Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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. 

It provides better performance for our desktops.

It has positively affected our space requirements.

We have reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.

We haven't done as much capacity planning as we should have. I am sure it would help us.

The most valuable feature is its performance.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are very good.

The upgrade architecture is very good.

Our data reduction rates, latency, and availability are all good.

The stability is very good. The stability and performance are the best things about the solution.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have undergone an upgrade of firmware.

We have seen a reduction in TCO.

The cost has room for improvement.

Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade.

We did an evaluation of Dell EMC, Pure Storage, and NetApp.

I would recommend trying it. We like the product, and it works well.

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. 

It is our core storage.

The manageability: Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators.

It has been nice to be able to see capacity and project usage. That has been helpful.

With the Pure1 analytics, we are able to identify whether the hardware that we are using today will meet our needs for tomorrow. That is probably the biggest thing for us. Also, the analytics has been great.

Manageability is its most valuable feature.

It is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good. We don't have to be experts in managing the storage. We can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product.

It has strong statistics and historical metrics with Pure1. Therefore, it has been everything that we have needed out of a platform.

We have undergone upgrades of controllers with mixed results. Some have gone well, and some have not gone so well.

We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals.

It has been stable. We haven't had any issues with stability. Though, when we have had issues, we have leveraged support and not experienced issues.

It is highly scalable. In particular, with the ability to view analytics and some of capacity planning, that helps us in this regard as well.

The technical support is strong and responsive. I would say response is probably the most important. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We worked with a field engineer on the deployment. Prerequisites and those kinds of things were shared and identified ahead of time. There wasn't a whole lot of guesswork.

The solution has reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage, which is one of its primary appeals. We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression work as advertised. I haven't had any issues with them.

We have used the predictive performance analytics. It has worked for us.

Biggest lesson learned: Having a strong support function is critical, especially when you're depending on it on an ongoing basis for maintenance and administration. 

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. 

Our customers primarily use Pure Storage for virtualization, whether it is VMware or Hyper-V. They choose Pure Storage for its high-performance, low-latency, and reliable all-flash arrays, which are essential for efficiently running virtualized workloads, including critical applications, databases, and virtual machines.

I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity. I value its simplicity and artificial intelligence monitoring. It also integrates seamlessly with major platforms like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Microsoft SQL, while offering tight integration with backup software for faster restores. This connectivity promotes cyber resilience and can be leveraged for disaster recovery solutions.

I don't see any major issues with Pure Storage, but one thing to note is that Pure Storage can be seen as a premium product, and other vendors are catching up in terms of performance and features. However, overall, the feature set and performance are excellent.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for two and a half years.

It is highly stable, especially if you follow recommended patching and software upgrades. Pure Storage offers an officially published uptime guarantee, ensuring device stability, which is legally binding.

Pure Storage is very scalable. Even the smallest model can be successfully upgraded all the way to the largest model, which is a feature I haven't seen with other solutions.

Pure Storage's tech support is excellent. They use AI effectively, and their support team is highly reliable and responsive. Our customers have experienced no issues with their support.

Setting up Pure Storage is incredibly easy. You just plug it in, connect it to the network, and start building your storage – it is that simple. Deployment takes less than a day. Deployment is straightforward and typically manageable by a single person or resource. However, when lifting heavier equipment, like the larger Pure Storage units, it is recommended to have two people, but the rest of the setup can be accomplished via servers. Maintenance is straightforward. Once it is connected to the internet and secure communication is enabled, it sends monitoring data to Kubernetes and artificial intelligence in the cloud, providing early warnings of potential issues. This cloud-based AI can often assess the health of your device better than you can.

Our customers see a return on investment and value for their money with Pure Storage. They measure it through methods like net present value and comparisons to the weighted accumulated cost of capital, which provide a robust financial assessment.

It has a flexible, pay-as-you-go option.The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations, but this is the only major downside.

My advice for new users is to not be afraid to start using it from day one, but take the time to educate yourself on all the valuable features available to make the most of it. Since it is a significant investment, ensure you manage and protect the asset effectively. Overall, I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten.

Access speed and power consumption are most valuable.

It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable.

We did not have to do that, but it looks like it is.

It is very good.

It is our first solid-state array.

It is very easy.

It could always be lower, but it's okay.

I would advise others to have a go at it because it has worked fine for us. I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for general block storage. Usually, the storage product owners are the users.

It's just very easy for general block storage. Generally, the ease of use is what customers comment on. It's very user-friendly.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

Scalability is possible. You can expand the solution.

The stability and reliability are great.

Technical support has been helpful in general. 

The solution needs an integrated NAS platform, file platform. The file functionality could be better.

I've been dealing with the solution for a couple of years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

We find the product to be quite scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

The solution is extensively used. Likely usage will increase in the future. 

Technical support is great. They are helpful and responsive. We're quite satisfied with the level of support they offer customers. 

I used to work with Hitachi and switched to this product for ease of use and for performance.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex. 

The actual startup and deployment take about half a day.

From an ROI standpoint, if you consider compression and de-duplication and all that, you get a pretty good ratio.

The pricing of the product is very competitive to others in the market for Flash and NVMe storage. That covers the cost of hardware and support.

I'm a reseller.

I'd advise potential users to try it out and consider it as an option.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten based on the overall performance, scalability, and reliability.