Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

We primarily use the solution for desktop virtualization.

I have IOPS and IOPS input/output. The reason that we have virtualization required for the media is because of high IOPS and we're able to maintain it with PR. The encryption is pretty high. We like the encryption right on the storage.

I was able to put up more VMs using Pure. I'm running almost 3,400 VMs and VDIs on Pure Storage. This improves our organization because we can just set it up and we forget about it. Everything works. We do not need to worry about storage or bandwidth issues. Its ease of use is also helpful. The setup is very easy with Pure.

I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side. I'd like to say "Hey, this particular VDI, what is the performance on that? How much IO is it using, what are the issues, what is CPU?" etc. I'd like to see that layout in the portal. That would be great for us.

The stability of the solution is very good. After five years, I've had very few problems. In terms of problems, for example, sometimes I've seen some spikes in iOS. It came from our end, not from Pure.

The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I've got an A-side and a B-side.

The initial setup was very straightforward. I did the GUI configuration after Pure finished their end, so it was very easy for me to set up. They just did the back end. I did the physical setup. They came back and did the configuration on the heads and I did the GUI set up with the network configuration, so everything else we set up ourselves. The setting up volume was very easy.

Pure assisted us with the implementation. It was a beautiful experience because we had an older model on which the head had to be upgraded. They did it seamlessly. I had no drops in my VMs.

There has definitely been an ROI. In four years I've never seen another storage vendor that offers what's called an Evergreen solution. I should have my refresh next year, so I'm getting a brand new a controller with a minimal cost. By then we're going back and replacing the whole thing.

I did a POC with three different vendors. Pure won out due to its resiliency, adaptability and the IOS and the feature sets. I was able to pull up all three discs at the same time and it never failed.

We are using the private cloud deployment model.

We are running VM on Pure. The main driver around VM on Pure is the number of IOPS I was able to get out of the two controllers. That was the main reason I chose Pure.

I'm not using any plugin with the vCenter or anything else like that.

The advice I would give to others considering implementation is to do your investigation, do a POC, and try it out. Find out which fits your needs. Also, isolate your workload. Don't mix your workloads if you want to do a successful VDI deployment.

I would give the solution nine out of ten.

We use this solution for general, primary storage in an on-premises deployment.

This solution has improved our performance. We run a lot of security tools that scan for different things, and this would greatly impact our other storage arrays that were either spinning disks or hybrid storage. Even though we did see an impact on Pure, none of our applications that ran on Pure had experienced any problems.

Part of it was to simply go to an all-flash technology that shielded us from that, but it was also that the toolset was very valuable. We could quickly see how we were performing. With some of the other vendors' tools, it's really hard to know where the problem is or how it's performing. You just see the results. You see the symptoms of the problems, and it's hard to come to understand where they are coming from.

This solution is simple to install.

It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity.

We use the Evergreen Storage model so that we will get upgrades as they are needed, or as we expand. It has helped us meet some financial challenges we had internally. In the past, we had to buy whole trays of disks from another vendor. It's too much money because we typically bill people ahead of the project. This solution has helped us meet the spending needs of our customers, and allow us to be more flexible.

I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers. We're going through a transformation where we are trying to run IT as a business. I need to know how much a VM costs, so I need to know how much the compute costs, how much the storage costs, and how much the backup costs. It's really difficult to go to every single product and try to decipher how much I've spent on each of the products. It's not always as easy as just dividing, saying well this must be the cost. I'd love to be able to get that data out of Pure and into vSphere so that I can just see, by VM, how much we should charge our customer.

The stability of this solution has been great. We did have a recent problem but it was probably poor capacity management on our part, where we allowed the system to become too full and it was unable to do its own correction. Besides that though, it runs great. It's very low-touch compared to some other vendors we have used in the past. In some cases, we used to really have to have an expert to run the storage network and now with Pure, that's not as important. Once it's installed and ready to go, it's very easy to maintain, very easy to provision new space, and very easy to expand the hardware. It's been transformational just in the way that you consume the product. It's a service now.

We tend not to do too much expansion but we can easily scale with the way we have structured our purchasing model on Pure. We can add small chunks as we need capacity, and we can once or twice a year add, which is kind on our budgets. It's kind on the IT people, as we don't have to fight our way through approvals because we're buying very massive amounts of expansion. It just makes it a little easier for us to do our own jobs internally.

I have never contacted technical support for this solution.

We needed to do a lifecycle replacement, and we also knew that at the time that flash was just really starting to take hold. We had used a hybrid model before and we weren't necessarily satisfied with that product from another vendor.

We evaluated three products and Pure just really outshines them on the pre-sales. On the financing side of it they were more flexible. Today I would look at it and say that it's much more of an OPEX model, similar to Cloud, and as we try to promote our own on-premise cloud, that continues to be important to us. We want to be transparent about cost all the way back to our customer.

My understanding is that the initial setup is generally easy compared to some other implementations we have done for storage in the past.

Pure's consultants assisted us with the deployment, and we liked those guys. Our pre-sales team is really great to work with and I have never heard any complaints about the
support teams. That's typically an indicator that it was an acceptable service. 

Well, as a personal perspective and from my team's perspective, we've seen a lot of return on investment. It is difficult to quantify monetarily. For example, we had one business unit that used Pure, they were the first, and it was supposed to be an evaluation at the time. We were going to come back later and do further evaluation of storage, but it performed so well that we didn't even think of evaluating again. When we needed to replace the other arrays, we went straight to Pure and life-cycled them into Pure in every segment we have. I think we only have one non-Pure storage array in the environment now, so that speaks volumes when it has worked that well.

In IT, we don't necessarily care about costs. We care about how much of a headache it is to make sure it keeps running and it was a win on both sides. It worked well in all areas for us. The other vendors weren't yet there, as Pure hit the market faster. Maybe the other vendors are catching up but it's going to be harder for us to walk away from Pure now that we have it working well.

Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models.

Prior to choosing this solution, we evaluated Dell EMC. We looked at Nimble but they weren't all-flash at the time so they didn't last very long. I am sure that we probably looked at an HP product but I don't think we ever really wanted to do business with them.

After implementing this solution, we did see the performance impact. The performance had increased, although our customers did not see it. So as IT, on the backend, we could tell that something was happening but it didn't impact our customers. That is big for us because a lot of times, you have outages that IT recognizes that don't impact your customers. Those are the good outages. When you have an outage that impacts a customer then those are the bad days.

VMware greatly benefits our IT organization. We are about ninety-five percent virtualized, and it's made it tremendously easy to support the number of servers that we have with the number of staff that we have. It increases the ability to provision and de-provision. The whole server lifecycle is much simpler than when things used to be hardware only. It allows us to leverage our spending better because we can use the whole platform.

We have been running VMware for fifteen years, but the reason we have Pure there is so that we have a general workload platform there that can meet any and all needs for our customers. Only for very specific customers do we develop anything different. It gives us the power to run pretty much any workload besides maybe AMP-analytics or artificial intelligence, so it allows us to be very flexible. A lot of times, our customers don't know how to ask for the resources. They say "Just make it run". Our response is that we have a tool that is flexible and powerful enough to basically handle any request because our customers sometimes don't know how to size for their applications.

Running VMware on Pure helps because it makes it easy for IT. The virtualization makes it easy for IT to withstand outages, to do refreshes, and to make changes. With Pure, the all-flash gives you the speed to endure bumps in performance and it shields you against performance slips on your network. In the past, with spinning disk technology, you would feel the pain. You customers would experience the pain. We help the customers by not spending so much time dealing with the hardware. It's like "said it and forget it". We set it up, it's running and now we try to spend more time working with our customers to understand what they want to do and less time on the back end just trying to make sure that everything works.

I think we are using a plug-in with vCentre, which allows our system administrators to see into the storage. In the past, they would have to reach out to the storage team to try and understand if there are any performance problems. Now they can see that right away as they are troubleshooting, so instead of having to get two or three seniors together to troubleshoot, we can get one person in vCentre. They can do most of the high-level troubleshooting right away and only if it has developed into something they can't figure out, do they need to engage multiple people. This all allows us to respond quickly to the customer.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider the impact on your employees. You want your employees to be successful so that your business can be successful. Don't look at just cost because any salesman can come in and make a proposal that looks appealing to you, whether it's over a one year period or three year period or otherwise. Especially when you deal with the very large vendors like Dell/EMC, who can bundle so many products together, it makes it easy for you. You have to also consider that this tool was so easy for us to implement that instead of spending three to six months fighting implementation, it was in so quickly that we were on to other efforts. There are a lot more soft costs that would have been there that we were able to avoid.

To summarize, I would suggest that you think more than just about the money and the investment, but the service level. For us, we needed support at international locations, and we took all of that into account.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for Citrix. 

We use the on-premise deployment model. 

Our previous SAN storage environment never performed with the same levels as this does. The performance levels and the storage have improved my organization. 

It has benefited our IT organization because we're a 95% virtualized environment and we're able to allocate resources as needed and manage our whole infrastructure that way.

We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver for this was to isolate our Citrix environment from the general SAN storage board.

The joint solution has benefited my organization in the way that it isolates it, giving peak performance and does not share it with other environments that have any infrastructures or competing resources.

The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution. 

It has been very reliable. 

We have had no issues with scaling up to whatever demands that we have.

I haven't had a lot of direct interaction with their support but VMware is very good.

We replaced another Legacy Solution. We wanted to maintain its isolated capabilities.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We haven't seen ROI. 

We evaluated EMC and HP.  

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The storage has been very good. I don't know that it's a large enough deployment across the boards to know how it would fit in the rest of the enterprise. 

We are a system integrator and this is one of the solutions that we provide for our clients.

For our most recent customer, this solution is being used to host VMware workloads in an on-premises deployment.

Our customer has been able to migrate some of their cloud services back on-premises, which is of benefit because they were having some performance issues in the cloud.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity.

It is easy to deploy and it's all-flash, so it's very fast.

As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it.

This solution seems to be fairly reliable. I haven't had any issues personally, or outages or anything of that nature.

The flash array scales up well, but it doesn't really scale-out. I think that's more where Pure's FlashBlade comes into play. You'd have to replace it with the next model up controller, in order to scale.

I haven't had much to do with technical support. Typically, we'll deploy it for our customer and hand it over, and then they'll manage it from there.

Prior to this solution, our customer used Dell EMC, but there were several problems. They were not happy with it because of the performance of the array, and also the complexities around engaging the support teams. Their solution had also reached end-of-life, so they had to move to a new platform anyway. Ultimately, they wanted to move to something simpler than their existing platform, so they moved to Pure.

This initial setup and deployment are pretty straightforward.

For the setup, it is very simple to populate the information. We had a workbook that was provided by Pure to give to the customer to gather all of the details. That made the implementation very straightforward.

The one thing that was a little bit annoying was the fact that we still had to come back through Pure to get the software. A lot of our other partners, we can just download it ourselves, and as long as we've got the process, we can go and do it ourselves. But, in this scenario, we still had to come back through Pure to actually get the software.

We implement this solution for our customers. We are a partner and we're certified to do deployments.

I think that our customer has seen ROI because their existing solution was getting into extended maintenance, so it was costing a lot of money for that service. Also, with less time spent managing that old array, they had more time to do other things.

In addition to this solution, our customer considered another Dell EMC option, as well as one by Hitachi. They chose this because of the simplicity, and the fact that it is all-flash meant that they didn't have to worry about performance. 

VMware benefits our IT organization because we are partners, so we deploy VMware services. It also helps our customers make their applications more readily available and reliable.

We are using the VMware plug-in for Pure. It's meant more rapid provisioning of volumes for VMware, and it gives the customer more visibility of the storage.

Both the ease of setup and the reliability of the array makes it quite simple to manage for the customer.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider that things are changing a lot in the industry at the moment. So, obviously, looking for things that are going to take less time to manage, are easy to implement, and give a good return on investment are important success criteria.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use the on-premises deployment model of this solution. Our primary use case is for virtualization. 

Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications.

It benefits our IT organization in the way that it drives down costs, allows us to migrate servers from one data center to another, and gives the flexibility that having bare metal servers wouldn't allow.

We run VMware on Pure and our main driver was for cost and performance.

The most valuable feature is the speed. 

We are taking advantage of the VMware integrations developed by Pure. 

As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use.

The stability seems good. It doesn't go down very often. 

I haven't contacted their technical support firsthand. 

At the time we were evaluating a whole bunch of different solution platforms, and a lot of times it came down to use case, workload, and cost. 

We are using this solution in conjunction with EMC. We might still be using both for different workloads. 

We used a reseller for the integration. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's a solid product but all products can improve. It's technology, it's not always going to do what you need it to do. It can go down from time to time, but it's been pretty solid so far.

I would advise someone considering this solution to talk to a Pure Storage engineer to see if it fits your needs. 

We use the hybrid cloud deployment model of this solution and use both AWS and Microsoft Azure as our cloud providers. Our primary use case for this solution is for mixed workloads. 

We are running VMware on Pure. Pure gave us the storage because we're a partner so we're running on it.

The seamless integration into the public cloud has improved my organization. It also benefits my IT organization in many ways. We sell it, we use it, and it makes us faster.

The joint solution, VMware on Pure, has helped our organization. It's tested a lot of stuff and been put in production. It's also used for customers.

Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integrations developed by Pure, any APIs that are available to be using.

It offers seamless integrations and has made it easy for us to do. It's a simple product.

The performance and the Evergreen maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution.

In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google.

The stability is excellent. 

The scalability is excellent and is very easy. 

Their support is very good, first-class. 

We switched to this solution because of the timing. We are using this solution in conjunction with a solution from EMC. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It only took us a couple of days to set it up. It was so simple.

We are an integrator and reseller so we did the implementation ourselves on one team.

We also evaluated NetApp. It was between NetApp and Pure. The reason we went with Pure Storage wasn't a technical decision, rather, it was just purely cost and the Evergreen maintenance that Pure provides. It just makes it easier when we have a new drive and a new chassis every three years.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It's simple. It's got great support and it's fast. It does what it's supposed to do. My advice to someone considering this solution would be to test it and build a proof of concept.

Our primary use for this solution is storage. We have a private cloud deployment.

Using this solution has improved our consolidation ratio and it saves us a lot of space. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the support.

This solution is easy to use.

The price of this solution could be improved.

So far, the stability of this solution has been really good.

The scalability of this solution is really good.

Technical support for this solution is excellent.

Prior to this solution, we were using the IBM Storage Network. The support was not very good, and the feature set was very limited.

We needed something that was simpler to manage and maintain.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.

We used an integrator for our deployment, and our experience with them was good.

In terms of space savings, we were able to save a lot of money.

We evaluated a second IBM-based storage solution, and after that, Pure was the second one that we looked at. We heard so many good things about it that we leaned towards that way.

Using VMware has improved our IT organization by providing a stable virtualization platform.

We are running VMware on Pure, which was driven by our interest in consolidation. It has helped us by saving space over using less dense storage.

We have the Pure plug-in for the VMware environment. It has helped us with information monitoring.

For anybody comparing this solution to similar products, my advice is to look into the numbers. This product is definitely worth the price, and it is easy to use.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.