Everpure FlashArray Reviews

SAN solution for Tier 1 storage for VMware, Exchange, SQL, and physical servers; trying to fit as much production load as possible on them.

The speed to deploy or move VMs is ridiculous. By migrating our important systems to the Pure arrays, we have removed any storage issues and questions when there is a problem of "is it the storage?"

The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive. The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size.

• Ease of setup
• Migration to it
• Upgrading
• Support responsiveness
• Kick-butt mobile app
• On box analytics and vCenter plug-in
• The ease of creating a snapshot for testing or recovery.

I cannot stress enough the stability, speed, and awesome deduplication and compression rates. The amount of data we have moved to it has allowed us to remove units four times the size. The mobile app is kick-butt and support has been topnotch.

Mainly, just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI.

None.

No issues.

It has been great; easy to work with to resolve cases or perform upgrades.

Yes, plainly put, it sucked and we wanted to get to a solution that was fast, easy to maintain, and reliable.

We had issues with it not handling the load and could never trust that it was serving data fast enough to not be causing issues.

Easy as pie.

In-house.

• Speed
• Time saved in management
• Availability
• No fingers pointing at storage as an issue.

It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for. I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue.

We looked at Nimble and EMC.

I never have to worry about its performance impacting the firm. It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.

I had high expectations and they have met or exceeded each one of them. It was an exciting day when I finally got them up and running.

Production storage for a lot of virtual machines. As a service provider, it is very important to have something with this much performance.

• Cuts VM deployment down to seconds. 
• Cuts latency under MS. 
• Amazing performance. 
• Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle.

• Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry.
• The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive. 

I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it.

Our database administrators had to run some manual process twice a week since the disk performance of our previous storage unit was not able to respond to the requests fast enough.

This process took approximately four hours and it had to be done manually twice a week by the DBAs. After the implementation, the time to run the process was reduced to minutes and it did not require any manual intervention from our DBAs.

Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications.

I have not been able to find one yet.

We did, but it was partially due to our environment. We were running outdated firmware in the HBAs for our HPE Blade Servers and an old version of vSphere that it is not supported by VMware.

We decided to keep these servers under with the previous storage array to avoid disconnects and system outages.

No, the unit that we bought contains 40TB of usable space and we are using 10TB so far.

Technical support is great. They will dive in deep with your team to figure out what is causing the problem for them and find the root cause.

I wish they could collaborate more with the other vendors internally, instead of us opening cases with Cisco, HPE, VMware, etc.

We have another platform using spinning disk 600GB 15K RPM SAS drives, but our applications and servers have grown so much that the storage was getting saturated with the requests from the applications.

We discussed the option to add more SAS disk and memory to the controllers of that array versus buying a Solid State Drive Array (SSDA).

We concluded that it would be more beneficial for our company to invest in an SSDA, and the results paid off.

The initial setup was straightforward and very easy to implement, as long as you have all the information that you need ahead of time.

For instance, IP addresses, iSCSI IPs and adapters, switch configurations and ports enabled, etc.

The price seems fair according to the market. We analyzed multiple All-Flash Arrays (AFA) in the market, but Pure came at the top in many areas.

The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it. I love the Evergreen model to replace any parts after three years with a newer part as part of your support contract. The licensing is based on your capacity.

We researched other products from Kaminario, NetApp SolidFire, Nimble Storage, EMC XtremeIO, and HPE.

I always recommend a company to start with a proof of concept. That way, you can test your applications directly with the unit. It is critical to get a baseline of the before with your current storage array and after with an SSDA or an AFA.

Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive. Also, this allows all the hardware and software updates to be completed while the system is completely online.

The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better. That’s it!

Everything related to the hardware or software update of the system(s) are active with absolutely NO downtime and NO service interruptions.

The m50 will be our production machine for a brand new property, we have almost finished building. I can personally state that the Pure Storage Flash Systems are the best built and Pure has the utmost professional customer care. Pure only focuses on Flash and they do it well.

The FA-450 pushes around 200,000 32k IOPS and with our load, which is not small by any means, we top-out around 50k-60k IOPS. It’s fantastic! We will soon upgrade both boxes to the newer m70 with some added capacity and all of which will take probably 30 minutes to complete.

We tested our VDI environment on this array and it performed flawlessly and boosted the user experience.

Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency.

Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi.

Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi.

No.

Very good.We did a PoC.

We use NetApp because of the variety of protocols it can support.

Initial setup was by far the easiest. We racked and stacked the array and were up and running in 4 hours.

There is always room for negotiation.

Nimble and NetApp.

Look at other competitor products as well.

It has allowed us increased performance along with massive consolidation of space and power. We went from a two cabinet EMC VMAX to a 12U racked system. Very impressive.

Compared to Pure Storage, the IBM V7000 has not improved anything yet within our environment.

The Pure Storage system is, of course, very fast and completely redundant. All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are performed online with no impact. The Pure Storage customer service is by far the best part of the product and organization.

We have found that the NAS portion of the software has limitations. For example, the number of Filesystems is limited, which is not the case on the EMC VNX. 

The service team assigned to the project has good, hard-working people, but we are not receiving the kind of care we should receive to get the project done.

As for IBM, they could increase the maximum storage capacity so more disk shelves can be added.

There have been no issues with the stability of the Pure Storage solution. By contrast, with IBM we have had performance and spiking issues for which IBM applied a workaround patch.

There have been no issues with the scalability for either Pure or IBM.

Customer Service:

10/10 for Pure Storage.

6/10 for IBM.

Technical Support:

Pure Storage is excellent, while IBM is only average.

The IBM V7000 was bought for just NAS and secondary storage and for use as storage for our AS/400 platform. We switched to Pure Storage because of the way the system performs and the fact that it does everything in 32K sizing. The IOPS are high and the support and customer service are exceptional.

Setting up the Pure Storage solutions was simple. It took 45 minutes to rack it and get it online. The IBM system was also fairly simple, taking about two hours to rack and get online.

Both devices were installed through one of our partners who did a good job.

We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both.

We evaluated EMC (which we already had), Dell, and HP.

The Pure Storage FlashArray is very good. Everything that Pure Storage told me is exactly what we have found to be true. It is the best production and implementation experience I have ever had.

Regarding IBM, the sales team was great, as was the technical team. I now feel that EMC VNX and NetApp are both better NAS systems. If I had to do it over again, I would stay with the EMC VNX for NAS.

We have not had a good experience with the IBM device. The installation and service were very good. However, the services to help us migrate our NAS data from an existing EMC VNX system have failed once already due to ACL permissions issues, specifically on how the V7000 NAS works. I have had to involved IBM Global Support by actually contacting high-level VPs. As of January 26, 2016, we have not successfully migrated our NAS data.

• It has a small footprint, as the current system is only four units per rack.
• It's got good speed for the price, as it uses eMLC, an advanced type of SSD.
• It's very scalable, and we're not paying for capacity.
• We get free controllers every three years.

For VDI, there's a consistent user experience. Users don’t switch to VDI if it's not at the same speed as a laptop or desktop, and Pure Storage provides that.

It doesn’t provide enough information on performance analytics. For example, Nimble Storage has Infosight, which provides data; Pure Storage doesn’t have an equivalent. It has every other feature, but more data would be the only thing missing.

No issues with deployment.

It's really good and we've never had problem.

Also, it's very simple to use, and one of our customers described it as, “If you know how to use Facebook, you know how to use Pure Storage.”

I think it's actually easier than Facebook.

It scales very well. A new box contains three units, and uses the power of a toaster oven.

We haven’t had to use it. We ran into some issues, but found their technical engineer not as good as Nimble Storage's.

The setup is easy, but not as easy as Nimble. It took about five hours to setup.

There's no additional licenses needed, as everything is included.

Once you try it, you’ll realize how easy it is to use. It has almost every feature.