Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

We use this solution for our primary storage. Our deployment is in a private cloud environment.

Using this solution has benefitted us operationally by making us more efficient.

VMware benefits our IT organization through cost efficiency.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.

I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution. 

This solution is pretty stable.

We have not tested scalability yet, so it is to be determined.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

We did not switch from a previous solution. We brought this in as a way to improve operational efficiency, which is something that we're always looking for.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward. It was an easy setup.

We used an integrator for our deployment, and our experience was ok.

We have not yet seen ROI with this solution.

We considered IBM and Dell EMC for our storage solution. 

My advice for anybody who is researching this or a similar solution is to give it a shot.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the on-premise deployment model of this solution. Our primary use case is for machine learning analytics.

It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights. 

Its agility has been a benefit for our IT organization. We are running VMware on Pure. The main driver was FlashStack. The joint solution has helped my organization through its support. 

The performance is the most valuable feature of this solution. 

We have taken advantage of the VMware integrations developed by Pure with the validated design, FlashStack CVD. The integration has helped in the way that engineers feel competent that the solution is designed correctly.

In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models.

The scalability and telemetry analytics could be improved.

The stability is good. 

It is somewhat scalable but it's not infinitely scalable. They could improve the petabyte-scale with greater capacities. 

We haven't needed to contact technical support. 

We knew that we needed to switch because our system wasn't performing so we knew we had to buy something. We liked Pure because it had a good pitch.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We did the deployment in-house. 

We have seen a two year ROI. 

With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually. 

We also evaluated Hitachi, Nimble, and EMC. We went with Pure because they have the best pitch.

The advice I would give to someone considering this solution is, don't wait. Go for it. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten. There is room for improvement. 

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.

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.