Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

We run all our Tier 1 and Tier 2 storage on it, our VMware infrastructure, all of that would be running on the //X70s. Our database workloads are on the new Xs.

The feedback I've had from the storage admins is that it's the simplicity. It's easier and quicker to allocate storage for us. We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint than we used to.

It helps simplify storage management a Database Admin perspective - there was a lot of thought that went into the size of the disks, how we allocate those, etc. Especially when doing maintenance or expanding disks. There was always performance issues when expanding disks on the old infrastructure arrays and allot of care had to be taken on offset sizes etc - Whereas now, we're finding that we can expand disks without having to remove and add disks again. That simplifies those admin tasks without any performance implications. From a Storage Admin side they love the ease of use and visibility the systems gives them.

• Simplicity
• Performance
• Visibility

Those are the three most valuable features that I've observed.

The visibility you have on what the frames are doing, even your phone is amazing, very detailed information about the environment in real-time.

One area that I haven't been sold on yet is the POD replication. We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency. We have another array that our latency isn’t affected by replication and when compared to the X array with a synchronous POD setup – it’s faster to respond to the system, but as soon as the POD mode is Async – the X is faster again. We not talking huge numbers – with the POD in synchronous mode with talking under 1ms for most IO operations.(Distance dependent to the other array)  I do feel there is some gaps in my understanding of the POD setups in detail so perhaps its tuning gap.

The stability has been excellent, there was one minor issue when the M70s were first released – but they have been 100% stable since.

The only aspect that I can talk to is the benchmarking that I did from a Database perspective, as we purchased the X70 for our Database workloads. What we want to see is as we increase workload the latency should remain stable. We are able to push the X70 way past our current needs from a throughput and IOPS perspective – without any degradation on latency. As we ramped up more machines into the tests, the only limitations we ran into were switch ports and FCoE saturation – the X had headroom.

The technical support is very good. The teams are awesome. The guys in South Africa, and they're very, very good.

If you're looking at it from a database perspective, you obviously want to make sure that you can scale your workloads without a degradation in performance. What we've seen on the X’s, and the Pure’s in general, is that we can scale beyond what we need without any degradation in performance. The real-time monitoring I’ve seen via your phone is a differentiator alone – to get a heat map in the past was a big process and took place after the event.

In terms of the Predictive Performance Analytics, I haven't seen it myself. I know that the guys have just recently started looking at a lot of analytics.

Although I don't admin the solution, I would give it a ten out of ten - from the vendor technical expertise and helpfulness, it's simple, reliable, quick and predictable at the same time I’m expecting lower costs for us once we fully migrated.

I didn't do the setup, but everything I heard was that it was straightforward.

We used the main guys in South Africa, Data Sciences. They do everything, top to bottom if you want or with you teams. Our experience with them has been awesome.

I do know there has been a reduction in the total cost of ownership, although I can't say how much as we in a transition from our old arrays, but I do know the cost per gig is lower, the dedupe on the array helps drive this cost down – as well as the physical size is much smaller and uses less power.

The vendors at the time would have been Dell EMC and Hitachi.

It depends through which lens you're looking at it. If you're looking at it from a database perspective, you obviously want to make sure that you can scale your workloads without a degradation in performance, your latency times. What we've seen on the Xs, and the Pures in general, is that we can scale way beyond what we need to without any degradation in performance. We don't need to sacrifice any of the performance as we scale up or scale to the side. There aren't many vendors that we looked at that can scale to the size of the operations that we needed, from an I/O-testing perspective. In real, day-to-day, we don't run that hard. But if we need it, we can. It's there. 

In terms of the Predictive Performance Analytics, I haven't seen it myself. I know that the guys have just recently started looking at a lot of analytics, but I haven't seen it myself.

Although I don't admin the solution, I would give it a ten out of ten. It's been awesome to work with. It's simple, it's very reliable, it's very quick. And we get excellent dedupe ratios on the machine without a sacrifice in performance.

We use the solution as storage for our vSphere environment.

The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature. We have two Pure Storages. They are in a high-available setup. If one fails, the other will take over. With all the virtual machines on the storage, we need a reliable solution. The product is reliable.

We are a little bit disappointed about the data deduplication feature. We were promised a deduplication rate of at least 2:1. At the moment, we get 1.8:1, which limits our expectations. We may run out of storage in the foreseeable future. We need better data deduplication.

I read that the vendor is working on a better deduplication algorithm. It will be useful for us if it works. We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment. It's important for us.

I have been using the solution since June 2021.

When we scheduled an update, the support technician called us and made the update remotely. We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site. It took around 24 hours to replace the controller. The technician who came on-site did not have the controller with him. The technician waited one and a half hours until a taxi driver arrived with the controllers. It could have been coordinated better.

Positive

We used DataCore before. It was a Windows-based solution. We had to restart the servers every month because of Windows updates. Every month, we had to restart the servers manually. It was not very pleasant. Pure Storage is a Linux-based system, and there are not many security issues. We only have two updates about every six months. It is much more reliable.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took about three days. The first day, we just put it in our racks and put the network cables and fiber channel cables on it. On the second day, we made the initial setup with high availability and created the first volumes. We migrated the data from our current storage to Pure Storage on the third day.

We deployed the solution with the help of certified partners. They were experienced professionals. They knew what they were doing.

Our performance has increased. We were using DataCore before. It wasn’t so performant. Pure Storage has flash drives. We have better IOPS.

The product is expensive. We bought it because we want to be able to use it for about ten years. The vendor offers maintenance contracts where we are guaranteed to be able to upgrade the system, change controllers, and do other things. We hope that in ten years, the solution will be worth the money.

Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Pure Storage has a hybrid deployment, and customers can get Pure Storage on AWS or Azure.

Pure created this technology of the NVMe. They have very good features. Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator. It's NTP protection. Also, if your customer doesn't care about the usable space and just wants space to put their data, Pure makes one to four applications, which could take 250 or 300 terabytes of space. The solution is fast and reliable and has good install-based referrals.

Given its price, Pure is not the first option. If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure.

Customers ask if there is Turkish language support, but Pure Storage doesn't have it. Only partners give support in Turkish, or customers need to speak in English. It would be good if Pure Storage could improve this.

I've been in this sector for 28 years, and I've worked with Veeam for two or three years.

I have one client who installed Pure Storage almost eight years ago. During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.

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

Pure has good storage, but they don't have Turkish language support.

The initial setup is very easy. Recently, they made an upgrade, a live system working on a bank, which is a non-interruption upgrade from one service to another one. The upgrade was very useful and easy to do. We didn't need to stop anything. The maintenance and the updates are very easy.

Pure Storage is better than IBM, Dell, and other solutions because it makes a good application and keeps its promise. Pure Storage has stability and works very fast. They keep their promise for what they build. For example, if they promise one to four with an application, they do that. Even if they can't do that, they put in an extra hard drive to keep their promise, and it's a free hard drive. The most important position of Pure depends on whether you are talking about net space or the use space.

Of course, Dell and IBM have good solutions, but that depends on what storage level we are talking about, such as SIP or NAS.

If the customer needs a certain size, say about 500 terabytes of usable space, Pure is not a good solution because it will be expensive. IBM could be a better choice.

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

Pure might be better than other products could be. But in some projects, IBM is better for the customer. However, I must understand what the customer needs. I am not saying that Pure is the best, but In some projects, I prefer to go with Dell, HP, or IBM. I need to understand the customer needs and budget before comparing them. Pure has better technology right now, but if the customer has a small budget and if we are just talking about the use space or the net space, Pure doesn't work.

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.

We use this solution mostly for our databases.

The latency is good.

The administration and the stability are very good.

The software layer has to improve. The software is promising but not prominent.

We have upgraded more than 21 things. We have four artists and have had to upgrade the codes. 

There are several upgrades required, but we are slowly catching up to them.

There are not many drill-down options available. EMC is providing many reporting tools that are not available in Pure.

They need better reporting. Some of the tools are missing. EMC is a step ahead in that area.

The usage at the host level has some limited options.

We have been using this solution for one year.

It's a stable solution. It's reliable, we have not been faced with any issues.

Our IT operations team is the only one to use this solution.

We have not yet scaled this solution.

Technical support is really good.

The initial setup was easy. It was straightforward.

The installation was done within three hours. 

The licensing is on a yearly basis. We have a three-year subscription.

I don't know about the pricing as it is not my department, but if we were not satisfied with the pricing we would not have purchased it.

This is a solution that I would recommend.

I would rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe an eight out of ten.

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.

At Secure-24, we have been a long time customer of Pure Storage. We started with Pure Storage approximately four years ago. We use it as the primary mechanism for block storage in our environment.

We specialize at comprehensive managed services of business-critical applications. We run a hosting environment and the full gamut of applications, infrastructure, security, compliance, and governance. Using that model, Pure Storage is a key part of being able to deliver the performance, encrypted storage, and reliability for mission-critical applications.

The biggest impact changing to Pure is we saw an influx of tickets from customers because they thought their BI applications were broken because they were running too quickly. 

Operationally, we find that we are not having storage problems anymore on performance. Historically, there might be various storage performance issues when you have DBAs involved utilizing network and storage resources, since it's very operationally intensive to gather multiple teams together and do comprehensive troubleshooting of problems. We found these issues have simply gone away since we have migrated to Pure Storage. It's been fairly significant change in how we manage and deploy applications.

It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users. 

You don't have to worry about the different tiers of storage. They are always fast and reliable with consistent performance.

Based on the various types of workloads and environments we run, we have looked at Pure Storage as being one of the largest infrastructure-based changes we have seen in our environment in the last 10 years of infrastructure hosting. 

What has changed is you now have databases and applications where you can make an infrastructure change and it directly impacts the end user experience. You generally don't see that with other infrastructure changes. If I change from storage A to storage B, maybe there is a small or minor performance increase. 

With Pure Storage, there was a dramatic performance increase which we saw across various different applications. Going from a legacy vendor to Pure Storage, we saw reductions in MRP reports previously running at six hours going to 30 minutes.

With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks. 

Ideally, in a perfect world, you would have all-flash arrays being able to displace even your traditional "cheap and deep" type storage frames. We are more excited from the industry perspective when this type of transition can happen from a cost perspective.

Also, I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center.

With mission-critical, business-critical environments, stability is of the utmost importance. Pure Storage has impressed us in this area. We have gone through multiple software upgrades, as well as completely non-disruptive hardware upgrades. Upgrading from an FA450, which is one of the arrays from more than four years ago, to an M70, then to the X70s. We have gone through that, the full controller and full storage upgrades, non-disruptively to any of our customers. This has been a big change from what we've seen historically in the storage industry, where you had to do an upgrade or when you had to do a large new purchase, and there would be a significant amount of time, planning, and organization which would go along with it. There would be intangible costs that would generally come along with legacy providers.

The way that we have looked at scalability is from a linear scalability perspective with multiple storage frames. We like having the capability of scaling wide with multiple storage frames as opposed to trying to scale too large with any one individual frame. However, we also have an X90R2 with two petabytes of NVMe in it which fits in about six rack units of space. This has been transformational, as well. From there, we scale out linearly with multiple of X90R2s, as opposed to trying to somehow cluster them or make them larger.

Over the last four years, we have displaced the majority of other storage solutions in our data centers with Pure Storage.

The engineers and architects on our team were the ones directly doing the setup and implementation.

We have absolutely seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO), specifically around the operational overhead of running a storage array. Now, we have our Pure Storage arrays managed by VMware resources. Therefore, we don't have a specific role for storage management where one used to exist. So, the VMware team is able to manage, deploy, and configure the arrays. The simplicity of drives allows for this consolidation.

There are a lot of intangible costs, such as gathering teams together in war rooms to troubleshoot performance issues, simplicity of managing the array, growing the array, and going through upgrades. When you look at all the intangible operational expenses, in many cases, these will offset the capital investment of going to an all-flash array.

To say, "Pure Storage has simplified storage," is a bit of an understatement. The array has gone from having a PhD in working with it to effectively having a high school diploma. Anyone who understands anything about IT can run a Pure Storage array. It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems.

With the traditional Pure Storage array, you had very consistent low latency, but you still were in one to three milliseconds. Now, with the all NVMe arrays, it's a whole new paradigm of fast. You're actually measuring everything in less than a millisecond. So, with the I/O responses, your high bar is one millisecond. This is something you haven't seen in most traditional storage frames or even all-flash storage frames.

We generally always advise people to make the choice to go with Pure Storage because they won't regret it. We can evidence that a lot through our experiences of running massive databases and systems on Pure Storage today and prior experiences that we've had with it.

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.