Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

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.

We needed a flash array to support our core databases for maximum performance. We use SQL. We were using vSAN before, but we were having some problems with it. So, we wanted to isolate the databases with dedicated storage. Rather than using a vSAN solution using servers, we tested a couple of solutions, and we figured out that Pure FlashArray X NVMe was giving us the best performance.

Fundamentally, we have more visibility to what is happening in the storage for the databases. We can determine if the problem is something that is bound by IO or the problem is related to the database structure itself. 

The amount of time that a DBA has to spend figuring out whether it is a physical problem versus a programmatic problem has been reduced significantly. Before moving to this solution, when the database was running slow, we were asked to check our disks, but we had no way of verifying that. It was a nightmare. Now, we have reports that we can send on a daily basis, and they know what their performance is like.

We can now ascertain that it is not the physical problem with the array that is causing the delays on the database. The DBAs can then look at the database and figure out various reasons or solutions for this, such as maybe the tables are value structure, maybe they need to run optimal queries, or maybe they should change the way they are accessing the data. You can pretty much take out of the equation the fact that the hardware is the problem.

It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality.

They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good.

Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. 

The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better.

I have been using this solution for almost a year.

It is stable. It has been almost a year, and we haven't had any problems.

Scalability-wise, it is expensive but good. They love to add boxes, and they did a very good job. You can easily add boxes to the array cells, both disks or controllers. The nice thing about it is that you don't have to change your schema. In other words, you don't have to reprogram or reconfigure anything. You simply add a box, and you have more disk space. Essentially, you can extend a disk to whatever services you are running without having to reconfigure a lot of stuff. That's actually a huge benefit. 

We have 200 employees in our firm, and almost everyone in our firm uses this solution. All the databases in the firm are running off Pure FlashArray X NVMe.

Their technical support is fantastic. They are very good. 

We were using Compellent from Dell. We switched because the Dell technology was at least one generation before in the type of SSD drives that they were using. Pure FlashArray X NVMe had the latest versions of the EV disks, which Dell did not have on their systems. They were about to bring it into the market, but we would have had to wait for another three months, and it would have been a new product that wasn't yet tested. 

The infrastructure or the technology for Pure was built specifically for flash arrays, whereas Dell came from spinning disks and then moved into flash arrays. So, the controllers were not built specifically for SSD drives or flash. Even if you have flash, you still run into delays because the controllers were not designed to run just purely flash, whereas Pure was designed for flash from the beginning. They never had any spinning disks in their boxes, and that makes a huge difference. 

The thing that makes these boxes powerful is the algorithm that they use to decide where to put the data and how often they read it. Because SSD drives have a finite life, if you do the algorithms correctly, you maximize not just the performance but also the longevity. Pure is doing a very good job. I'm not fully a mathematician in the longevity piece of it, but I'm expecting that this box is going to give me three to five years of use with good performance. A Dell box would have to be replaced in three years for sure. 

The initial setup is very easy. Its installation is very simple. The console is fairly intuitive, and I understood more or less what my team was doing.

Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it.

I would absolutely recommend using it. I would also suggest negotiating and testing it. I bought a very small system of 10 terabytes that I put in one of our labs for testing so that my team can learn it, and I could play with it. We tested it, and after we were comfortable with the capabilities of the system and building things in VMware, which is a really critical part of the whole integration, we tested three different solutions from HP, Dell, etc. After the testing, it was clear to us that the Pure FlashArray X NVMe was the easiest to manage and configure and had the best performance that we had seen in all the arrays. We are not testers, but we could tell. We could see the speed at which the databases came up and everything else. After testing, you will be convinced that Pure FlashArray X NVMe is probably the best box or right there in terms of performance. We tested in early 2019. There might be another solution that is doing better today.

I would rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten. The only reason I won't give it a ten is the price. Its feature set is pretty complete. I'm pushing it right now. It is like you buy a sports car and then you complain that you don't have a big trunk to put a lot of luggage. You are complaining about the wrong thing here. You bought the thing because it is fast. Similarly, we bought it because it is fast. From that perspective, whether they can address NAS or other things like that is just icing on the cake for me. Its price is a little high right now. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten.

We are a solution provider and we sell all sizes of Pure FlashArrays. The FlashArray X NVMe is one of the products that we provide to our customers.

Our clients with their own data centers purchase FlashArray storage because they are replacing old storage systems. They often have HP systems with hard disks and these systems are old and too slow. They are replacing them with faster systems and don't want to have additional costs every three years to renew their storage.

We also have a FlashArray for our own use.

The most valuable feature is the performance.

One of the best features is the support, which is excellent.

The user interface and reporting are good.

It is easy to deploy and administrate this solution.

In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems. They should have direct integration available using Pure APIs. Good candidates would be Rubrik and Veeam.

We have been working with Pure FlashArray storage for more than seven years.

We have not had any problem with stability, even when updating controllers for customer arrays.

We haven't had any issues in terms of scalability.

The support from Pure is excellent.

The deployment is simple. We have a single person for maintenance and they spend one or two hours per month doing it.

This is a good solution and one that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using version //X70 of Pure FlashArray. Our primary use case is to have a very fast storage array.

The virtual volumes and clarification around storage arrays are the most valuable features 

In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified.

We have been using the Pure FlashArray for about five years.

Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution.

The solution is very scalable as you can add capacity very easily. We have about 2000 users using the storage array.

The technical support was not good in the beginning. I would rate the support at a five out of 10. It has improved though.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took two weeks from start to finish.

We were able to complete the setup in house without any vendor support.

We looked at IBM and NetAPP before choosing Pure FlashArray.

I would definitely recommend Pure FlashArray. I would rate the product at ten out of 10.

We use this solution primarily for production data for our virtual environment. We run a lot of SQL out of it.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

Speed has definitely been a big improvement for us. We were running a bunch of iSCSI to EMC VNX and that had a gigabyte bottleneck. Now, since we're running through a true fiber channel to the Pure array, we're getting 32-gigabyte bandwidth. That means the speed and accessibility for our users and our customers have definitely improved.

The Hypervisor that ESX and vCenter use, as well as the Orchestrator for some automation,  have helped to improve my organization. There's a lot that VMware does for us. Probably 95% of our infrastructure is built on VMware's platform, hosted on-premises. This is soon to be 100%. We have some physical stuff that we're converting and VMware has made it possible to pick up and drop those servers onto their platform. We'll reach 100% by the end of the year for sure.

We do have VMware analytics stood up. It's a simple Linux machine that runs a Kubernetes container that talks back to Pure1, which is their public website for support as well as for analytics, which we're using also. It's just a simple API. 

We also use vRealize. It helps us pinpoint issues as they come. We haven't done a whole lot of the automation through vRealize, but we're probably going to work towards that so that if we have an allocation issue, it can automatically shift things for us. But the DRS and HA kind of do a lot of that for us inherently. There hasn't been a huge drive to do any of that quite yet.

The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly.

They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit.

I think it's a lot better than what we were running for production as far as the VNX, which has fail drives about every month. It had the EMC VNX protocol. And it's not the VNX product itself, it's just that we have a much older one so it has older disks and drives that will fail.

We absolutely see this working as our company grows. Even though it is fairly simplified in the way that they do their RAID and everything like that. It makes pulling drives and putting new ones in super simple. The costs could be improved though because it is quite expensive.

Their customer service is phenomenal. In their escalation paths, everything is laid out in black and white and it's very streamlined. Then they even go so far as to actually talk with other vendors on those integrations. If there's a potential issue with VMware and there's a potential issue with Cisco, Pure engineers will actually talk to Cisco engineers or VMware engineers and come to a resolution together instead of pointing fingers and saying, "Well, it's their problem, not ours." I've actually seen that in action so it's not just talk. You can actually do that.

It ended up being an incompatibility on the Cisco end for the UCS from one of the drivers that we had installed based on the firmware that we installed for that particular blade. But rather than Pure just saying it's Cisco's problem, call Cisco, they actually got on with a TAC engineer and talked us through it. With this method, they came to a resolution a lot quicker than it would have been to just open a ticket with Cisco and start the troubleshooting process all over again.

I had worked at a different company and we switched from EMC's XtremIO flash array to Pure and we were actually one of Pure's first customers when we did that. Their simplified support model and then their Evergreen program where they upgrade controllers as they come out was pretty phenomenal. I carried that over into the company I work for now. I kind of suggested that as a route to go in.

We used VNX, which we still have. I think one of the main driving points at the time was that we were running out of space on the VNX and the flash pool, and we could have added additional space, but the cost comparison between getting a Pure array and adding a new shelf to the VNX was about the same. I felt like we would get more bang for our buck going to Pure, which we have.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It's pretty much plug and play.

We actually used Pure professional services, which we didn't even really need, but we used anyway because it came with the implementation purchase. We did use a reseller to buy. We used RoundTower to buy the Pure array. We used professional services from Pure. It was probably set up within 20 minutes ad we could've done it ourselves, but it's always good to have trained hands on it.

A SQL job that would normally take six minutes running on VNX takes two minutes on Pure. That's been pretty beneficial because we're constantly running reports out of those SQL instances. We've seen enhancement and efficiencies from that.

EMC still has good products so they were still there. We were looking at adding additional space to the VNX. And then for general purpose, we did look at some stuff through Cohesity, but we needed more performance-oriented space. So that's why we went with Pure.

Try to get as many discounts as you can if you go with Pure.

If you don't need performance-oriented space or storage, Cohesity is very well priced and scalable. If you just need file server storage, you might not want to go with Pure. You might want to go with something a lot cheaper or more cost-effective like Cohesity.

The Systems Engineer that we worked with was a huge help, too. 

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten. It's very functional and very cutting edge. Technology just costs a lot.

We use this solution on private cloud for all our Oracle workloads and databases, and also for our enterprise virtualization infrastructure running BMR.

The main reason why we run our VMware on Pure was because it went hand in hand with the ease of use, configuration, compatibility, and the support. It was a recognized solution very early on and Pure Storage and VMware have a great partnership. It offers support for compatibility drivers and things like that.

We also use some of the integration tools from Pure Storage to help us manage some of the day-to-day tasks that we do with our storage and configuration and also to help keep things running optimally. One of the things we're using is the management pack from Pure Storage for vROps, so that we can continuously monitor the entire environment as well as our Pure Storage. With that we are more proactive about being able to make adjustments to meet the demands of our users. We use that to automate some of our storage augmentations when we need extra volume.

The moment we started using Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, we immediately saw a 30 to 40% improvement in performance. In addition to that, we saw a highly dense configuration where we were able to eliminate costly spindle-based storage and free up valuable real estate in our data center. That was immediately recognized.

VMware is really beneficial for our IT board. It benefits our IT organization by enabling us to consolidate as much of the physical hardware as possible within our data center. Essentially we can shrink the footprint to make more efficiency gains out of our existing data center.

What I really like about this program is that it is easy to use and easy to configure. I  am also very happy with their support. It's the first storage company that we've actually engaged with and formed a partnership that does what they say they're going to do and they meet all of the requirements given.

Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services. 

Pure is an innovator. They're a disruptor in the industry and I love that. That means that they're motivated and dedicated to being at the forefront of technology. So the only thing I can say is that I wish that Pure would keep up the good work and it looks like they are. 

We've been a customer for about four years and as far as the stability goes, we have not had any issues with the product. Again, it has met the described functions that we need. When our vendor told us what Pure Storage does, we weren't certain of that because many vendors make empty promises. But Pure Storage was the first company that delivered what they promised. 

As far as stability goes, we have yet to have an outage. We have had failed components, but we've had top-notch support, and we've been able to resolve critical issues within hours. So if I had to rate the stability with Pure Storage products and our environment from one to 10, I'd give them a 9.7.

For our environment, we have seen the ability to scale up and out very easily with the product. We have also performed storage and controller upgrades live with zero downtime. That is another key component of our requirements that were met. I have been involved with every upgrade and there have been no issues. Scalability for us has been great. It works well and it does what it's supposed to do, as advertised.

What I like about Pure Storage technical support is that when you enter a request, you immediately get a response. Within less than 15 minutes you get a follow-up phone call, depending upon the severity of troubles you're encountering. That has been very good for us. And again, if I had to rate that on a scale of one to 10 I would say that's about a 9.5. That too is another thing in the industry that we haven't experienced before.

We were running on very old hardware that was all spindle-based sand solutions. Large-sized equipment with too much power consumption. We looked at other solutions like Kaminario, Nimble, Nimbus, 3PAR, and Tintri, but choosing Pure Storage was a no-brainer. We saw the solution, we were skeptical upfront, but when we did our research, it was very quickly recognized that Pure Storage was the right solution. We were able to save a ton of data center space with density ratios we've never seen before with hardware. 

With Pure, we immediately saw value in the density ratios that we would be able to achieve. We saw value in the performance, in the scalability, and with the support. In the past, we've had trouble with support with all the other major vendors. So that was something that we took a risk on. Thankfully we did because it worked out.

The initial setup of any storage solution is complex. However, what Pure Storage has been able to do, is remove those complexities. When you receive the product, you will get detailed information on what to do. It really does eliminate the complexities. In other words, our experience has been very positive with the product out of the box. We did not need dedicated support engineers, we were able to figure these things out on our own, and we did it based on their documentation. If I had to rate that on a scale of one to 10 I would say that it's about a 9.5 as well.

One of the interesting things about ROI is that most companies assume ROI without quantifying it, which has one of the beauties of where I work, we were able to quantify an ROI. We looked at historical data from our previous spindle-based solutions and year after year we looked at those costs, the performance, everything down to the movement of water that it takes to cool this equipment. So with Pure Storage, we did a comparison in the same manner, and we saw a dramatic improvement in precious real estate space. If you had to put a dollar value on it, we'd saved a lot there. Don't expect ROI within the first year. Give it about two years and then you will start seeing a difference. 

As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license. That's something that our other competitors don't seem to do very well with as they usually have additional costs. 

On a scale of one to 10 Pure Storage has rightfully earned a 10 rating. We are very proud to be a customer and I hope the developers will continue to innovate and keep up the good work.

We use this solution for on-premises, VMware workload storage.

I do not hire as much tech support for this solution as I would normally have to because of the way that it works, so it saves money on staffing.

VMware benefits our organization because we make use of the applications for everything.

The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance.

You can't use this solution with VNC, yet. We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC.

I would like to see the cloud version of the application improved. It is kind of new and it still has some limitations. Using it with VNC would be nice, and making it more incorporated with vSphere would be very nice.

The stability of this solution is extremely high. Very good.

Scalability of this solution is decent, and I would rate it a seven out of ten. We've recently become a VNC client, and you can't use Pure Storage with VNC yet. They are working towards it, but in the meantime, it prohibits us from using VNC along with some of the Pure features that they have.

I would rate Pure's technical support a ten out of ten.

We switched from our previous storage solutions because of speed. At the time, Pure was a lot faster. It was flash, and we were on spinning disks at the time.

The initial setup of this solution was simple and straightforward.

We used Logicalis, an integrator, for our deployment. Our experience with them was good.

We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees.

We looked at EMC, Pure, and IBM. The Pure interface was much better, which is why we chose it. The cost was also better in most cases.

We run VMware on Pure, mainly because of the speed and the ease of use of the Pure storage interface. The joint solution has helped because we can do the same thing with a lot less tech.

We use the vSphere plug-in for Pure. It helps because we don't have to learn the CLI for Pure. It allows my medium-level tech staff to do stuff that they normally would be a little nervous about doing on their own.

We are big fans of this product, and for anybody considering this solution, I strongly encourage them to use it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using this solution for our on-premises, private cloud.

The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability.

The UI for this solution needs to be improved.

This product is very stable and I have had no issues.

This solution is very scalable. It's good enough for us at the moment.

I have had no issues with technical support.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

We used an integrator, WWT, to assist us with our implementation. We have had no issues with them.

Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD.

VMware benefits our IT organization because of its ease of deployment and manageability.

We are using VMware on Pure, and we have implemented this because of the speed. VMware is faster, so it helps when you log in.

We use vCenter integration. It helps because you can see the storage added, and manage it from vCenter with a single console.

The cost for Pure may be high, but the reliability and scalability make it well worth the money.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.