Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We use this solution to assist with our on-premise database workloads; In conjunction with our Oracle database and SQL server database.

Within our organization, there are roughly four people using this solution.

Pure Storage has been of great value to us as it provides us with a lot of great tools, especially for monitoring and capacity planning.

Also, Pure Storage is extremely user-friendly. 

The solution itself is pretty solid. Perhaps the time available for selecting upgrades or for scheduling things could be improved. On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial. 

In the next release, I would like for them to support file systems on the lower-end models, like the X-10 or X-20. 

Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed.

I have increased the capacity during working hours with no impact on production at all.

Their technical support is excellent. Once we raise a ticket, they respond very quickly. Even better, their support is proactive. In most cases, they are the ones contacting us, not the other way around.

The initial setup was extremely simple. It takes about half an hour to get it up and running. 

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good.

I trust them — their reputation is outstanding. Pure Storage is an amazing solution. I would totally recommend this technology. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Pure Storage a rating of ten. 

If you're skeptical, there is a free demo that you can use to test it in your environment. Just give it a try, test out all the features, and experiment.

Our primary use case is to keep the disc for all the critical systems in the company.

The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc.

The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them.

This is the only problem that we have in the two years of working with Pure Storage and it is not an important problem. The interface that this solution has is really good. It senses all the errors. We get good support from the vendor. 

The price doesn't really matter. It's very expensive, it can be cheaper.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for around two years. 

Stability is very good. We haven't had any problems.

We have around 4,000 users. 

The initial setup was very easy. It took around two weeks. 

I would highly recommend this solution. 

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It has all the features we need. It tests all the software solutions that are currently available and that will be available in the future. You do not have to pay for any additional solutions that they purchase.

It's the back-end storage for all our virtual environments.

The performance is great.

The predictive performance analytics are good.

It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them.

It has been scalable so far.

We have also used NetApp, but not for all-flash. This is our first all-flash solution.

We were looking for an all-flash solution, and Pure Storage is the best solution right now.

Just give it a try.

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. 

The primary use case is for any server and database that has high I/O demands on disk.

It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have.

Our Pure Storage unit is really small, so we just move what we have to it.

• Speed
• Scalability
• The cost

We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that. Therefore, we would like to see improvements with the way it integrates with vCenter for picking up dedupe.

The stability is good. It hasn't gone down since we've had it.

From what we've been told, it looks like it would be really scalable if we purchased more. The licensing and scalability patterns are really cost-effective. We don't have to rebuy things in different tiers to just continue on, so we like that.

The technical support is really good. They are really responsive. For the call that we had, we had a call back within 15 to 20 minutes.

We noticed a dramatic increase in application performance when moving it from NetApp to Pure Storage.

Pure Storage seemed more cost-effective than NetApp. When we did our POC, we saw big performance gains between all-flash on NetApp and all-flash on Pure Storage. It was significantly better.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. They set it all up for us.

They pretty much manage the firmware upgrades for us, and they've gone well so far.

We dealt directly with Pure Storage engineers for the deployment, and our experience was good.

We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.

It is cheaper than NetApp.

There were several vendors we looked at. We also looked at Nimble, but we did not do at PoC of them.

We just liked the way Pure was pitched to us overall.

Get a PoC and see how it works out for you. See if you see an improvement with your apps and go from there.

We really like it. It is really speedy.

We use it for performance, the capacity of deduplication, and compression of the data.

We are a small cloud service provider. When we put Pure Storage working on the services of our customers, most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services.

The storage is very simple. 

We can use more capacity because of the compression and deduplication.

The predictive performance analytics are good, easy to use, and simple to see. They are simple to understand, not complicated.

Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers. 

The solution is very stable.

Only one disk has a problem. The performance with that problem doesn't create problems for our customers. We are able to maintain the performance of the program.

We have already made upgrades now for two months. We think that the scalability is very good. If you want to go to another array or add more capacity, they will change it, if you have the support. So, we put more capacity on it. There is a simple way to do it which has a protection of investment.

We have only used the remote technical support in the case of the disk. They are very good. They acknowledged the problem quickly, identified it, and are always asking and seeing things, which in some cases, are more difficult for us to see.

Because of our clients, we needed a more structured solution with performance which was stable. So, we tested new storage, and Pure Storage was the one that revealed to be more flexible and simpler. 

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward.

For the integration, we used a reseller. It was so easy to put in place and put it to work. They did a good job, but I think we could also do it.

For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management. The total cost of ownership has been reduced. In the beginning, the investment was greater. Now, it is about a 20% reduction.

Using older techniques, we see that we can offer clients more capacity. The real capacity that we get to customers is six or seven times greater than the capacity that we have in place.

In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify.

It is a very good solution. It responds to all the workload problems that we have. It could be with some different workloads that the solution might not respond the way that it responds to us. Test it. People will be astonished with it performance and simplicity.

We have two arrays in two data centers. Normally, in the arrays, the latency is about 4.3 milliseconds per second, which is very good in all workloads. In terms of reduction, our customers are seeing about a seven to eight plus reduction in the capacity that they have.

The TCO for flash and SSD implementation are comparable.

We use it for nearline storage.

Right now, we just have lab equipment that we test them on and we try to compare them with other solutions.

The thickness and the sizing for when we put it in the data center. Also, the performance and price.

It has good stability for our company.

It's granular.

The support is good.

Our storage is old, so we were searching for what would be the next good solution for us. We had an integrated solution with a supplier, so we were looking to get rid of this kind of model. 

The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple.

We used a retailer to buy it and it was easy.

Compuverde. But, we like to have data sheets and a more traditional storage than a complex unit.

I would rate this a seven out of ten because it's a good performance storage, but the price is a little bit high. Our predicted performance analytics is also going really well, so if you need faster storage and a good product, this is the one you should go ahead with.

Our primary use case of this solution is for Rack Database Storage and Virtualized Server Storage.

I used to have to manually sync storage from server to server, for multiple clusters and database storage for disaster recovery but now, that's all automated. I set it up once, and it was done on the very first day we implemented bolts. Storage arrays were set up on the very same day and by that afternoon all of the replication was configured and I haven't had to touch it since.

Has also helped simplify storage for us. It had taken the original person we used a full week to implement. With this solution, we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations.

We have seen TCO of flash be lower than SSD implementations. We're faster which is part of the equation too. We're paying for speed and if we would have had to buy other solutions, then that would have cost us on the morale side and on the user satisfaction side.

Another way that it has helped my organization is that now we are seeing 3.6 to 1 on Oracle Databases. Our goal was 3, we had to have 3, so we got 3.6 to 1.

The most valuable features for us would be the ease of implementation and box-to-box replication.

I would like to see box-to-box encryption on replication included in the next release. 

We've had zero drive failures and zero problems with it. We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted.

Scalability appears to be easy but we haven't had to use it. 

We had to open a ticket with their technical support. We needed to get NIST certified and we had some of our storage on that PRA and we had to be done at the end of the year 2017 so we were in constant contact with support to ensure that we were going to meet all the requirements. In the end, we did hit that date.

We knew that we needed to switch solutions because we were using very old Dell EMC hardware. It was painful, we had weekly drive failures. Every single week one of the key drives failed. It was old, it was out of support, we were losing support, we were paying for extended support, we knew that we had to have this solution. It was all spinning discs, there were a couple SSDs on there but for the most part, it was all spinning discs. We saw some major improvements.

The initial setup was straightforward. The other guy we used took a week to set up and there are still issues. Here we had two arrays set up within four hours with a thirty minute drive time.

We used a reseller called Sirius for the implementation. They were good, we didn't have any complaints. 

We looked at Hitachi which we did put in place for some of our dev environments. We also spoke to IBM. We used to use Texas Memory Systems which was bought out by IBM and we reached out to them to see if there was an equivalent and there wasn't. 

I would rate this solution a ten.