Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We make use of the solution primarily for storage and DR replication.

We use the most recent stable version, as the latest one is still in a beta stage and too new to be employed.

V-Vault is pretty new and its implementation is superior to that offered by nearly any vendor. It's easier to configure than most others and to import the V-Vault. A separate working machine is not required. 

I can't think of too many features that need improvement. There are no bugs, it just works and it's stable. The graphical interface is perfect and really simple. Someone who understands storage can figure it out within a couple of minutes. There are really no drawbacks.

The only minor issues that come to mind are that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad. Also, the solution should be cheaper.

I've been using the solution for the past 10 years. 

The solution is stable. It's superb. We've done upgrades in which multiple controllers were involved and, while changing from one model of the array to another, a single controller was removed. It is swapped out and a new one introduced. Once it's stable they proceed to the next one. We have never experienced an outage in any of the three companies in which I've employed the solution. Even when the controller went down, the arrays remained up.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has been amazing. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who is not super knowledgeable. The only time I entertained any doubts, whatsoever, is when V-Vaults first came out. Certain people were not very familiar with it, but this was short lived. As we were extremely early adopters of V-Vault, training was provided fairly quickly. While the general tech support was not up to snuff, within a month or two they were all trained. Since then, there have been no issues to report. 

In this company we used an IBM V 7000 and in a previous one, an EMC VMAX.

When comparing the solution to an EMC array or an IBM B7000, both of which I've used, Pure Storage FlashArray is light years ahead of everybody else. I've used a variety of these solutions and many of them are very complicated. 

Only two weeks ago we set up a new solution in a new location that we're building. It's pretty straightforward. There are certain internal matters that only the vendor can handle. But, that's fairly common with most good storage arrays. Besides this, it's really easy. The vendor is really simple to work with. One need only provide him with a list of the IP's he uses for management and replication. 

I did not do the initial storage myself, as I'm in Chicago and it is handled in Omaha, Nebraska. I did have to coordinate everything, however. We were sent a form to fill out with the name and IP use. At this point, the arrival of a technician is scheduled, who asks where the rack should be placed. At this point, it is racked, cabled up and all the initial IP configurations are introduced. This is the point at which the person can take over and start carving out the ones he wants or creating the V-Vault, should he so desire. The process is really simple.

The technician's visit lasted an hour-and-a-half. I've been doing this for a long time. So, perhaps, it took me another hour to configure everything, although the level of involvement can play a factor. We created two only and a V-Vault. Like I said, it's really easy.

The solution absolutely provides us a return on our investment. I've worked with other storage arrays such as one that IBM was promoting to us. It was the company's first attempt at doing an all-flash array and it bore much similarity to Pure Storage FlashArray. It took us a week to get it up and running. We added some development servers and the whole array went down. We lost everything. Such experiences really make one appreciate the stability and thoughtfulness that goes into the engineering and redundancy and scalability of the solution.

You could say that the licensing cost involves a one-time fee, at which point support can be renewed in what I believe to be three-year blocks. As long as a person keeps his support current he can upgrade to the newer version of the array, which can be done once every three to four years.

The solution could be cheaper.

We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee. Something that's really awesome about the solution is that the cost is all-inclusive of the features. There is no need to pay for replication or for any additional features. A person is entitled to employ these when they come out.

In my present company we have around 500 users, but my previous one had closer to 10,000.

In the current company, there are five or six of us that are responsible for overall maintenance and we handle everything. This is in contrast to the company before last in which there were three of us who handled nothing but our four different storage arrays. To be honest, Pure Storage FlashArray does not leave us with much to do. Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup. It frees us up to do real work.

My advice to others is that this solution is the best available. For someone who's not a storage admin, the support is awesome and help is provided gladly for unfamiliar areas. What's nice about the solution is that it very rarely breaks, which vastly cuts down on downtime. There is much redundancy and support is super proactive. This means that if a part goes bad they will generally know about it before we would. It's such a clean, easy to use, great supportive product. It really frees one up to do other things that are more important.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten, although I would give it a score of 50 were this possible. 

Our primary use case has been our production Oracle campus management database environment. We use Oracle PeopleSoft as our campus management solution and underneath that we have about six terabytes of Oracle Database. Our most demanding use-case for Pure Storage has been hosting these high performance, transactional databases, while also hosting all of our other critical application storage needs (MSSql data-warehouse, BI/Analytics, VMWare).

As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit we saw, from our very first benchmarks, was that our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other changes. That increase in performance allowed us to then redesign our database environment in ways which had many knock-on benefits, primarily virtualization and automation. Our primary activity as DBAs is copying databases: making clones, doing refreshes, and creating development/test copies. We spend all day, every day doing this. Pure Storage's technology allowed us to automate these tasks, reducing a manual database-deployment process that started as a 12-hour turnaround to an automated solution that takes about 15 minutes.

The most valuable feature has been its performance. It has allowed us to virtualize our production environment, which has many secondary benefits, primarily involving the automation of database administration activities. Very close to that primary benefit has been the effectiveness of their data reduction technology, a combination of deduplication and metadata indexing. In our environment, nearly all of our databases are copies of copies. With Pure Storage's data-reduction technology we can host an unexpectedly large amount of functional data in an affordable amount of storage.

Also, their system-management REST API is excellent: well-documented and very easy to use.

In the higher-education industry, things moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of their existing features. 

In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. I've done a lot of automation work using their existing features and tools, so I'm always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about extending their phone-home centralized analytics interface (PureOne) into a does-everything management console with a list of new cloud, WAN, and backup features, but this doesn't seem finalized. 

We forget they're there. We plugged the first one in, then we didn't look at it for months. We copied more and more stuff into it over that first year and got more and more impressed at how effective Pure's data-reduction technology was. You copy more and more stuff into them and they just sit there, working away. Now that a lot of our daily operations are automated, we barely even log into them.

The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive. We really like its ability to host diverse additional workloads, categories of data, and vendor database technologies.

We have purchased a second array. We also added an additional shelf for capacity to the first array. The process of adding both of these devices took less than an hour in each case: The SE shows up, plugs stuff together, turns it on, and the data moves over.

We've been incredibly happy with their tech support. There was even an instance where we were having an unrelated problem with our production Oracle Databases. If you can imagine having your production Oracle Databases randomly reboot approximately every 12 to 17 hours for no reason that you can figure out. It tends to be something approaching a resumé-generating experience. Out of the blue, we received a proactive, spontaneous call from Pure Storage support saying, "We're observing something weird on one of your Fibre Channel connections. We think you should take a look at this one SFP optical connector on this one channel, because we're seeing stuff on the array which looks unusual." We looked and it turned out to be the problem. We were having this timing error that was causing our databases (because they were clustered) to lose track of the fact that they were part of a cluster. They would just reboot. Pure Storage support, using their phone-home data analytics, solved it, proactively.

They even showed up at our office, just in case it was the Pure Storage array's SFP, not the one in our fibre-channel switch. Our salesperson and sales engineer showed up within an hour at our location with a replacement SFP that we didn't even need. 

Therefore, we are very happy with their tech support.

It was very straightforward, to the point that our SE said, "Watch me as I do this. You'll never need to do this again. It will just sit here." The array set up, for our first array, from taking it out of the box to mounting the first volume, took less than an hour.

Pure Storage showed up, plugged it in, and we attached it to our Fibre Channel SAN and our iSCSI network. We were copying data within an hour and a half or so. Our Pure Storage team is great. There wasn't really an "implementation". No assistance was necessary.

Compared to legacy spinning disk, we have absolutely seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). I don't have an actual sort of number, but it's dramatic. 

In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for. It isn't priced for you to just go buy one off-the-shelf. It isn't a casual purchase. If you have an appropriate use case though--heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or workloads that just really need low latency and high throughput--you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage. For example, we are starting to use our second array for high performance computing, primarily machine learning, and for that sort of research analytics and heavy math computation you really need all-flash. 

We had existing relationships with vendors who had spinning disk technology. What we weren't getting was the type of flexibility for automation and copy management that all-flash technology offered with the same level of functionality. 

Spinning disk, if you're going to copy things, is zeros and ones on a piece of metal or glass, being moved to another piece of metal or glass. There is physics involved, physical changes. All-flash is largely a metadata-based environment, which means you can make copies of things by changing a few bytes in a table somewhere. 

Pure Storage was chosen because we wanted to move our university's database environment forward in terms of optimization and automation for everyday database administrator activities.

I work with a lot of different storage technologies, including other all-flash solutions, and Pure Storage stands out.

When researching or selecting potential purchase, start with performance, then try to narrow things down by looking at the additional functionality that a particular solution is going to bring into your environment. There are use cases where raw speed is everything, but almost no one is ultimately in that use case. Most people don't want it to be just fast. They want it to:

• Be fast.
• Make their DBAs lives easier.
• Make their VDI work. 
• Run their VMs in VMware in a more reliable, faster way, with better HA. 

Definitely investigate your options. Research a solution's whole set of functionalities, strengths and weaknesses, then compare that to your needs. Don't chose it because it's fastest, cheapest, etc.. Look hard at how you're going to be using it, in detail, over the next 18 to 36 months.

If you are using a storage solution in an enterprise, you need something that has an infrastructure, an ecosystem around it, a whole vendor environment. You're not going to just plug it in. You will want to use it in complex environments for important tasks.

This is why we have never implemented any sort of homegrown SSD or stripped-down, generic SSD storage arrays. We'd need to build all of those additional "ecosystem" features ourselves.

We haven't made a lot of use of Pure's built-in predictive analytics. However, they were beneficial in a couple of our storage capacity-planning discussions. We did use and trust them to understand when it was time to purchase a second //M20, which is the model of array that we use. Partially based on the built-in analytical projections, we purchased a second //M20 array and added capacity to our existing one.

Pure Storage helps to simplify storage. Some of the simplification that we observed simply comes out of its all-flash nature. We suspect that most other all-flash storage arrays in the enterprise would have shared a large percentage of that simplification. However, what Pure Storage adds, uniquely, is that their software is very much aimed at reinforcing and sustaining simplification. Performance is not the only goal; it is performance, simplicity, and ease of use.

With Pure Storage FlashArray we have been able to deploy several thousand VDI servers, virtual machines, very quickly and efficiently. We were also are able to virtualize 80% of our workload, and we are planning to get 90 to 94% of our workload virtual. That's a huge reduction in the cost of hardware.

What I like most about this solution is that it is simple to bring in, install, and get it going. You can get it installed in a few days.

What's more, the compression ratio that we're getting is that our database portion is pretty high, so it saves a lot of money.

We have had no issues with the stability so far.

The solution is very scalable because it is fairly smooth and easy to upgrade. 

The technical support has been pretty good. The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing.

Pure was the first solution we used and now we use a couple more. One of them is an EMC product and then we also have a new start-up called Vector, so we currently use three solutions.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and the integration was very easy to do. There were no hidden features and the GUI was very straightforward. 

Traditionally we have been buying massive storing arrays from EMC and from Hitachi, but most of them were built for very high tier applications. For VDI with your desktop, you really don't need that so it was easier for us to go for an array that used high-speed devices, providing Hadoop capabilities because the nature of your desktops are literally the same. So we needed to look at newer technology, and this really was one of the first ones to be there, and it was very popular. We did a study on the market and found that VR was one of the leaders in this space, so we brought them in.

We ran into some issues with the program at first and we had to work around those issues to fix our problems. So at the end of the day, it wasn't really a smooth ride. It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure. That's why I would give it an eight or a nine out of ten. But definitely not a 10.

We use the solution for the vendor support. It's a banking software system. It's an IBM system and it requires some Pure Storage for the backend and SSDs for performance. The vendor supports Pure Storage. 

It saved a lot of space, as far as physical space in our data center. The old sand took up an entire rack and this entire system to about 6U. It's about 1/10th of the space and the power too. You get those power savings and space. The speed has also vastly improved. It's a lot faster than what we had before. We've been running VMware for over 10 years now, so we're all virtualized at this point. The solution has helped us to virtualize everything. 

Pure allows us to upgrade hardware anytime we want and not have to worry about converting everything. It makes everything easier to switch from one vendor to another if we want to. We just recently updated our sand from a Dell EMC. It allowed us to move it seamlessly without having to do anything with the software because it's all VMware.

The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day. 

We're pretty complex. Back there, we've got three or four different systems. It's important that we have something that's easy to manage so we don't have to learn something completely new. This solution offers a GUI that you can just set up and it's ready to go. We had it up and running in three or four hours.

I haven't had any issues with stability. The solution has run since the first day we implemented it and so far has done everything they promised.

We haven't had to scale out yet because the solution is new to our organization, but I have heard it's pretty easy to do. Right now, we have a capacity of about 100 TB. We don't plan to scale right now. When we bought it, we sized it to allow for about two years of growth. So unless something unexpected happens, we should be okay.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed it in our VR site first. We got it set up in VR and made sure everything was working. Then we brought it into production and deployed it on the production side.

We tested it first on the VR site. We personally didn't test a unit, besides our VR site, which was about two weeks. Our vendor-approved it and they used it. We went on the advice of our vendor and got the system.

We implemented the solution with the assistance of a vendor. 

Our experience with that vendor was good. They had everything up for us and there were no problems. Everything worked. They pre-configured it before they brought it out and then they just set it up. 

So far, I'm not sure if there is an ROI, as the solution is brand new. It's too soon to tell.

We have a package deal on the solution because we bought it through a software vendor, so they packaged it with their solution. I don't know what the individual costs would be for the Pure side of it.

It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside.

We looked at two other solutions but we liked that Pure seemed a bit easier to use. That, and we had recommendations.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

VMware was one of the primary drivers when choosing Pure. One of the banking vendors that we use as a primary banking system had limited vendors that they support for storage and Pure was one of them. It was also recommended by a different credit union, which is why we went with them.

I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten.

I would definitely recommend them. They're recommended for a reason. They're not the cheapest, but the performance is, from what I read, the best, and it's easy to manage, so it's worth the extra cost.

We use the FlashArray X20, M20, M10. We have regulations against cloud, so we're mostly on-Prem. However, we do use Office 365 for email and we have Azure for development on another team but I don't manage that team.

Our primary use case of this solution is to house data stores on virtual machines.

It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past and the support is extremely quick and responsive. 

The ease of management, cutting edge technology, and higher availability benefits our IT organization. 

We are running VMware on Pure. The main driver for this was the speed of the virtual machines and the ease of administration with Pure is pretty seamless.

The joint solution has helped my organization. Cody from Pure Storage has been a really big advocate for cutting edge technologies within Pure Storage. He's given us as a customer a lot of tools from his social media to help us do our jobs easier. That's been amazing. It's been awesome for us. The support's been great. Our SC has been great, and our sales reps have been great. Performance is awesome.

The most valuable features of this solution are the speed, ease of use, administration, and the support model.

We have the VMware plugin for Pure storage. It's the plugin that allows us to create a data store. It's super simple but we use it. It's in vCenter. The integrations have helped by making it quicker to deploy data storage.

If we have a LUN that is ready to have a data store put on it, rather than us having to give access to certain people to create data stores, they can just do it directly from vCenter and they won't have to have access to the array. It makes it easier. It's a little faster.

From a software perspective, it's been great. They've done a lot of things with VM integration from the Pure side. I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution.

The costs could be improved. They still have a very good value proposition. I'm not arguing that they're too expensive, but if they want to continue to increase market share, they're going to have to come up with better ways to get the cost down. The availability of QLC NAND is much cheaper, albeit at a higher latency.

Stability is very high. It's been amazing. They do non-disruptive upgrades that I have never seen anything like in the industry. For us, we can do upgrades in the middle of the day. We wouldn't accept that kind of risk, but we've accepted a lot more risks than we should using Pure and I've never been let down.

Scalability is very good considering the architecture that they're built around, which is the scale-up architecture. It's very good.

Before Pure, we had EMC VNX, and we were having the entire array reboot and we would lose a server room at a remote casino. All VMs would go down and have to reboot because the entire array would reboot. That happened at least three or four times and then that's what made us decide to pay for what I would say is around triple the cost, just to guarantee that that doesn't happen. To my organization, money is less of the concern as the availability. Nobody wants to get that phone call. We had EMC, it was bad. Support wasn't great. I wouldn't say it was bad but it wasn't great. What put us over the top was that Pure is stable.

The initial setup is insanely easy. It's so easy our sales guy can do it with Pure.

We used a reseller for the integration. The company was Pinnacle Business Solutions from Oklahoma city. It was pretty good. We were happy with it.

We absolutely have seen ROI in two areas. The ease of management has made it so easy that we don't have to have extra storage people or systems people. The data reduction has been very generous. We're getting roughly three and a half to one data reduction across all arrays. That's basically three VNXs right there, and three VNXs would cost more than a Pure FlashArray. That's a pretty decent return.

We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars. 

I wasn't a decision-maker in the decision-making process. Had I been, I would've considered Nimble All Flash Array. I wouldn't consider anything else. Everything else that I know of in the storage industry is not worth us having insanely low latency for that. That's not our number one concern.

They're the leader in the industry and everyone's chasing them. They're a cloud-native array that no one's ever done and their storage is excellent. Even if they weren't one of the fastest arrays in the entire industry, I would use them for their support model and ease of use.

The advice I would give to someone considering this solution is to look past the sticker shock which is return on investment. I would look at data reduction. I would definitely buy into what people say about their support, which is excellent. I would say that your company, whether you realize it or not, is going to benefit from being industry-leading, pushing the edge from a technology perspective, the ease of management, administration, and even the setup. It is well worth it.

I would rate it a nine and a half out of ten. I would rate it that high simply because I think if they can take advantage of QLC NAND and bring the costs down into a different market, it would be perfect. If they wanted to do a hyper-converged solution with this type of support that they have, they would be unbeatable. They're already unbeatable, but QLC NAND is going to bring the costs down for this all-flash architecture, and if you can cut the price of half of the flash array, you can be selling to small, medium business much quicker. It would be fantastic. 

We use the private on-premise deployment model. Our primary use case of this solution is for virtual machines. We just use it as storage for our vCenter environment.

It has improved my organization in the way that we have high reliability and faster access to our data.

It has improved our IT organization in the way that we are able to provide systems to our customers quickly and provide high availability and reliability for their applications. 

We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver was speed. The joint solution has helped our organization through speed of delivery and speed of applications.

The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution. 

In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption.

It's highly stable. It's one of our biggest successes. 

It's been really easy to expand storage with no downtime. It's one of the things we like about it. 

Their technical support is great. 

We knew we needed to switch to this solution because the industry is going away from spinning disks. We were on spinning disks, and the whole industry is going away from that. 

We are still using IBM but we are not happy with it. IBM has taken old technology and tried to make it new. Pure has started from the ground up and built it.

The integration was straightforward. 

Pure Storage did the integration for us. 

Our costs are around $100,000.

We also evaluated Nimble, EMC, and HPE 3PAR. We ended up going with Pure because of the architecture, speed, and support.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for its reliability, speed, and support. The support is awesome.

In our company, we implemented a Pure Storage FlashArray for our VM virtualized environment. 

We do have vCenter integrated with Pure Storage. We use that application to deploy virtual volumes on our Pure Storage solution. We are still in the beginning stages, so we only have four virtual systems running on it. However, in the coming months, we will be migrating the bulk of all of our VMs over to vCenter and Pure Storage.

The inline deduplication and compression have exceeded our expectations. The rep from Pure Storage kept promising us 4:1, and we were very skeptic about getting that. We were anticipating mainly getting 1.5:1. So far, with the VMs, we have been running closer to 5:1 deduplication and compression, which is amazing to us.

It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done. With the old HPE system, there were quite a few more steps to have to deal with. Therefore, it has definitely reduced our management.

The simplicity is the most valuable feature. I do not have to deal with how to provision RAIDs or manage disks. I just plugin my disk groups, and it does it all on the back-end. I just identify the size and volume that I want and the host that I want to deploy it to, then it just shows up and works. It has been incredibly simple to use, and it is incredibly fast.

Simpler is always better in my mind. Just making it quicker and easier to deploy, then also making it so that there is less chance of error. 

We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter.

I know that Pure Storage is working on this. They already told us, "Hereon out, we will be developing and only deploying HTML5 plugins." However, it's currently only in beta testing right now from what they've said. Getting that plugin out would definitely help us, because we don't have flash, or use it very actively. If we had that plugin in sooner rather that later, it would be awesome.

We have only had it installed for a few weeks.

To early to comment.

We are hoping that we get to scale up, at some point. My initial impression is that it should be very easy for us to expand just by replacing the disk groups or by adding a shelf. As far as my impressions of being able to scale, I think it will be pretty simple. Until we get to that point, I don't know.

We haven't really seen much on the performance side, because we only have five VMs in there right now. I can definitely say that it is extremely fast. It is much faster than our legacy HPE spinning disks. However, until we get a lot more servers on it, I won't know if we going to hit a bottleneck or cap it out at all. I don't think we will, but until we get more on there, I won't know.

The technical support is very easy to work with. 

We are replacing legacy HPE EVA and legacy Hyper-V systems moving to VMware with Pure Storage, as our storage solution.

We have a very old HPE EVA system. We knew that we needed an upgrade, because our system is 10 years old and out of support. We brought in a number of consultants to talk to us about whether we should upgrade our Hyper-V system or move to VMware. Thre or four consultants recommended (almost all of them) moving to all-flash. They highlighted Pure Storage as one of the industry leaders in all-flash storage. That is why we started working with Pure. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had a Pure Storage Rep onsite to help us install it. They had their installation guide with the steps outlining how to do this and that: x, y, z type steps. It only took us two hours to get it out-of-the-box, in the rack, turned on, added to vCenter, and have our first VM on the system. 

We had a Pure Storage rep come onsite and help us install the system. We had it up and running in just two hours. Then, he turned us around and had us enter a ticket to do a firmware upgrade on our system, because it was three versions old. 

The technical support was very responsive. They emailed us and scheduled it a couple days out. They talked us through how to enable the Remote Assist tunnel. We had that up and running, then the day came for the upgrade. They emailed us and asked if they could continue. Then 20 minutes later, they emailed saying, "Okay it is done. We will monitor it for 24 hours. Let us know if you have any problems." It was just amazing to me, because I don't have to touch it. I don't have to look at it. We had no downtime nor interruption to service, and yet the upgrade was done.

We have already seen ROI.

We have upgraded our legacy Fibre Channel system from 8 gig up to 32 gig with our Pure Storage. By just copying the first few VMs off to that, I was floored at how fast it would write and read to that system. I am really excited to see once I get more VMs on there how well it will handle all of it.

We just barely bought our Pure Storage, so we haven't been able to use Evergreen Storage subscription at all yet. However, it's a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm doing right now again.

We did evaluate the HPE 3PAR and HPE all-flash systems, because we were a legacy HPE environment, where everything we had was HPE. Beyond that, we didn't really investigate any other vendors. We read some white papers on Dell EMC, but we didn't talk to anybody about them.

Pure was very responsive when we talked to them when we were just investigating on what to buy. They were always the first ones to get back to us and talk to us. They came onsite multiple times to help us with any questions that we had. That level of customer experience was really helpful in making a decision.

We decided to go with Pure Storage more for the Evergreen Storage subscription. With Pure Storage, it was a little bit more to initially get it in, but then you have the Evergreen Storage subscription, which is essentially less than the support on HPE, and that came with the upgrades down the road. HPE subscription support would only cover failures. It didn't have any upgrades built in to it. So, if five years down the road, we went with the HPE system then we would have had to buy whole new storage array to upgrade it. That really played a lot into us wanting to go with Pure Storage. We didn't want to have to do this multiple times.

I have made recommendations to friends who work for other companies that are looking for storage right now to just go ahead and buy Pure Storage. From what I have seen, it will beat out any other storage solution.

From the performance that I've seen, the simplicity of how to use it, the responsiveness, and customer experience, it is one of the best companies that I have worked with so far.

I was actually branded as a SAN environment when we got Pure Storage. For me, it was learning that a SAN environment wasn't necessarily as complex as I thought it was. You have vendors out there, like Pure Storage, who makes things super simple and easy to use. 

I work for a company that offers outsourcing services for IT solutions. I work in system support and we are resellers of Pure Storage FlashArray. 

I'm a Pure Storage fan because I think this solution offers great performance. It provides fast access, is user-friendly and it's easy for us to support this product. The product is also very powerful with high-speed duplication which makes it easier to manage things. I understand that there is a new version of system operation that includes a self-protect configuration to avoid getting hacked. It's crucial for us here in Brazil where we need to be safe. 

The only feature the solution lacks is self-backup. If you're working with different processors, you need to install different software tools to back up. But if it were directly available, it would make things very easy. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable, we haven't had any problems in five years. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have a close relationship with customer support and they are good. 

Positive

The initial setup is very easy, there aren't any problems. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10.