Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

The primary use case is big data. 

SAP is very important for our business. We are running our management system on SAP, so it's very critical. We are running SAP S/4HANA and other ERP modules. We run our config on-premise.

The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is okay, but could be improved.

We switched because the performance was bad with our previous solution, and it was expensive.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed it in-house.

We have seen latency improvements.

We also evaluated EMC and HPE.

We really needed high performance with large amounts of data. We weren't happy with other vendors, and the speed and the volume of data that they could store, handle, and compress.

It has been quite satisfactory in performance and scalability. Since we adopted this only a year ago, we will see what happens in the long term, if they will keep up with their quality.

Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on, and the biggest selling point for me was the replacement of the hardware, the controllers, without any major expense to the clinic.

I don't deal with the day-to-day management of it. I'm sure that, from a technical perspective, the ones who manage it would be able to tell about you something that needs improvement. From my perspective of the acquisition and ongoing support, I don't see any.

It's a stable product. 

It's scalable. We've grown the product two or three times since we got it. We've actually purchased two more storage arrays since then that are not used for Epic, so we're expanding it. We'll be using this for many years in the future.

Tech support is helpful when needed.

We had multiple platforms beforehand. We had HPE, IBM. 

To me, the installation is easy. I'm not the one who put it together, their techs came out and helped us. I don't remember anything momentous about it.

I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less. That's standard business. It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace. That's huge for me.

I would recommend this product to colleagues in the same field.

It makes life easier for me.

I rate the product at nine out of ten. We're very happy with it. We purchased the product for our Epic implementation. I had such minimal issues with it. Ten out of ten is a stretch, but it's pretty close. We're pretty happy.

Our primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the project.

The analytics that we gather is used for just one environment (which is big in the banking industry). Production wise, it's running Oracle. Performance wise, it's basically running enterprise applications.

Once the project was enabled with data persuasion and we had Pure Storage behind it, there was a lot of saving storage. Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes. 

Infrastructure as a base is important, but the end game is to have the DevOps pipeline, which is the most valuable feature. 

A three wave application or multi-wave application synchronization would be an improvement. 

The company started off with a small chunk of the product. Now they have moved up to where Pure Storage became the direct responder in our Australian office, they said it was very stable on their end.

We have a capital of storage with EMC, our previous solution. The fact that Pure has a petabyte of storage means that Pure Storage will become a de-facto standard in all the global organizations.

We don't use the tech support, but we have an in-house engineer in one of our offices.

The initial setup was really straight forward.

We needed to choose a new investment because our solution couldn't do data provisioning very quickly. The main solution that the bank normally had was EMC. We looked into HP, IBM, and Pure Storage. But, cost, rate per terabyte, and speed is why we chose Pure Storage. It was a no brainer.

Latency defines everything.

This solution has improved my organization because it has good performance. The interface is simple. Its ease of use has simplified storage for us.

The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free. 

I would like to see more cloud integration. 

Scalability is great. 

We used a Pure Storage engineer for deployment. He came on site and did the setup. 

We also looked at NetApp. We chose Pure Storage because we did research and heard good things. 

I would rate this solution a ten. It's fast and simple. I would recommend this product to someone considering it. I would advise to look at your budget and use case and decide from there. 

Our database administrators had to run some manual process twice a week since the disk performance of our previous storage unit was not able to respond to the requests fast enough.

This process took approximately four hours and it had to be done manually twice a week by the DBAs. After the implementation, the time to run the process was reduced to minutes and it did not require any manual intervention from our DBAs.

Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications.

I have not been able to find one yet.

We did, but it was partially due to our environment. We were running outdated firmware in the HBAs for our HPE Blade Servers and an old version of vSphere that it is not supported by VMware.

We decided to keep these servers under with the previous storage array to avoid disconnects and system outages.

No, the unit that we bought contains 40TB of usable space and we are using 10TB so far.

Technical support is great. They will dive in deep with your team to figure out what is causing the problem for them and find the root cause.

I wish they could collaborate more with the other vendors internally, instead of us opening cases with Cisco, HPE, VMware, etc.

We have another platform using spinning disk 600GB 15K RPM SAS drives, but our applications and servers have grown so much that the storage was getting saturated with the requests from the applications.

We discussed the option to add more SAS disk and memory to the controllers of that array versus buying a Solid State Drive Array (SSDA).

We concluded that it would be more beneficial for our company to invest in an SSDA, and the results paid off.

The initial setup was straightforward and very easy to implement, as long as you have all the information that you need ahead of time.

For instance, IP addresses, iSCSI IPs and adapters, switch configurations and ports enabled, etc.

The price seems fair according to the market. We analyzed multiple All-Flash Arrays (AFA) in the market, but Pure came at the top in many areas.

The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it. I love the Evergreen model to replace any parts after three years with a newer part as part of your support contract. The licensing is based on your capacity.

We researched other products from Kaminario, NetApp SolidFire, Nimble Storage, EMC XtremeIO, and HPE.

I always recommend a company to start with a proof of concept. That way, you can test your applications directly with the unit. It is critical to get a baseline of the before with your current storage array and after with an SSDA or an AFA.

Pure Storage FlashArray is our main SAN solution. It's for SAN for service for data storage.

It is very easy to use.

The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray.

It's a brilliant solution with brilliant support.

Pure Storage FlashArray has a lot of features.

The price could be better.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for three years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is an absolutely stable solution.

It's a highly scalable product.

In our organization, we have 1,500 users.

We have plans to increase the usage.

The support is excellent.

We were also using other technologies such as EMC, and Hitachi. We were using various other SAN storage systems. It was approximately three years ago.

We switched to Pure Storage FlashArray because it was easier to administer, and it is very powerful and fast.

It is not difficult to install.

It only requires one admin to maintain this solution.

As it's a SAN, it's a corporate solution, that requires experts.

It can be costly, but the return on our investment is extremely high.

Price is always an area that could be improved.

There are no licensing fees or other costs.

We have reviewed other solutions. We looked at a variety of options.

I would encourage them to try the solution.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a 10 out of 10.

We put the solution onto the VMware environment and all the Microsoft SQL servers. We do the synchronization between two data centers, so that is has a very low latency. We just have a few milliseconds of latency which is a ready performance, and near perfect. 

If I compare it to SAN Symphony, for instance, it's much faster, much reliable level. 

The maintenance is very good. The support is very, very good. If you do any maintenance on it you have the support, and it's nice to know they are there to assist.

It's a very good product. It's very easy to manage everything.

With a snapshot, you can schedule it and you can remove it afterward. You can do a kind of production cope. That's very, very good now, and it's performing very well. The storage is amazing. It's so fast.

The total reduction you can expect is excellent. You buy the bundle storage and they give you a ratio of what you can achieve within it.

The mobile app is very helpful. I have an application on my smartphone. I view the latency in real-time on my app. You can see everything on your smartphone. You can also set up alerts on it, and things like this. I don't think you can do this on Dell storage. 

The solution is not cheap. It's much more expensive than DataCore. It costs much more. 

The improvement I would expect from them is maybe more if there is integration with VMware. We are also using Amazon Cloud to provision snapshots or to move or to copy snapshots to Amazon. I would expect more integration within Amazon. Amazon has tree storage or last tier so we have that as an option instead of keeping it in Pure Storage as it costs a lot of money. If they offered a hybrid cloud, for example, it would be very helpful.

The solution needs to ensure they have good integration with VVol. VVol is the future of VMware. I have spoken with Pure Storage engineers and they have an integration with vVol. They have a kind of plug-in for VMware to work with VVol, however, it's not mature enough. It's my understanding they're working on it to get it done on that side. More integration with the Windows Server for snapshots would also be helpful. 

One year ago I found that instead of having the new Pure Storage FlashArray on-prem, you can have it in Tokyo or you can have it in Virginia - it depends where you are. You can just pay a certain amount per minute and you can have a Pure Storage that you manage from your prem, but have it on Amazon. That may be in production. It will be a useful attribute.

I've been using the solution since 2019 and therefore it's not so long. It's a little bit more than one year - nearly two years now as we have started in August, 2019. 

5.3 is the latest stable version. They have a version 6 now, and 6.1 is in production, however, it's not as stable as the 5.3. We are running to the latest best stable version.

Previously, you were not able to scale the snapshot. You had to do it manually.

For a flash array of 11 terabytes that you buy in a bundle, you can provision for 44 terabytes. We still have six terabytes free. We can come to a ratio of four on full storage. You can optimize four times what they give to you. They give you a ratio from three to four. It depends on the application you have running. Not everything is taken on the storage. 

If you would like to expand, you can always just buy more storage disks. We will have to get a new license in two years and we might increase our usage then. For the moment, we have enough space.

Technical support has been very helpful throughout the process. They can assist during the setup process. They make everything very easy.

We also use the Dell EMC Storage Suite.

This solution is easier than what we've used in the past.

For me, in terms of setup, the process much easier than Symphony, for example. Before, we had DataCore and Symphony. With this product, it was easier to do the zoning on the fiber channel side. On the network side, it was easier. Everything it's much easier than other products if I compare it to Dell or to DataCore and Symphony.

The maintenance, if you have to upgrade the firmware or the version, is very convenient. The support is good also. And they are working now to integrate more in Amazon which will be helpful for us.

While it is my understanding that the solution is a bit expensive from a financial point of view, I don't know the exact costs.

The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more. I don't have the details anymore. I know it was much more than HP 3PAR and Dell Storage Center or DataCore. 

We have a five-year contract. We would need to renew it in two years or so.

We are just a customer and end-user.

With Pure Storage, you have two versions. You have the Pure Storage version 50 and version 10. 50 is a little bit bigger than version 10. With FlashArray M50, it's an X50R2, it's full flash. 

We have the product currently on-premises, however, we would be more open maybe to Amazon or some other cloud. 

I would suggest new organizations go with the product, even though it is new. Some companies are scared of new products. It's more mature in the United States. However, it's working well for us here in Europe. Even if it costs a little bit more, you do get more for what you pay. We've chosen the most expensive option, however, we have no regrets in that sense. It's been worth it. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's very easy to manage and works very well. The maintenance is also excellent. I'd recommend the solution. You don't have to do anything on the FlashArray. You don't have to deal with tier levels, or build and optimize something. Everything is done from the Pure Storage side. You're just using it, and that's it.

Our primary use case of this solution is to manage our virtual environment and storage so our entire VMware environment runs on Pure. 

The solution increases the overall speed of our systems. We run our virtual desktops off of them and there was a noticeable improvement once we moved from our old sand to this new sand. One could tell, the minute we switched to this program, everything ran a lot faster.

VMware benefits our IT board because all our servers are virtual, so it helps keep our footprint small. We spend less on hardware because all our servers are virtual. 

I find the speed of the solution its most valuable feature. It is really fast and it is also very easy to use. You can basically set it up and forget about it. You don't have to manage it on a day-to-day basis. I also like the plugins that go into beta where you can see there. For instance, if I need to extend a datastore I can go straight to the plugin and extend the data store, refresh the VAs, and see the new store. I don't have to log in and use my credentials, so I save time and it is easy.

We only want to manage our virtual environment so this program has all the features we need. We're pretty straightforward customers. I don't see anything that needs to improve as we only use the standard features. 

Once we've set everything up and running, we haven't really had an issue with it. So it's really stable.

Pure is our primary enterprise storage. We have a smaller one with about a 120 servers and a little over 400 virtual desktops. We have one 20 terabyte model and a 10 terabyte model. I believe it is scalable.

I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades. The service was pretty good. They knew what the problem was and they were able to remove in by enabling remote features. They shipped out a replacement and we swapped it out and shipped it back. I am satisfied with the technical support.

We used an older program, but it was too slow. The main reason for switching over to run our VMware on Pure was the speed and, after several meetings with other vendors, we decided to go with the all-flash model. We replace our programs every five years because we want the best performance.

It was pretty easy to set everything up. We used an integrator from Pure and we had to fill in a worksheet beforehand, so we gave them all the information they needed, like IP addresses and ports. It took less than an hour. 

We looked at Pure, NetApp and Nimble. Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis. If you want to upgrade, you can simply call in and they do everything on their side. NetApp, for instance, requires you to be on top of firmware, drivers and updating. You must initiate the upgrades, do the upgrades, follow all the steps. With NetApp, you need a lot of insight to manage it and it's difficult if you have only one person dedicated to that. 

I am a firm believer that everything has room for improvement, so I rate this nine out of ten.