Everpure FlashArray Reviews

I have worked with Pure Storage for about three or four years now.

I have been in two companies where we were a partner with Pure, so my point of view of working with Pure was of course to sell them, but also to help customers with management of the arrays.

The intuitive way of managing storage is what I appreciate about Pure Storage FlashArray, along with the clever use of flash modules, and absolutely the data reduction, because they are using that in a very clever way to do compression and deduplication. I think they are ahead in doing data reduction on flash modules.

I find Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass very easy to work with. I appreciate the way they have rethought storage management, and especially the Pure1 platform, which is a cloud solution for managing a fleet to gain more insights into your storage environment.

Some of the other storage vendors are also very good, but the main benefit that Pure Storage brings to the table is the easy way to do it. I also think that Evergreen really helps customers. Additionally, you can rent the array through Evergreen//One, so you pay as you grow. That is one of the things I really think benefits some customers, as they don't have to buy the entire array upfront; they can just rent it and then pay for their consumption.

Pure Storage FlashArray has helped to decrease the organization's storage footprint. Because of the technology they have with very big DirectFlash Modules, which are 150 terabytes with 300 terabytes coming next month, the environment footprints are good. Also, the rack usage doesn't take up so much space, and that is another area they excel in because of those large flash modules. There is no need to use so much power, and you don't use a lot of rack space as well.

Pure Storage FlashArray has helped my customers to decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO). The ecosystem Pure has is unique, especially the data reduction. That's where you see a very good TCO on your arrays because you don't have to buy as much capacity compared to what you had to do with other vendors.

I haven't been so lucky to experience Pure Storage Evergreen architecture for upgrades or scaling up yet.

I want to have a better S3 object storage integration into Pure Storage FlashArray. I know it's coming, but I also know that initially it will be a light version of object storage. They should work on having multisite clustering for object storage on Pure Storage FlashArray.

I don't have any other missing features that I would like to see included in the next releases of Pure. I know what's coming on some of the roadmaps, and I think the things they are coming with are pretty good. Of course, you can always have better compression, but that depends on the data.

I have never had any downtimes, crashes, or stability issues with the FlashArrays.

Pure Storage scales very well, much the same as all other vendors do. They have really good scale-up and scale-out solutions for both Pure Storage FlashArray and FlashBlade.

I have only had one support case in all the years I have worked with Pure Storage. They are very professional, and I appreciate the flat organization; when you call, you reach someone from the level three team directly, which is unique for Pure.

I would rate the technical support and the customer service of Pure Storage a 10 because I am very satisfied with the resolution and the way they work.

I have worked with other products and other storage solutions as well. I have worked extensively with IBM storage, specifically FlashSystem from IBM. Additionally, I have worked with Dell EMC products including VMAX, VNX, ECS, Unity, Clariion, and many different storage vendors including Hitachi, NetApp, and 3PAR.

I have been involved in the deployment process. I have installed Pure Storage FlashArray in my former company.

The experience with the deployment process was very easy.

I use the CLI; it's a normal way to use CLI installations for Pure Storage.

I work with Pure Storage through partners. Here in Denmark, we cannot buy directly from Pure, we buy it through partners.

I worked in Kyndryl and Plan B as Engineer in the partner team.

It depends on the model when comparing Pure Storage FlashArray to other disk and flash storage solutions in terms of performance. You cannot just say Pure is faster than others because you have to compare different things; it really depends on the model.

The main disadvantage of Pure Storage FlashArray is the price.

For a colleague considering Pure Storage but who already has a flash solution for their high-performance workloads, I would say the big models of FlashArray, the XL models, are built for high workloads. It depends on what they currently have, but Pure has some benefits. As I have mentioned several times, they are ahead in technology, both regarding flash modules and data reduction. The new R5 model has built-in front-end encryption, enabling end-to-end encryption, and that is currently unique in the market.

In terms of power consumption, they are on par with others All flash Storage arrays. Flash technology generally uses less power. I believe Pure is slightly ahead in having low power consumption due to their large drives.

The price is higher for Pure Storage, but you also get much newer technology and numerous features that other vendors currently do not offer.

The key differences in Pure Storage FlashArray compared to other vendors lie in its way of thinking about new technology. The way they use DirectFlash is really ahead, so they are ahead in technology in my opinion.

I would absolutely recommend focusing on data reduction when considering Pure Storage FlashArray. They are at the forefront of technology in data reduction, as well as dense technology because of their larger DirectFlash modules. Dense technology and data reduction would be the two main points I would highlight.

Pure Storage has a higher base price than other storage vendors, but they also have some features that you have to pay for. In my opinion, you get what you pay for, but it is higher, and it's very hard to compete in the market compared to other vendors. However, if you understand the benefits of Pure, then it's a no-brainer in my opinion.

I rate this review a 9 overall.

My usual use cases for Everpure FlashArray involve being on the vendor side, where we sell the product to customers, but we also have managed services with various customers. It ranges from installing and performing code upgrades, so firmware upgrades for the boxes, doing hardware upgrades for the boxes, and performing your normal break-fix, replacing drives, controllers, power supplies, and those types of things.

Additionally, we perform baseline troubleshooting, level one and level two troubleshooting, as we are an ASP partner. If we cannot resolve it with level one and level two, we then contact Everpure and they get their level three, level four engineers on the line to assist with getting whatever the problems might be resolved.

What I appreciate most about Everpure FlashArray is its simplicity; it has a very simple design and is very user-friendly. If you want to use some of the more in-depth features, it takes a bit more understanding, but for the normal business person, if you install it, it is up and running within a couple of minutes. From the moment we get to site, we can get that machine up and running within half an hour to an hour, and then the user can start using it. It is very quick and easy and simplistic to use.

I think the Evergreen architecture for upgrades or scaling up is a very good feature; we sell it to most of our customers. They either use Evergreen or they do the Flex upgrade. With Evergreen, you are on gold maintenance for three years, and after three years, you get new hardware. Evergreen provides gold maintenance for three years, and then by the time you need to renew it, you get free hardware upgrades. You get the latest generation that is available, and we have had some customers that have been on Evergreen for twelve years now. In those twelve years, they have never had unscheduled downtime. They have had scheduled downtime if anything happened, but that system has always stayed online. This is a very nice architecture design, which is a good thing that draws a lot of customers into using this product.

I find Everpure FlashArray's single management pane of glass very important; it is very simple and very important to make it user-friendly. From a user point of view, they do not have to try and understand where everything sits. It is very simply explained, and it is easy to use. Everpure FlashArray has indeed helped decrease my customers' storage footprint. Pure Storage uses deduplication data, which dedupes the data and allows the customer to use more out of the capacity that is technically there.

I do not have any recommendations on how Everpure FlashArray can be improved; at the moment, Pure has excellent hardware, and it is a very good software company with the in-house code they create. I really do not have any recommendation; I love the product. They are very quick with bug fixes and code fixes and are very responsive to providing the next steps on how to do things better.

The only thing I might consider minor or unimportant in the grand scale of things is that, as one of, I think, two ASPs in South Africa, we do level one and level two support. A lot of times when we log cases, we get a level one engineer trying to assist us, and they go through the information we have already gone through. While this sometimes hinders the process, we have a fast way of going past that. This is not a major issue, but it would be helpful if they checked our status and assigned someone appropriately rather than just assigning anyone to the case.

I have used Everpure FlashArray for four and a half years, and Everpure FlashArray is our main product.

Regarding the stability and reliability level of Everpure FlashArray, I have never experienced an issue before. In my four and a half years of experience, the stability is perfect at one hundred percent. I have never seen the array give problems. If an array is not performing at the expected performance level, Pure South Africa will jump in immediately. I have seen two or three customer arrays being upgraded free of charge because the array did not meet the expectation of the customer when they bought it. Pure's way to handle things is very good.

Regarding the scalability of this solution, I think it is good; it scales very well. It is a very simple solution, so it has the array, and if you need more, you can attach shelves to it. With the new feature they have brought out, which is Fleet, it does really well in spreading your workload across multiple arrays while making it easy to provision or decommission items when using Fleet.

I rate the technical support for Everpure FlashArray a solid nine.

To a colleague from another company considering Pure Storage, I would say if you have already got something in your environment and it is working, there is no need to change it. However, if Pure Storage has a feature that you want that your current one cannot do, then I recommend them to change it, especially considering how their asynchronous and synchronous replication works and how their failovers operate, all of which are very good. I cannot speak about other storage arrays' quality, as I have not worked that much with them to have an educated opinion; I have only gone by what the papers say.

My usual initial setup process for Everpure FlashArray involves receiving the box from the vendor, from Pure itself, unpacking it, putting all the drives in, starting the system up, installing Purity on the system, and then doing a health check on the system. Once that is done, we shut it down, take it to the customer site, reconfigure it with the customer details, and then rack and stack and install it for the customer. It is very straightforward.

I usually participate in the initial setup of Everpure FlashArray.

Everpure FlashArray has helped my customers reduce downtime; I cannot tell you how much downtime, but definitely one hundred percent. Every single time when we do a hardware upgrade, we never have to schedule downtime. We have never had an outage in my four and a half years, but in our company's ten or eleven years, there has never been any planned upgrades that required downtime. I have never had a customer need to switch off or move their systems to their DR array. I have never had a customer needing to switch from production to DR so that we could work on the production array. Some customers prefer doing it because that is the model that they follow, but it has never been a requirement from Pure's side that we need to do it to work on the machine.

Unfortunately, I am not part of the sales team, so I do not know the prices well. From what I hear, the pricing of Everpure FlashArray is quite decent compared to other storage appliances in the market. I think it is very market-related and not exceptionally expensive compared to others. If I compare that to, for example, a NetApp or Huawei storage, I prefer Pure Storage because of their support, which goes above and beyond for me.

In comparing Everpure FlashArray versus other disk and flash storage solutions, I would say Pure is number one in terms of performance, power, cost, and sustainability. The most I work with is Pure Storage and Huawei at the moment, and across every single parameter—cost, support, sustainability—Pure is miles better than Huawei, Fujitsu, or Lenovo. It is not even close.

I rate Everpure FlashArray overall a nine because there is always room for some form of improvement, but it is one of the best products and companies I have ever worked with.

Pure Storage FlashArray is used specifically for all types of storage, which is used for the active-active sites. It is used for backup and block storage. We manage this in Azure as block storage, and in AWS, it is similar to S3 storage. The solution is used for products, non-production, and backup, making it versatile.

I am working with Pure Storage FlashArray product. I am working with four different versions, specifically X70, XL170, C60, and C90.

The best features of Pure Storage FlashArray are its ease of use and user-friendly interface. There is not a complex configuration required. It is easy to configure and provision. The performance allows all types of services to be visualized from a single point of interface. Unlike other vendors, where multiple services are required on multiple appliances, this makes it more robust and user-friendly.

Having this single management pane is beneficial because I don't require managing multiple appliances to manage one type of storage or multiple types of storage. Within one place, I can consolidate all the boxes and can get all types of reports, including capacity, LCM, and vulnerabilities.

I use Pure Storage's Evergreen architecture for their upgrades, and it is a subscription-based model where the vendor guarantees to provide the LCM from time to time, with hardware or software. If the controller is getting expired, they will replace it. If there's a code that is getting expired, they will update the code. It is completely capable of LCM upgrades from time to time.

The main benefits I have seen from using Pure Storage FlashArray are that capacity is a key point. In a small disk, we have large capacity with high performance. We have a 49 terabyte disk, which is also an all-flash disk, and it can accommodate petabytes in one small array. Additionally, the power consumption is very good in this product, which reduces the overall cost in terms of capacity requirement.

Pure Storage FlashArray has helped to decrease the total cost of ownership because we pay based on utilization, not on the total capacity we procured. If we have the targeted capacity of 100 terabytes, it will be provided, but we only pay for the used amount. This pay-per-use feature is very good, but other vendors are not providing it. Even when they provide it, they keep the blocking or minimum binding time, which is not the case with Pure Storage FlashArray.

Within the same type of storage, if multiple protocols can be handled, I shouldn't be required to buy a new array for object storage. It should be unified in the same box. A discussion is ongoing, and they are going to launch some code for this type of feature.

In terms of the utilization capacity for the actual server side and the storage side, both are not fully utilized. Only the storage side used capacity is visible. From the graphical user interface, we cannot extract the report from the server perspective usage, but from the CLI, we can extract it for server utilization. This feature should be included in the graphical user interface.

During heavy load situations with 100K IOPS on one specific port, it requires more granularity level for distribution. This occurs during salary time or high transaction periods, where more IOPS should be available on one port or two ports, otherwise it can become a blocking point.

I have been working with it for the last 10 to 15 years.

It has maintained operations without reducing downtime. Each component is redundant. Everything is done so that even if I have to replace a controller, it is replaced without downtime. If a disk fails, or multiple disks fail, they are replaced without any downtime. Maintenance is very easy to do.

The scalability aspect is very easy and very fast.

The customer service and technical support of Pure are very good in terms of reachability and response frequency, which is very good in comparison to others. I rate the tech support as eight out of ten.

Positive

I worked on IBM, HP, NetApp, EMC and Dell. Performance-wise, capacity-wise, and cost-wise, Pure Storage FlashArray is number one among all the products.

The deployment of Pure Storage FlashArray is handled by the Pure vendor, and it takes hardly one or two hours to deploy. With their expertise, it can be installed in the small space in the rack with good capacity. Two U controllers or four U controllers can be done quickly within the available space in the rack.

We have a direct liaison with Pure, and as an enterprise company, we procured directly through our partnership.

I am from a technical background, and ROI is calculated by our financial team, which promotes it very frequently, so I assume it's very good.

The pricing is very reasonable for Pure Storage FlashArray.

All other organizations are also good in terms of robustness and reliability, but those are very costly in comparison to Pure Storage FlashArray.

They have some high-performance required solutions, but I suggest that during requirement gathering, it should be capable by the same array instead of buying a specific array for getting performance. The CLI must be more user-friendly as currently, it is not. I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Everpure FlashArray is that we use it for all of our block storage, mainly LUNs for ESXi and other Linux hosts that need block storage.

Everpure FlashArray has positively impacted our organization as we have been able to shrink our rack space and the energy that we use and cooling because Pure is in a lot smaller form factor than our competitors.

Before we were using a G1500, which took three full racks; we replaced that with an XL130, and I believe that is 6U in one rack.

The solution has helped decrease our organization's storage footprint because of the dedupe and compression; I do not have exact numbers on how much it has decreased things, but I know that we use 4 petabytes of data, and it gets deduped down and we store it on 30 terabytes, so it is a lot of dedupe and compression if you have repeating workloads or a lot of snapshots or other things.

The best features Everpure FlashArray offers are the speed and dependability, which are the main features that we get from Pure; it is faster than its competition, and we do not have any documented downtime from it ever.

The speed impacts our operations as it helps us make decisions faster and allows us to use products that need that speed, while the dependability affects our team's confidence as we know that when we put it on Pure or we are having to do updates or upgrade hardware, we are not going to run into issues because the vendor has our back 100% of the time, and we have not had issues with them before.

Everpure FlashArray's single management pane of glass is important to us as it does simplify management; coming from other products where you have to swap between multiple windows, it is nice to be able to go to one and manage everything from there.

Everpure FlashArray can be improved as the pricing is expensive, but you do get what you pay for; you are paying a premium for better service, better warranties, less downtime, and other things, so I do not know that a lower price would work out because you probably would not have that high of quality for those things.

I have been using Everpure FlashArray since Pure was founded.

Everpure FlashArray is stable.

Everpure FlashArray's scalability has never had any problems with adding another one, and it does not sound like we ever will.

The customer support is better than any other competitor that I have ever used.

I would rate the customer support at 10 out of 10.

We used Hitachi previously, and we switched because of simplicity of use, ease of management, cost, speed, among many other factors.

I did not work on the pricing, setup cost, and licensing as much, but I know that their price was competitive.

We compared other options before choosing Everpure FlashArray, including Dell storage, HP, Cohesity, and NetApp.

Everpure FlashArray fits into my daily workflow because Pure is a lot easier than other products, and we have had to spend more time on management in the past, but we do not have to spend nearly that much time anymore.

For us, the solution has not helped decrease the total cost of ownership.

The solution has helped my operations reduce downtime because we do not take downtimes for hardware upgrades, and I do not know that you can measure that very well.

We do use Pure Storage's Evergreen Architecture for our upgrades or scaling up, and that is very important; I have mentioned a few times that we do not have to take downtime when there are upgrades, and that is part of that Evergreen upgrade program; it is nice that we can keep the same equipment that we have, yet we get to upgrade our controller to the newest and best one, which has kept us without having downtimes quite a few times.

We have not had to hire as many employees because the management is a lot easier.

I would advise others looking into using Everpure FlashArray to do a POC and see how easy it is for them to do things on there; I think that they will see how easy it is for management and how very little they have to interact.

I would tell a colleague from another company considering Pure Storage, but already having a flash solution for their high-performance workloads, that Pure probably does it cheaper; I have noticed that other flash solutions do have a higher premium price, and oftentimes it comes from name competitors, where I think you are paying more for the name than you are for what you get from them; Pure has been doing it for over 10 years, and they have been doing it really, really well, and that is why they are growing; these other companies have responded to what Pure is doing and mimic how Pure has done it, and now you are starting to see copycats and mimics on the market.

Everpure FlashArray is about the same performance-wise as others.

Everpure FlashArray is more power-efficient.

I would rate this review at 8 out of 10.

All use cases for Everpure FlashArray are anything that requires a SAN should use it because it is the easiest thing on the market. Whether it is the higher-end Everpure FlashArray itself or FlashBlade, they are the best storage on the market, period. Not only from a performance standpoint, but also from a maintenance and ease of use perspective, it checks all the boxes across everything.

Pure does deduplication better than anyone on the market, hands down, period, within the box from a hardware perspective. The IO and the amount of IOPS that are built into Pure compared to the other devices is superior to a point as well.

If there is one thing that I did not appreciate about Pure, it is that between the two different lines, which would be FlashBlade and Everpure FlashArray, there is no easy way to migrate LUNs as far as being able to replicate across those platforms. However, compared to the others, the others have all their own problems themselves.

Another good thing about Pure is their licensing is very straightforward, whereas other companies' licensing gets really complicated when it comes down to deduplication and replication. Sometimes these are chunked out as services, which is really annoying. Pure does not do any of that, which is fantastic.

Their support is really good as well. When you call them for an issue, they are responsive and their engineers get on the call with you and are very quick to respond, compared to some of the other vendors which might take a little bit longer and not be as helpful, but Pure's support is phenomenal. Their monitoring platform is also phenomenal as well. The use of Pure1 is definitely an eye-opener besides just their regular interface, compared to other companies where some things might be hidden or you might have to do some command line work because they do not want customers getting into certain things. Their remote support is fantastic. The way they do upgrades is fantastic, where they coordinate with you instead of you having to do it yourself, but you can do it yourself if you want to. The options are always good. I really appreciate the ease of use of it. Once you set it up, you basically set it up and you forget it. You might add LUNs here or there, but that is one of the really nice things. There is no maintenance on Pure that you would really need to do yourself besides just consumption.

Immediately when we moved anything onto Everpure FlashArray, the deduplication that thing does is beyond this world. It is first in its class.

Everpure FlashArray could be cheaper. Other than that, everything that they give you from an advertising standpoint and what they do is perfect. I have told Pure in the past that I do not think that the way that they sell them is correct. I think that if anything, they should be promoting more of the return on investment where their Evergreen program, which I believe is now Everpure, should really be stated in that as long as you are paying maintenance on the device, you never have to buy another device again. The device literally pays for itself within the three-to five-year timeframe. It is expandable and you never have to replace the hardware ever again because Pure Storage will do that through their maintenance program. I think that should be something that they should be shouting from the rooftops to anyone that will listen that is using on-premise hardware.

I have been working in my current field overall for 28 years.

Their support is really good as well. When you call them for an issue, they are responsive and their engineers get on the call with you and are very quick to respond, compared to some of the other vendors which might take a little bit longer and not be as helpful, but Pure's support is phenomenal.

Their remote support is fantastic. The way they do upgrades is fantastic, where they coordinate with you instead of you having to do it yourself, but you can do it yourself if you want to. The options are always good.

I have used Hitachi, IBM, EMC, NetApp, HP 3PAR, and Tintri.

It is just as difficult as any other platform. Most of the deployment is not on their end, it is more on how your environment is configured. Whether you are using iSCSI or whether you are using NAS and Ethernet, or you are using straight Fibre Channel, every platform has their struggles with that which are not necessarily the device itself, but more of how your current infrastructure is set up to integrate with that device.

The device literally pays for itself within the three-to five-year timeframe. It is expandable and you never have to replace the hardware ever again because Pure Storage will do that through their maintenance program.

I mean, I appreciate that I can see a single pane of glass, and I think it is a great feature, but if you are asking me the importance of it, I do not care. As long as all the information was there, it does not really matter.

Everpure FlashArray is a little pricey, but again, it is not too pricey where you would not buy it. It is more that you need to have a better understanding of what you are buying and the benefits of paying more money now than later. It is comparable.

I gave this review a rating of 10.

I work for a Pure partner, so we are actually doing deployment of the arrays at the customer sites. That's one part. The second part is that we help customers to maintain the infrastructure. Not all of them, but many of them.

My favorite feature about Pure Storage FlashArray is definitely the simplicity. In one word, it's simple to install, simple to upgrade, simple to maintain, and simple to manage. All the phases of that word are covered by Pure Storage FlashArray.

The storage footprint has been decreased with Pure Storage FlashArray, and that's also another great feature. They probably have the best reduction algorithms implemented on the market. On the install base we have, we can see an average of around 3-to-1 data reduction. That's well above other vendors we work with.

I think Pure Storage FlashArray can improve the file services that are enabled from factory, as they definitely have room for improvement.

I'm missing a few functions in terms of how they can be improved, but the most important for me would be to enable file services on the stretch cluster. Having two arrays in the stretch cluster would also provide file services.

Their interface, the dashboard, or as they call it, a single management pane of glass, is very intuitive. Sometimes I could imagine there could be more choices visible to the administrator.

Scalability is usually not as scalable as other vendors because they are pretty limited, especially with the low-end models, where you usually cannot scale above the single box. That's something they can work on.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately the last two years in my entire career.

Fortunately, I have not seen any instability, lagging, crashing, or downtime with Pure Storage FlashArray.

Scalability is usually not as scalable as other vendors because Pure Storage FlashArray is pretty limited, especially with the low-end models, where you usually cannot scale above the single box. That's something they can work on.

I have contacted the technical support or customer support of Pure Storage FlashArray many times.

The quality of the support and the speed of the support is exceptional. They never let me down. They usually work pretty fast.

For support, I would give them something between 8 and 9 on a scale from 1 to 10. I would say nine for the support.

Positive

I have used alternatives to Pure Storage FlashArray, such as solutions from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is our second vendor we work with.

The initial deployment for Pure Storage FlashArray was super easy for me. I remember it took approximately one hour to fully deploy it.

You definitely need someone to help you with the case to get it to the rack, so that's definitely not one person's work. All the rest is very easily done by one person.

Similar solutions include those from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

I don't think as a company we have any customer that uses Evergreen architecture and understands how important it is, so we don't use it. I will not comment on that.

I think the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray is the major issue because all the great things come with the price, and a lot of customers simply are not willing to accept it. That's why we also have some cheaper alternatives for them.

Everything needs maintenance, so Pure Storage FlashArray is not an exception. You need to patch it, but usually, it's very straightforward and easy to do.

Pure Storage FlashArray has helped me to decrease or reduce downtime. On other platforms we work with, there's sometimes trouble with the performance management during the upgrades of the array or some failures. In the case of Pure Storage FlashArray, they stick to what they say in the marketing, that they always keep the performance of the array no matter what kind of situation you are with the array. That's a very nice thing.

I would rate this review a 9 out of 10.

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.

Positive

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. 

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.

I am from Europe and work with European standards and European colleagues from Everpure FlashArray. We use Everpure FlashArray as Storage as a Service, and this is our main vendor for storage.

I would say it is very important because it is the only storage we have, except for object storage. For flash storage, this is the only solution we have and it works very well.

The best features are the performance, for sure, and it is very easy to manage.

We have never had any performance issue with Everpure FlashArray, while we had some performance issues with other vendors.

Everpure FlashArray has very good performance and we have not seen any problems so far with the storage. Another thing is that Everpure FlashArray has great support. For example, we had a problem with the backup integration with Everpure FlashArray and the problem was on the backup side. Everpure FlashArray support was able to solve it even though it was not a problem on Everpure FlashArray itself.

Evergreen support works well. Everything is solved in a timely manner. We use Everpure FlashArray as Storage as a Service and that works well. There is no downtime.

The most important thing is how easy it is to manage because Dell VMAX was quite hard to manage. There may have been financial reasons as well, but I do not see into the financial aspects.

With Everpure FlashArray, everything you need to do is accomplished in five clicks. With VMAX, you need to have a lot of knowledge. If you are doing something wrong, you could do terrible things to your environment with wrong clicking and wrong actions. Sometimes we got an error and we have not even been able to find it in documentation.

We have been using it for about six years.

I would not say there are stability issues. Both are enterprise storage systems, so they are both stable.

We do not grow that much, but in case growing is needed, then it is absolutely easy.

With Everpure FlashArray, everything you need to do is accomplished in five clicks. With VMAX, you need to have a lot of knowledge. If you are doing something wrong, you could do terrible things to your environment with wrong clicking and wrong actions. Sometimes we got an error and we have not even been able to find it in documentation.

Everpure FlashArray is probably not cheap storage, but it provides great performance, scalability, and everything a customer needs. It also provides great support.

Both storage boxes are working fine. However, Dell support is not that good, but Everpure FlashArray is one level upper. For our use case, Dell was fine enough. The pain was just maintaining and doing things on it.

The performance was good on Dell as well. That was fine, but Everpure FlashArray still has better performance. We can see it on the graphs, but we have customers that do not need that much performance from Everpure FlashArray.

We use Storage as a Service, so we deployed it with Everpure FlashArray support.

We use Storage as a Service, so we deployed it with Everpure FlashArray support.

I would not say anything because we still do not use Everpure FlashArray fully. There are many options we are not using, so we are still trying to implement everything they are able to do.

With Everpure FlashArray, everything you need to do is accomplished in five clicks. With VMAX, you need to have a lot of knowledge. If you are doing something wrong, you could do terrible things to your environment with wrong clicking and wrong actions. Sometimes we got an error and we have not even been able to find it in documentation. I would rate this review a 10.