Everpure FlashArray Reviews

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.

On-premises

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.

On-premises

Other

I have been using Everpure FlashArray for five years with satisfactory results.

My main use case for Everpure FlashArray is using it for demonstration and storage of anything in my company. For example, I demonstrate how Pure Storage is resilient when we try to change controllers and use the Evergreen program, showing how we can upgrade the storage controllers without degrading performance. I can show my clients how Pure Storage ensures security for data resiliency with Safe Mode Snapshots.

In my experience, the best feature Everpure FlashArray offers is Safe Mode, and I believe that resilience features such as live synchronization and synchronous and asynchronous replications are also standout attributes. The Evergreen program contributes to customer satisfaction because it allows them to upgrade without degrading performance.

Both Safe Mode, resilience, live synchronization, and the Evergreen program make a significant difference for my clients, and Pure Storage performance and construction stand out to me.

We experience fast demos and zero downtime; we do not experience any downtime with Pure Storage, thanks to resilience with Safe Mode, integration with backup software, and everything related to cyber resilience.

I love how Fusion demonstrates for us how I can improve my storage and gain insights into security, and I appreciate the way automation is handled in Everpure FlashArray environment. Additionally, I find the chatbot incredibly helpful for when I need assistance with storage information. The single management pane of glass is crucial for our organization as it allows us to have simple operations.

I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features such as Safe Mode and Evergreen contribute to top-notch performance.

Everything is satisfactory for me with Everpure FlashArray.

Everpure FlashArray is stable.

The scalability of Everpure FlashArray is impressive because it offers a wide range of models, including those with 20 to 130 terabytes in a single model.

Customer support is excellent; I find everything I need and receive great help.

I have used different solutions before Everpure FlashArray, including NetApp and Dell EMC, which led me to switch.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is acceptable overall.

While the cost of Pure Storage is a bit higher, when we calculate the return on investment, it shows that we save money in the long run.

Everpure FlashArray has significantly decreased our organization's storage footprint; I achieve a 6-for-1 data duplication, which is substantial considering the costs associated with all-flash data on disks.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is acceptable overall.

The main concern my customers have relates to cyber resilience as they ask about problems with ransomware and performance degradation in systems. I can demonstrate how Pure Storage addresses these issues and the security it provides for customers.

Pure Storage is better in terms of sustainability because it never crashes a controller or hardware, ensuring that nothing becomes obsolete; they can upgrade storage and controllers while maintaining good performance and power consumption, which also helps with savings and ESG initiatives.

Everpure FlashArray has helped reduce downtime, but I cannot quantify the exact amount; it is significant.

My advice to others considering Everpure FlashArray is to inquire about its performance, Safe Mode, and Evergreen programs. I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

On-premises

My main use case for Everpure FlashArray is that we were using Pure Storage to be the underlying storage for our vSphere environment, basically to store our virtual machines and backups.

A quick specific example of how I use it in my daily workflow is that we use it as an underlying storage for our vSphere infrastructure where we have some mission-critical virtual machines running using VMware vSphere environment, and all those VMs are currently stored on Everpure FlashArray because of their high speed and throughput and high IOps. We decided to use flash storage because Pure is a market leader at the moment in that technology, which is why we decided to use it.

Their support from Pure Storage is really good. Whenever I needed something, I reached out to them, and they were always available to help us. This is one of the most important reasons we decided to go with them because their support was really good, although it was very expensive as well, since they have different tiers of support available, and the tier we selected was expensive. We decided to go with that because the support was really good and because of the nature of our environment.

The best features Everpure FlashArray offers include flash storage because of its high speed and also the redundancy. We really love that redundancy, which is not only at the storage level but at the array level and at the power level and network level. Everything is redundant, making Pure Storage stand out compared to other tools and technologies provided by different vendors.

These features have benefited my organization in terms of performance and reliability because the redundant array means not only is the storage level such as the disks redundant, but the network cards and power are also redundant. That's why we decided to use that, as our virtual machines run some really critical applications. We needed that redundancy available to us all the time, and in case something goes wrong on one side of the storage, we know that the other side will always be available to help. The redundancy from Pure Storage is really efficient.

One unique feature that stood out to me is that their GUI portal is really helpful to check the status of Everpure FlashArray, all the networks, and all the components. You can actually go and see and view the status so you can proactively monitor them and also ingest the monitoring with different monitoring tools. That's a really good feature of Pure Storage.

Everpure FlashArray has positively impacted my organization by improving uptime and making our job easier, but it obviously comes with a high cost because Pure Storage is an expensive product.

I have noticed specific outcomes related to improved uptime and making my job easier, including a limited number of outages and faster recovery times, as we never had any outage in terms of Pure Storage, so it was always up and available for us.

Everpure FlashArray can be improved by possibly enhancing the user experience by providing users with more access so they can tweak the settings by themselves, which could be suited to their own environment. Currently, Pure does not provide that, so you have to actually lean on Pure support to make changes to the configuration.

I have been using Everpure FlashArray for three years.

Everpure FlashArray is stable.

In terms of scalability, it can be tricky because if you're going to scale your storage, sometimes you have to go for another array or maybe you need to change the chassis. Scalability is not an easy option for Pure Storage, so you have to be very careful when you are getting that product for you.

Customer support for Everpure FlashArray is amazing, as they're always available and they are all around the globe, so whenever you need them, they are always able to help you.

I did not previously use a different solution, as we started with Pure Storage.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was good, as the account manager was closely in touch with us to decide and design the pricing module for us.

I have seen a return on investment, particularly in that we needed fewer employees.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was good, as the account manager was closely in touch with us to decide and design the pricing module for us.

Before choosing Everpure FlashArray, I evaluated other options, including IBM and Dell.

My advice to others looking into using Everpure FlashArray is that it's a really good product, especially if your main purpose is to get high speed with more redundancy and reliability; then go for it. However, it comes with a cost, as it's not cheap.

I rate the customer support a nine on a scale of one to ten.

I rate Everpure FlashArray a ten on a scale of one to ten for being the best.

I chose ten for my rating because of the speed, redundancy, and support—all these three things.

On-premises

We use Everpure FlashArray for performing allocations and deallocations using the Pure Portal. We also create new LUNs and zoning through this interface.

When a user from Linux or Windows requests a new LUN, we create the zoning using a switch DCNM portal. After that, we use the LUN and create it using a WWPN within the Pure1 portal. We then create the LUN and provide the LUN ID to the user, which allows them to store their data into that LUN. The same process occurs in reverse for deallocation. First, we unmap the LUN from the host, then we delete the LUN, and finally we perform the unzoning.

Everpure FlashArray is very easy to use. Whoever logs in to the portal for the first time can easily adapt to it and use it independently without needing help from other people or documentation.

The information is easily accessible in the portal, and the wordings are simple and easy to understand. It does not consume much space or cookies to load the data, making it very useful and user-friendly.

Compared to other storage boxes, Everpure FlashArray is very useful because it is cost-effective and requires less work. With other storage boxes, we need to do pre-work for everything. With Everpure FlashArray, we do not need to do much work. Even if we do something wrong, it is easy to revert within twenty-four hours. This has impacted our organization in a very positive way compared to other storage boxes.

In terms of improvement, Everpure FlashArray could have more attractive UI/UX design compared to other solutions. This would give joy to work on it, and even if you are tired, it will be very easy and attractive to work on.

I am currently working in this field for two and a half years.

Everpure FlashArray is stable.

I would give scalability a rating of seven.

Customer support is very accessible twenty-four hours a day. Even if we do not get a direct call, we can connect with them within a few hours via email.

Before Everpure FlashArray, we used NetApp for the NAS part and PowerMax for the SAN part.

One day my colleague created a LUN with more space than requested. The user asked for one GB, but instead a one TB LUN was created. If this were another storage box, it would have created a big impact and increased costs significantly because GB and TB are very different measurements. At that time, we immediately found out about this and deleted that LUN without any error or loss of money to the project since we had twenty-four hours to correct it. We deleted the one TB LUN and created a one GB LUN and provided it to the user.

Because I have worked on many storage boxes, I find Everpure FlashArray very useful in comparison. Both the CLI and GUI are very useful to me. It is easy to understand and work with. I do not need to learn additional commands or refer to any documents to access the portal. This was very useful to me in the project when I joined.

Compared to other storage boxes, Everpure FlashArray is easily accessible and more cost-friendly. I would advise others to try Everpure FlashArray when comparing it to other storage boxes. I give this review an overall rating of eight.

We use Everpure FlashArray to allocate space and create disaster recovery setups within our applications. The main goal is to provide storage to our clients, which is the primary purpose for using Pure Storage.

We recently had a request from clients who wanted to migrate their data from one of their storage arrays to Everpure FlashArray. I took up that project and created the zoning between their servers and Pure Storage. After that, I allocated the space to their servers to migrate their data from their ESXi hosts. This was a big challenge because the data is very important for them. We needed to complete the zoning part on time and allocate the space accordingly, and I kept everything in place on time. After that, they migrated their data, and currently, they are using Pure Storage.

As a storage array, Everpure FlashArray is mainly used to allocate storage. Beyond that, I perform upgrades on this Pure array with the help of the vendor. We can also do self-upgrades.

I am not entirely sure about all the features offered by Everpure FlashArray because that is fully taken care of by my management. As an engineering and operations team, we maintain these arrays and perform daily health checks on the array. In case of any issues, we collaborate with the vendor and fix those issues. Additionally, whenever any server cannot access Everpure FlashArray, we fix that issue accordingly. This is our day-to-day work. The best feature is the Evergreen feature, which automatically raises a case and fixes any issue without reaching out to us.

Compared to other vendors, this feature is really helpful. We just receive the alerts without prior knowledge. When we go to Everpure FlashArray and see the alerts, we can see two alerts: one is that the alert is opened and after some time, we can see the same alert is closed, which means the issue got fixed. They automatically fix that issue without our knowledge. This really helps our team maintain high availability at all times and saves our team time.

Cost-wise, compared to other vendors, it is very budget-friendly. Everpure FlashArray is a high-availability storage technology that we are currently using. Whoever is using Pure Storage is happy with it, including the latency and everything. We have not received any complaints related to Pure Storage. Since I have worked here for four years, throughout this entire period I have not received any complaints on Pure Storage, which is really great.

When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports went down, there was a possibility to highlight that particular port which has gone down. Some kind of features in the GUI related to hardware would be helpful. If it is showing visibly on the ports end, it would really help us to identify the particular port without logging into the Brocade switches or somewhere else. From the GUI itself, we could see that a particular port is down right now, so we need to fix that.

I have been using Everpure FlashArray for over four years.

Right now, I have not seen any issues with Pure because, as I mentioned, we have the Evergreen feature on Pure, and they automatically raise a case. When it comes to upgrades, they do not take much time and we do not need any downtime to upgrade our Purity version. That is really good. Compared to other vendors, I would prefer Everpure FlashArray to anyone.

Whenever we need more storage, we have the feature of scalability. Whenever we need more, it happens automatically.

It is very easy for us to reach customer support. Whenever we raise any case, I believe within the next ten to fifteen minutes, we are receiving the response from the vendor. That is really great. They are acknowledging that whenever we need the support, they support us on time and they try to fix the issue within the given time. That is really great from Pure.

We have other vendors as well. I do not want to reveal the names. However, we preferred Pure because, as I mentioned earlier, the cost, the time-wise, and the latency are all better. We compared everything and after that, we switched to Everpure FlashArray. We referred and offered Everpure FlashArray to the application teams where they are satisfied with the Pure setup. After that, we allocated storage from this Pure array for a few clients.

We have another vendor as well with us, for example, NetApp. We compared the costs and everything, so the budget and the setup-wise, everything. When it comes to NetApp, for development and everything, we just need to do the basic health checks on their storage devices. Apart from that, they take care of the entire part, but the budget is very high. When it comes to Pure, we need to maintain the upgrades and all other activities. Compared to the budget, it is very low. The useful thing is when you are taking care of your storage part, meaning Pure, the maintenance and everything is really useful for you because you will learn what is happening on that storage. Every time you have a chance to look into those particular operations. That is why we preferred Pure recently for the clients. Based on this comparison, we offered them to use Everpure FlashArray.

I would advise companies or other clients to use Everpure FlashArray. Cost-wise, performance-wise, and scalability-wise, compared to all perspectives, Pure is going to become number one across all the FlashArrays. I would ask them to use Pure Storage and give it a try. Once they choose Pure, they will never go back to any other vendor. Regarding AI capability, I do not think that applies to our situation because our data is very secure. In some use cases we can use AI, but not in all cases. I would rate this product overall as a ten out of ten.

On-premises

Other

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. 

On-premises

My main use case for Everpure FlashArray was file share storage and VM spin up storage. It was used for file sharing and VM spin up, specifically for scenarios involving hosting shared drives for critical applications. I used Everpure FlashArray for both file sharing and VM spin up; we had it for the VMs that house the 911 escalation calls and then for the software and files that were needed between all the departments.

That was primarily what we used it for as our main use case with Everpure FlashArray.

Regarding how Everpure FlashArray has positively impacted my organization, no specific outcomes come to mind, but the lack of negative outcomes makes it good—especially with the 911 department, where we cannot have downtime, and we have not had to worry about that using this.

Regarding how that reliability impacted my team or the departments relying on it, not having any negative outcomes is the reliability impact that we need, especially because when anything goes down with the 911 department, it is a massive undertaking and deal, and the public does not appreciate that.

The best features Everpure FlashArray offers are its ease of setup and incredible performance, which is better than most other software or hardware that we have used.

I will start with the incredible performance; it was very fast, with everything transferred near instantly compared to what we were using before, making general use much better for everyone. The ease of setup came from the documentation that I was able to follow for general setups, taking only a couple of minutes to get going. For one of our units, I needed support assistance, and they got right to me and helped me out with no problem.

Regarding scalability, we started off with two units and were able to add four more as needed, and it was not a massive undertaking to do; it was simply adding them to the interface, which was very easy.

I do not have any improvements at the moment; I like how it is. I have nothing to add about needed improvements.

I have been working in my current field for about 13 years.

Everpure FlashArray is stable.

Everpure FlashArray's scalability works really well; we have been able to add more units as needed and just continue growing.

The customer support for Everpure FlashArray is really good; we have had to call them just a couple of times, and each time they were able to help us get everything straightened out right away.

We did use different solutions before; it was a variety of different items, and we consolidated everything into a new hardware stack using Pure as the backbone.

There were no issues with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

There were no issues with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

Several others were looked at before choosing Everpure FlashArray; nothing outside of the big name retailers that I can remember.

My advice for others looking into using Everpure FlashArray is to absolutely look into it. I just wish that we could actually get our other customers to use Everpure FlashArray, as it really does make a difference in the data centers. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

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.

On-premises