Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Anytime that you need fast storage. 

The back-end data reporting for Pure Storage is phenomenal. The data that you can see on the performance of your customers' array, so you can be proactive about upgrades or enhancements, and is a phenomenal tool to have access to as a partner. I haven't seen this type of stuff out of anything of the other storage systems.

Pure Storage has a lot of statistics which help out with capacity planning.

As a partner administrating the solution, the back-end reporting has positively affected the time involved in managing and administrating.

Performance is its most valuable feature. There is nobody else who is coming close, not that I have seen. 

They are on the money with the predictive performance analytics. They claim high performance, and they do have it.

There are things that they are doing with the interface all the time to make it better. It is not the easiest to work with, but it is getting close. As far as interfaces, I always liked Nimble's interface the best. Though, Nimble's interface has been stuck in the mud for the last three to four years since HPE took them over. There hasn't been a whole lot of changes to Nimble. Whereas, Pure Storage has been continuing to improve, which is pretty good. It is not top of the market, but it is getting there.

The UI reporting is adequate. 

The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier.

I can't think of a time I've had a problem with a Pure Storage array. You might get drive fail once in a while, but it has never been a problem. Usually, that will get reported in the partner dashboard and we will get an alert. Pure Storage will also get an alert. 

Nimble used to be the best if you had a part fail. It would be on your doorstep the next morning. It just showed up, every time. No questions. They have lost some of that with HPE. 

Pure Storage is still pretty good. I haven't heard any customers tell me that they just had a part just show up without even knowing anything was down, like I used to hear about with Nimble. However, usually they will get some type of an alert from Pure Storage, such as, "Looks like you lost a drive. Do you want us to send someone out or a power supply?" Then, get it out.

They are at least 30 percent faster than their closest competitor. It depends always on the differences on how you scale. I had customers get NetApp, who couldn't get anything out of it. They finally added another storage shelf and started getting some decent numbers. Well, instead of adding a couple more storage shelves, I could do that with one Pure Storage array. What if I don't need that much storage and don't want to have five shelves? You don't need that with Pure Storage, because one shelf will strain.

I don't have any massive Pure Storage installs. Probably the biggest ones that I have been apart of are five or six arrays.

I have at least three customers who have had other stores solutions and installed Pure Storage. There is no comparison. Their old storage solutions have now been relegated to archive, or they have ripped them out.

The initial setup can be challenging. If everything works the way it a supposed to, which it often does, then it is fine. However, when your encounter problems and you have to get into those local admin accounts, that can be a pain. You have to call tech, they need to look up what the password is, then send it to you, which can be a pain.

I would like to see a bit different setup. It would be nice if they have something where you can plug into the thing and see an HTTPS address, like with a bench setup. A couple of other vendors has upped their own Layer 2 protocol for discovery. As long as you are on the same network segment, it pops right up  and you can do the base config, then you are ready to log into it in about five minutes. Pure Storage's process is not bad, but it could still be better.

I have never had a problem with a firmware or controller update.

With the pricing, they have, it is pretty competitive to spinning disk.

I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it.

The competing vendors are NetApp, Nimble, and IBM. I don't run into a lot of Dell EMC. Customers pick Pure Storage for performance.

There is no comparison performance-wise. I also install Nimble for storage, and Nimble has flash and all-flash, as well. However, if you are looking at the performance numbers, these Pure Storage is just killing it.

I have integrated the solution with vCenter. There is nothing remarkable about it. It works. I have no complaints.

I think all vendors have a pretty decent platform for inline deduplication and compression. There are always little differences here and there, but I haven't seen anything remarkable with Pure Storage.

We use virtual servers on there.

We have tons of capacity on it.

It is fast and reliable. It works. 

For three years, we haven't had any trouble with it. It is reliable. Once it is installed, off it goes.

The scalability is handy. You can just add more drives. They automatically synchronize. You don't have to do anything but snap them in there. It is pretty easy.

I can't even remember dealing with technical support. 

We had tons of old physical servers and needed the storage room. It was more cost-effective to set this solution up for running our VM environment off it.

The solution is bigger and faster than what we had before.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and simple. 

We used Compunet for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

The solution has reduced our power usage.

The solution could be cheaper.

There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it.

I would recommend to go with this solution.

We have integrated the solution with VMware, and the process was seamless. We've never had any trouble with it.

Flash drives make an amazing difference.

The sales and executive support have been outstanding compared to the rest of the market. I replaced another couple of vendors that I had in place for storage, who over-promised and under-delivered on their technical expectations, and who certainly over-promised on their ability to do conversions from one array to another. My upgrade paths have been simple on the Pure.

The documentation has gone along with the idea of "it's simple to use." In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around the movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that.

It wasn't until we got to a point where we had changed out everything front-ending the platform, and got past that conversation and we rose up past helpdesk and fact sheets and documentation, and before we actually got to somebody who knew about it, there was community knowledge within Pure that knew that problem existed. Having that front and center, where we could have searched and looked for that information, would have answered our questions and caused me to rate it as a ten.

I've never had an outage.

It's very scalable. I probably run about 10 million patient visits a year through the system. I've never had a problem. It's back-ending my entire medical record platform. It's a very stable platform.

Prior to Pure, the original implementations that we had for other vendors had been in place for about 15 years. This actually replaces another all-flash array product that had been in place for the three years previous.

From an investment standpoint, the support staff I require for it is greatly reduced, so I don't have the in-depth requirements that I had on other products. The challenges of getting into the product and manage it and moving away from older platforms for systems management disappeared, so that reduced my cost and expense for support. It's a lot simpler to implement and a lot simpler to manage, so I'm able to divert those resources onto other projects, so it's a pretty decent return on investment.

I definitely like the licensing model. It's a lot better than being "piecemealed" as a customer. I've been extremely happy. Cost-wise, it's been very effective. We're a nonprofit-based organization, so pricing is at the forefront of every conversation we have, and it's been a good marriage between the technical capability of the product, the software that we get, the service and support that we get. From a price standpoint, it's been very effective.

I looked at a half a dozen other products and Pure won over across the board.

I would absolutely recommend this product to a colleague. And I have done that already.

We use it for VMware virtualization.

We have VDIs, virtual desktops, which users log into every day. On the old storage, they would sometimes have three, four, or five-minute delays; it just because useless for five minutes. They couldn't do anything when they were logged in, because of the slowness. Now, with Pure Storage, we have totally eliminated that problem. This was the primary reason we purchased it and it has performed very well. We're very pleased.

It has helped simplify our storage. It's small, it's fast, and it's very simple to manage.

In one of our arrays we had a 35-to-1 data reduction, which is very outstanding. Not many places have that kind of benefit.

We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency.

We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power.

Finally, we love the predictive performance analytics. It's an excellent tool. It's something we were asking for in the past. When they rolled it out, it made a difference.

We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array.

Both the stability and scalability are excellent. It's a very stable environment.

You can scale easily. You can extend it online, change controllers online. Scalability gets five out five stars.

Technical support is very good. We are very pleased with support. We think that it's probably one of the best vendors we work with, as far as support goes; compared to NetApp, for example. Pure storage support people are very responsive and knowledgeable.

The old systems we had were just not doing the job, so we knew we had to change.

It was very easy to set it up. No complexity at all.

We deployed it ourselves.

We haven't analyzed it in terms of numbers, but we have definitely seen a very good ROI. There has been a reduction in our total cost of ownership.

We looked at Pure Storage vs Dell EMC, but we thought Pure Storage has newer, better technology developed from the ground up, whereas Dell EMC is a patchwork solution. In addition, the price was more favorable.

Give it a try. Get a system in on a trial basis, make a deal, and try it to see if it's something you can use.

I rate Pure Storage at ten out of ten. We're very satisfied with Pure Storage. They are a very good company, doing very good things.

My primary use case of this solution is array management. 

FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy. 

FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool. 

I have been working with FlashArray for the past two years. 

Compared to other products, this solution is more stable. We haven't had any performance issues. Oracle RAC and most of the Microsoft applications perform well on the block storage. 

This solution is easy to scale. 

FlashArray is best suited to a large company. We provide any kind of hosting service in our region, so we have multiple customers hosted in our data center. The environment is large and we have more than 25 different customers and terabytes of data. 

I'm satisfied with the support. Comparatively, it matches with Windows. I don't see any difference in the levels of technical support. 

The initial configuration, the base configuration, is really simple. Compared to other products, it's really easy. The racking and stacking will take time, but that has more to do with the data center operations, not specifically the Pure Storage configuration. I'll say this: once the base configuration of the storage array is connected with those cables, once the IP is assigned, the setup process won't take long. It won't take more than 30 to 45 minutes to complete the base configuration, and then it will be ready for provisioning the contract data. 

We implemented through an in-house team. We are the service providers in this region, so we did it ourselves. We only engage vendors and their local partners if there is any hardware issue or hardware replacement we need delivered. 

I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC.  

Overall, this is a good product and I would recommend it. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We have all-flash for our SQL environment.

The product added speed to our SQL environment, so we receive a bit better compression. It did give us a little more space when I moved my SQL environment off the competitor onto Pure Storage. Therefore, I obtained a bit of space and saw an increase in performance.

They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth.

I like the five-year controller upgrade, easy-to-use interface, and performance.

They do a good job at ease of use for the interface. I don't have a big team, so its easy user interface has helped us be able to manage our data better.

I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates.

The product has not gone down in a year. So, I would say that it is stable. We haven't seen any high spikes in read/write latency.

Scalability seems pretty simplistic. You just buy more drives and slap them in the box, then tack it onto your current storage pool. It seems like it would be pretty easy to scale out.

However, I don't know about scaling up. I don't think they do extra data shelves, so you would have to buy a whole new unit.

We have only used the technical support for upgrades. They respond very quickly and are efficient at what they do.

A local VAR was talking about our challenges and some different solutions to take care of it. Pure just seemed like it could fit the bill.

We have Tegile and HPE 3PAR in our environment.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We were about to get the installation done within two hours.

We have done a firmware upgrade for the OS. We clicked the button to place the call in with support. They remote in with a time that we agreed upon to upgrade the solution. We have never had any problems with it.

We used the reseller for deployment, who came in and worked with our storage guy to deploy the solution. The reseller company was Sirius Computer Solutions. My local rep and his engineer were the ones who came in to install it, and it was a perfect experience. They are whom we have always bought storage through. We have never had any problems with them.

We watch latency, then our I/Os. We care about how much we're pushing through the box, then what latency the box for read/writes is hitting. I have seen a decrease in read/write latency since moving to Pure Storage by seven milliseconds.

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year.

We looked into a couple other vendors. I am currently still using one of the vendor. Then, with Pure, we looked into some solutions from Dell EMC or HPE. Pure seemed to be a bit more cost-efficient. It also had better reviews from what we could find online and with references.

Because they do the compression and dedupe on the backside, I have seen better numbers of the Pure Storage box than on the other competitors that I have in my environment.

Ensure you are looking at all aspects of what the device can do, what your company needs are, and try to see how Pure Storage can meet all of your company's current needs.

We have Pure Storage integrated with our vCenter. The integration was very simple and gives us a lot better insight into our virtual environment.

Pure Storage hasn't increased nor decrease our ability to manage storage, because the solution that we are moving from had a very easy to use interface too.

I don't really use the predictive performance analytics.

Biggest lesson learned: Longevity planning. Pure Storage, with their five-year upgrade for controllers, has helped me feel comfortable. Even as the company grows, I will still have a storage solution which will fit the environment.

The primary use case is storage for payment platforms.

We don't have anymore performance issues, which is good. 

The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage.

Performance and support quality.

We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions.

We have seen through time that it is perfectly stable. It has aged well. We were an early adopter in our company.

The scalability is very modular. When you need more storage or power, you change one brick, and you don't have to go through a long process.

Pure Storage has proven to be proactive with support. Even when we have small problems, they open a support case before we even notify them that there has been an actual issue.

We receive good quality of support from the first line of support, so we don't need to escalate or wait through a long process.

We clearly have seen the difference between having storage on Dell EMC or NetApp versus what we have now on Pure Storage. The investment was a clear win for us.

The initial setup was very simple. It's basically a few cables with two plugs. Plug it in, and it is that easy.

We did the installation in-house.

We have seen reduction in total cost of ownership.

We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products.

If you have doubts, do a proof of concept. Pure Storage is very happy to provide you with storage ahead of time that you can test for a couple of months. This way, you can test the performance and bugs, which makes it easier to sell to your company.

Everything is embedded that is something managed from end-to-end by Pure Storage. This is something really easy for us. We don't have to work with integration and the different subcomponent of the storage that we would have to use if it was SSD.

We are at about 3.0 to 4.0 in terms of data reduction.

We use this solution for storage of critical data and for storage of replicated backups. We use Zerto replication software. We write all of those backups to Pure Storage and then we use those in our disaster recovery scenarios.

It helps us simplify our storage because we use it for a specific use case of replication between sites. We have two data centers: a primary data center and a secondary data center. We got a Pure Storage device in each location and we do backups of critical data in both locations and then replicate them back and forth between the sites. This is the biggest thing it does for us. 

We have seen a reduction in total costs of ownership. Most of the data that's on the Pure came off of Dell EMC VNX. The money I saved by not renewing maintenance on the Dell EMC devices paid for the Pure Storage devices. I've saved a lot of money and gotten better-performing storage.

With every update we get, we get a reduction in the space used which has been pretty dramatic with each one of the upgrades that we've gone through.

The value of the storage in the way that it stores the data is a very valuable feature for us. We also like that it's robust and stable and that we get good support from them when we have an issue. 

We put very high stress on this solution and we've almost never had any problems with it. We originally went with a competitor's product and after about eight months and a lot of wrangling, we had them buy it back from us. Then we bought a similar Pure Storage product, and it's been great.

Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with. 

We decided it was time to switch because the other solution was terrible. We were using Dell EMC Unity and it never worked properly and was full of software bugs. Dell EMC couldn't fix it and they had no intention of fixing it. 

The initial setup was easy and we were able to sort data almost immediately. The time from racking to being in production was very short and very simple.

We used a third-party for the implementation. We bought it and we built in some professional services. They were great. Everything with Pure Storage is straightforward. 

The cost of implementing Pure Storage was less than the cost of continuing to maintain the Dell EMC solutions which is ROI for us. In addition to that, the more data we store, the more compression we get, the better it looks.

We initially looked at Pure Storage and Dell EMC Unity. We made the poor decision of going with Unity and eight months later we went with Pure Storage. 

I would rate this solution a ten because of the way the product works. It never blinks. Also because of the progressive support that we get from Pure Storage with updates and opening tickets on the device before we even knew that there was a problem happening. The entire experience of working with them has been great. 

I would advise somebody considering this solution to buy it.