtual infrastructure. At the time, I discovered that the best features of Pure Storage are their support and analytics. Pure Storage and VMware were connected through the SAN infrastructure. I got an email from Pure Storage saying that there is something wrong with one of the hosts. There is a CRC error, which means that there is something wrong at the hardware level. When people were complaining about this issue, I correlated that email and checked that particular VMware host. I realized that the information that I got from Pure Storage almost three days ago was correct. I could fix the issue in 15 minutes. They proactively tell you about the potential issues in your infrastructure. 

They have a very good support system, and the GUI is also very intuitive.

Based on my experience with various technologies like EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage, one area for improvement is compliance certifications. NetApp excels in this area, particularly in the American Army or defense sector, where NetApp has approval, whereas others are striving to achieve the same. NetApp also delivers security, ransomware protection, and scale-up capabilities more effectively. These are the areas for improvement.

As an admin, I started working with Pure Storage in 2016, and I was working with it till last year.

Pure Storage had operational challenges between 2016 to 2018, impacting perceived reliability. I encountered instances where the entire cluster went down due to workload and throughput issues. We were considering alternative solutions like EMC, but I noticed improvements in later projects and encountered no incidents. This indicates a significant improvement in stability over time.

Our clients were enterprises with a very large footprint with multiple petabytes. A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.

I led a team of 11 system administrator engineers while also serving as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for this technology in India, specifically in Bangalore and Pune. The U.S. team had around the same number of staff, adding up to approximately 30 team members, including managers.

I would rate their customer support a nine out of ten. It is definitely one of the best.

Positive

I have worked with various technologies such as EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage. One of the clients transitioned from a larger reliance on EMC technologies such as VMAX, PowerMAX, and VNX to focusing solely on Pure Storage for SAN infrastructure and NetApp for NAS infrastructure. This strategic shift, established around 2017, reduced their data center technological variety to just Pure Storage and NetApp, highlighting the evolution of their approach.

Deciding on a solution can be challenging. FlashArray technology is maturing, with options based on the infrastructure and user preference. The minimal learning curve makes it a recommended choice. I have extensive experience with NetApp and Pure Storage, and I can confidently endorse both technologies, as they have been significant in my professional life. Their performance is pretty similar, but NetApp leads in scalability. Pure Storage is also more expensive than NetApp.

Both companies are working on sustainability and reducing their footprint. They both are doing well in this area.

Installation is notably simple for Pure Storage. Their technology is devoid of complexities. Once you understand their technology, managing it becomes convenient and efficient.

An on-prem implementation can take months because of multiple points or multiple decisions. You have to work with your solutions partner or the sales, presales, and accounting team.

In terms of maintenance, they have a release every year or six months. We had to do those upgrades.

In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage. The initial investment, especially in the first year, could be high due to the hybrid workload and spinning disks, but over three to five years, it reduces.

The cost of Pure Storage is subjective and determined by your environment. Pure Storage tends to be more expensive than NetApp, but it is cheaper than EMC. Performance varies with data workload, making cost considerations complex. There is not a straightforward answer.

Pure Storage is a leader in FlashArray Storage technology. They excel in terms of technology and support but lack the broad ecosystem required for diverse client needs. Pure Storage caters well to niche clients, especially in FlashArray storage technology, but it may not meet the needs of object storage clients.

Overall, I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

Initially, there were a few use cases we started with when looking at alternative storage platforms. Once upon a time, we were ran a different platform that was physically huge, power hungry, low on capacity and mediocre on performance. Use was complex and did not scale very well. It was also very cost prohibitive to maintain. We quickly outgrew it, especially when we started to adopt VMware vSphere virtualization.  We knew we had to replace this beast with something that made more sense for us.  We needed to reduce the footprint down to something a lot more reasonable.  We wanted to contain costs, especially when it comes to hardware investments and maintenance renewals. We also needed more intelligence, visibility and flexibility in our data storage platform.

We were introduced to Pure Storage through one of our long-term partners in the Chicagoland area who brought them in for a meet and greet. Their presentation was compelling. It was exciting to see what they were doing with technology, especially with the concept of data deduplication, so we decided to give it a go. The results were simply unbelievable. We deployed Pure into multiple datacenters effectively consolidating down entire row's of storage to a single rack. It ran circles around our legacy platform and what it did for VMWare was really something to see.  Boot times were drastically reduce, latency went from 30-40ms down to sub millisecond...consistently. 

As we continued to use Pure and their products evolved to add in additional features/technologies, we were able to solve other issues we never knew we had.  Our BC/DR playbooks were effectively rewritten to take advantage of array to array replication for disaster recovery.  Snapshots cut our product upgrade times in half because we no longer needed to rely on taking full backups of our environment before deploying new code.  Snaps were immediate and rolling back was almost just as fast. It was a true game changer.  Pure had single handedly improved our business strategies and making us more agile in provisioning storage and overall, running our datacenters. 

Over the years, we have witnessed Pure continuing to deliver new feature sets and technical enhancements in it's Purity code base.  Did I mention that all of these features and enhancements are part of cost of support?  Yep...no nickle and diming people to death. 

As alluded to above, our environment is far more performant, reliable and feature rich since going on their platform. 

Pure has allowed us to minimize the storage footprint with their products. Their Evergreen support model effectively eliminates forklift upgrades and takes it one step further by rewarding customs who stay current on support by giving them free in family controller upgrades to the latest revision.  Did I mention it was free??   

The Pure1 portal gives me a unified single pane of glass to view my fleet of arrays globally. In addition, it integrates with our VMware vSphere platform, has it's own analytics engine and allows me the ability to self-upgrade the arrays.  It is also an invaluable tool for annual budgeting with their built in 'what if' planning tool.

As we needed to grow in capacity, we were able to do so without increasing footprint.  This is done by replacing smaller devices with larger ones. The array handles all the internal data migration seamlessly in the background without needing to be taken offline.

The snapshot and replication capabilities of the arrays improved disaster recovery and data protection in events like ransomware attacks by enabling us to revert to good datasets without complete loss of our (and our customers) data. 

Lastly, I have to say that their hardware architecture and Purity operating system has been nothing but stellar.  In all the years we have been using Pure, we never had an availability event.  They are the only platform/technology we have that I can honestly say has had a 100% uptime relative to storage availability.

During their early years, I was a member of Pure's Customer Advisory Board. In addition, when we first adopted Pure, they did not have replication GA yet. We got into their beta testing program and help them work out certain issues with that technology. One weakness I can say the array has, still to this day, is limited control on scheduling snapshots.  

Depending on the type of replication schedule you are building, you may or may not have control on specifying the start time of a given replication schedule. This is not a very big problem in the grand scheme of things, but something nonetheless that has bothered me about the scheduler in general.  

Another area for improvement would be automatic host alias creation. Other platforms such as EMC Unity/PowerStore will automatically detect the host name, create a alias for it and associate the logged in HBA's to it. Pure does not do this for you and as a result, requires manual configuration.  This can be very time consuming especially when you are deploying a large number of new servers. 

I have used the solution since 2011.

Again, stability has never been an issue and we have enjoyed a 100% uptime experience on Pure. This doesn't mean nothing goes wrong.  Sure, there were instances of a controller failover event, a drive or cache module failure, GBIC burns out, etc. Sometimes Pure Support knows about an issue before I do and is already reaching out to me about it. 

Phenomenal.  I have never seen a platform go through as many generational changes as this one and have it all be done in place. It's truly amazing.

Pure's support is exceptional; no other vendor reaches out proactively to improve something on their array. They're interested in our success, which is also in their best interest. This experience isn't common with other OEM's that I use in my datacenters.

Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention. Their portal simplifies engagement, and they consistently offer friendly, prompt assistance, deserving a ten out of ten.

Positive

As discussed above, yes, we did use several different block storage arrays/vendors. All did their job, but for one reason or another, aged very quickly.  They were either limited on features, supportability or became too cost prohibitive to keep after the initial support contract expired.  There were not the only reason though.  Pure simply had a superior product that changed the game for us and frankly, no one else at that time has anything GA that came close.

When standing up a new array, it is as simple as it gets.  Pure does it for us.  There is a method of self deployment, but I have found it better to have them ensure the system is properly implemented and functioning to their standards.  After all, they know it better than I do.  Once the array has been deployed, it is very easy to setup.  In fact, the configuration of the SAN fabric will take longer (depending on how many hosts you need to zone up to the array).  But once that is done, I am in and out of the array in about 30 min. This includes all the administrative configurations, host and host group creations and volume provisioning.

Pure Storage handles our initial implementation of the array and we handle the rest in-house. We've had the same technician each time. He is familiar with our environment, and I trust him implicitly. This consistency is unusual and greatly valued.

This is hard to quantify, but all I can say is that they have been worth the money.  I have said this to many people in my 32 years in IT.  The technology you forget is running in your datacenter is the best one you own. The ones that constantly remind you that they are there....yeah, those are the ones you should consider replacing. 

Well...you know the old saying, you get what you pay for.  I wont lie...Pure is no cheap.  I could easily buy another vendors AFA (all flash array) and possible save some $$$, but I wouldn't get everything I love about Pure. Switching platforms would be very painful for me.  

Not really.  We were already using best in breed platforms.  Pure was the new kid on the block and seamlessly fit into our existing environment. Sure there were other options, but they all kind of looked the same.  Pure simply stood out in the crowd and they were committed to proving themselves.

I could spend all day talking about the platform, the portal, their support teams, or their account management. Suffice to say, Pure actually cares about me being successful and I have seen them do the same thing with other customer too.  I have been a customer reference for them on many occasions and I tell all of Pure's prospects the same thing.  Your not just investing in hardware, your investing in a company committed to your success.