Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

We use it for databases and VMs. We are using its most recent version.

Its speed is superior to our existing Unity x00 model. There are three different models of Unity. There is x00, which is the original model for Unity. There is x50, and now you have x80s. It has performed substantially better than our x00 model and a little bit better than our x50 model. I cannot rate it against the x80s on the Unity class, but from what we've got, it has beaten those two models performance-wise. This is bearing in mind that those x00 models were there before they had their own X-series with the NVMe flash.

The Pure1 App is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can see your diagnostics and cases in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone.  EMC has not unified both diagnostics and cases into a single App that I am aware of at this time.

You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me.

Their technical support is excellent, but I can't get hold of engineers directly at Pure even when an engineer is assigned to me, which is a downside.

I have been using this solution for two years.

Its stability is excellent.

Its scalability is good. I wouldn't call it excellent because you're limited on capacity customization. You get that limitation with any array, but it seems there is a little bit more flexibility on the Unity side from a scale-out standpoint. Pure is not flexible on your datapak expansions. You're locked into a certain amount of storage. You can't customize your Pure flash storage to the degree that you can on the EMC Unity side.

Currently, its usage is pretty extensive. We're considering purchasing C-class arrays for our next use case, and we're about to use them more because of several factors. One of them has been that EMC is now starting to lose our organization's trust because of subpar support coming mostly out of India. The offshore talent in Asia or Australia is good, but the offshore talent in India is not good. Usually I know more than their L1/L2 support folks about their product.

Their technical support is excellent, but I can't directly get hold of engineers at Pure directly. Their support system is such that even with an engineer assigned to me, I can't phone them directly even if an extension at an 800 number. I have to basically jump through a manager on duty, to try to get to the engineer, whereas with EMC, the engineer might not pick up the phone, but I've got extensions for whoever gets assigned to a case to leave a voicemail on top of an email.  Pure wants to handle most of their support thru email exchange unless Zoom warranted. This is a downside that Pure has. If you get into an issue after you've got your initial engineer and you need to follow up, getting to them directly can take a little bit longer or more effort.  While Pure has an "Escalation" button on their support portal they forget humans like to talk to humans directly when urgent.  True you can email please call me.

Its setup was more straightforward than EMC Unity's setup. It took about two hours.

It is not maintenance-heavy. Its maintenance appears less than an EMC Unity array. I handle the array, but in terms of maintenance, you can schedule the upgrades with Pure, like EMC. It is done all remotely by Pure's own people. That's one thing that is not good with EMC because you have to deal with their Indian offshore team for upgrades which is lacking many times.

Pure support is how EMC used to be. EMC used to be follow-the-sun, where you had support in Cork, Ireland, the US, and then Australia, but like a lot of our US companies, they have now offshored and it is reflected in worse support in several ways, one being communication barriers.  Resolution times have been extended more than it should due to offshore support. I have had extended
turnaround times to get solutions because of their lack of talent. There
is a language issue, and their L1 support team is clearly not as good
as it should be.

What I do love about Pure is that it is lighter in maintenance.

We used an integrator, and our experience with them was great.

Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It is hard for anyone to get a 10.

Currently, it's our tier-one storage. We use it mostly for our Oracle databases.

It has drastically improved the performance of our high-end Oracle databases and allows us the ability to replication to a DR location with ease.

We love the product. Pure Storage works really well. 

The CAT tool and also the ability to upgrade the unit's place grades are great. It allows for in-place control or upgrades.

It's a very simple implementation.

They have a good tool to analyze upgrades.

The stability is good.

Technical support has been excellent. 

I cannot recall coming across areas in need of improvement. 

We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI.

I've used the solution for three years. 

The product is very stable. We've had no issues that are related to the array.

We haven't done much scaling. We're ordering an upgrade this week and therefore we will know soon enough how easy it is to expand. We're upgrading the controllers and the disks this month. Scalability so far seems good.

The users are 90% Oracle admins and then 10% SQL admins.

It's used pretty extensively. It is our top-tiered storage for the entire company in our major data centers. We have two of them and we are upgrading them this month.

Technical support has been very helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We used to use a Dell EMC VMAX. We upgraded from that product due to high costs, and little flexibility. This solution also offers specialized Oracle tools.

The solution is very straightforward to set up. It's easy. It's not difficult. 

Deployment of an array took an hour. Implementation of the product did take a while, due to our complexity, however, it works right now. 

I have one staff member for managing the array and then the database team is about four people and it's a global database.

We handled the initial setup ourselves in-house We did not need outside assistance from consultants or integrators. 

We noted a net ROI in about 11 months.

We only pay the support costs. The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support. There are no additional costs. 

We did evaluate Dell PowerMax and NetApp AFF.

The reason why we picked Pure was that it was reasonably priced and had better upgrade capacity, as well as better scale-out capacity. It also had better Oracle tools, especially the CAT tool.

We're customers and end-users.

We really like the product and their other tools are all great.

I would advise new users to look into it for your higher-end Oracle and SQL needs. It does really well with the database products and with low latency requirements with a lot of transactional data.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. It handles all our needs. The only reason why it didn't get a ten is the fact that the tracking of high CPU and garbage collection is still needed. That's kind of important to us.

We use Pure FlashArray X NVMe is a premium tier storage offering. It is a dedicated array option that we offer our customers. We are a service provider and deployed it in multiple data centers.

The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use.

Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution.

I have been using Pure FlashArray X NVMe for approximately three years.

Since we have deployed Pure FlashArray X NVMe we have not had any major issues with failures or performance on these arrays.

I rate the stability of Pure FlashArray X NVMe a ten out of ten.

The solution scales well and is easy to do. 

We have approximately 10 dedicated customers and another 10 or 15 in the shared use case. Our customers are our users and they may be a company that runs their own software development and this is only their storage on their cloud offerings that they purchase from us.

We plan to increase our usage.

I rate the scalability of Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten.

Overall the initial setup of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is not difficult. It's simple to deploy, install and get up and running. The full process of deployment which includes installation, setup, and configuration, takes approximately one day.

I rate the initial setup of Pure FlashArray X NVMe an eight out of ten.

A small team is typically required for the implementation, as different teams handle different responsibilities, such as networking, virtualization, and facilities. The installation process also requires a couple of people as different roles such as cable racking, networking configuration, and array configuration have to be handled.

We have a dedicated support team for maintenance available 24/7 across all of our data centers. A small group of individuals is in charge of overseeing the platform, and we also have a standard support team in place.

I highly suggest obtaining the implementation certification for Pure FlashArray X NVMe. It is necessary for deployment and can be a bit frustrating as it requires paying for professional services unless you have the certification. With the certification, you are able to deploy on your own. The process is straightforward and uncomplicated, but you don't have access to all the required information to do the initial setup without the certification. Obtaining the certification is a good idea.

There's training material that's available and it's a normal certification test. That cost approximately $150.

I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten.

They could make it easier to receive information about the solution and the support has been a mix of good and poor experiences.

The overall performance is great. The single workload performance available from Pure is higher than the SolidFire can provide. 

It's very simple to deploy and manage. Those are probably the two biggest aspects for us.

Everything has been very easy and very intuitive from a support standpoint and from a deployment standpoint. 

In terms of the upgrade procedure, we've gone through that in the last year and it was very smooth. It met expectations.

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

I've only been using it for about a year now, so I haven't run into any issues.

The biggest thing for me is not so much the Array itself. It's their Pure1 manage solution, which is a centralized monitoring plane that we can register all of our arrays to and monitor from one location. However, the ability to make that more multi-tenant for customer visibility so that we, as a service provider, can monitor all arrays we give customers visibility down to their dedicated environments would be ideal. Seeing VM performance down to the array level, and things like that would be useful. It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking. 

We've only used the solution for a year at this point. It hasn't been very long. 

The solution is reliable and the performance has been great. We haven't had any issues so far. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We haven't deployed anything too large yet. That said, just based on the design, that two-controller design, we're not going to have any of the scale problems that we had with SolidFire. They do scale it differently as it's a two-controller design. However, you can easily upgrade by upgrading your drive sizes due to the fact that it's all NVMe. The performance is top-notch, as it's all NVMe based.

Technical support has been pretty responsive. In our testing in the lab, my main interaction with their support was testing some of the different features on opening tickets and going through the upgrade procedure, and it was all really smooth. I didn't really have any complaints.

I'm familiar with SolidFire.

The initial setup was very smooth and straightforward. We didn't have any issues with it. 

We are currently a customer. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I would definitely recommend it. If a company is looking for an All-Flash Tier and they need extreme performance for individual workloads, Pure's the way to go, over something like a SolidFire.

We use the solution for storage.

We use it for localization and we use the virtualization environment for the server applications and VDI, and we leverage Horizon for the virtual desktop.

Everything works well, and it is very fast.

The pricing is good.

We're happy with the services. They are user-friendly.

It offers a simple setup process. 

It's stable.

The solution is scalable. 

We haven't come across any major issues. 

They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage.

I've used the solution for about three years. 

The product offers good stability. We can upgrade live to a new version of the software with no issues. It doesn't crash or freeze.

We've tried to add a new disc in the past. It's easy to expand, and we found the process of expansion very simple. 

In our company, we have 2,000 employees working on virtual desktops. If you include our customers, that number is about 4,000.

While my colleague has worked with technical support, I have not, and therefore cannot speak to how they are to deal with. My understanding, based on his experience, is that they are fine. 

The initial setup is very simple and quite fast. The deployment only takes a few days. 

We don't have any issues with the pricing. It's not too expensive. 

I haven't compared the solution to other options. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We're a partner and end-user. We deal with Pure quite often.

FlashArray is used for flash storage for SQL databases, like Oracle or MySQL. Oracle is the best use case for FlashArray.

FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a  compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle. 

Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient.

We've been selling FlashArray for a few years.

FlashArray's performance is quite good. We haven't had that many server or hardware issues with FlashArray X. We lost some drives a couple of times, but we replaced them before we got errors. FlashArray is connected to a cloud system, so it sends some warnings before you lose a component. 

FlashArray's latency is the best on the market. I don't know of another product that has latency this low. Read and write latency averages .5 submillisecond. It's good for online financial transactions using Oracle.

I have no complaints about Pure's customer service and support. I've never had a negative experience with these guys. They're always fast, gentle, and ready to help. They offer ample support, and [inaudible 00:06:16]. If you connect FlashArray X to the cloud, they will inform you about any potential issues before they cause an outage. 

It has good, reliable, and fast storage. We really like snapshot features and how automatable and programmable it is. It is all managed with ad sport and playbooks.

We have been using Pure FlashArray X NVMe for about a year now.

Scalability has been great. We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly.

I have not had to contact technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy.

I would absolutely recommend Pure FlashArray X NVMe to anyone and rate it an eight out of ten.