Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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 have workloads that demand high IOPS, so a lot of speed, fast access, time, and overall high performance.

Its ease of use is a very big thing for our customers. It's easy to set up and easy to maintain. The support is automated, which is very good. 

• Performance
• Deduplication
• They work well with Oracle and other database workloads.

They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about.

It is very stable.

It is easy to scale.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward from what I heard.

The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive.

NetApp is the biggest competitor, then SolidFire, and not so much Dell EMC anymore.

When our customers are deciding on a storage solution, we talk about their needs and what they need as an outcome for their business. We usually show them how easy Pure Storage works and how fast it. These are strong points for most customers.

Try to get a demo, then test it.

There are two real use cases. 

1. General purpose infrastructure for VMs. 
2. Business technical applications, such as Oracle DB or MS SQL DB. 

One customer didn't have the budget to renew all the VM and VDI infrastructure. It was not so huge (approximately 100 VMs). The VMware partner provided the Horizon View solution, suggested to upgrade it to Windows 10 (for example), but the customer didn't want to recreate the infrastructure.

Without touching anything, and integrating from the traditional storage, was a two-tier Dell EMC squared infrastructure toward a flash array. We were able to guarantee the overall performance and consistency for Windows 7 machines without upgrading anything, which was a huge improvement without an additional cost. Then, we added a lot of additional VMs.

It's simple, powerful, and ready to use.

Replace SSDs in the lower-end unit. 

Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex.

I has good stability. We have had no issues with upgrading.

We haven't done an upscale of the solution, maybe more in future projects.

It has very good support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It is clear, simple, and easy. While it's a human interface, there a lot of operations that are automatically done by the unit itself.

Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation.

It's cost-effective when we replace it and has rich improvements with low effort from the customer side.

Our customers will usually also evaluate HPE 3PAR. It is a good competitor because they put emphasis on their infrastructure.

In the end, the customers pick Pure Storage because of me. I don't sell 3PAR because I don't believe in the solution.

It is simple, powerful, and a beautiful solution. It is a nice piece of software, but it also has some nice hardware inside.

The predictive performance analytics are quite good. We have touched a lot of cases where the performance was quite similar, even under big loads, but the compression and duplication numbers can be misleading. Because PDFs are more compressed, the dedupe and compression numbers are being lowered.

It's really fast.

So long as it's powered, it is stable. We had someone drop the power to our Pure Storage array once, then everything went down. However, that wasn't Pure Storage's fault. It was just what happened.

The support has been good.

We moved off of VMAX storage. It wasn't keeping up with the workloads that we had. Pure has done this for us.

From my previous employment, where we used it, everyone thinks about Pure Storage running their EMR or HIMS. One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage. People should think about that with their help record. They don't think about that with something like their messaging platform or their interface engine.

It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.

I recommend the solution to my colleagues.

It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well.

It's stable.

It's scalable to our needs.

The deployment is very easy. It's quick.

All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help.

We always consider other storage options.

I would definitely suggest this solution to a colleague because of the ease of use. Also, the controller upgrades, compared to Pure's competitors, are huge.

We have about 1,000 users using the product in our company.

It's very good storage for what we use it for, very efficient. It's very cost-effective for the amount of data we have when we're crunching the numbers that we're crunching, for our algorithms which use a lot of processing power.

The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware.

We've never had an issue with scale as we've deployed to some of our clients.

Depending on the deployment, the configuration, and the size of the project, and some of our larger machine-learning deployments, where we have to put in an AI-ready infrastructure box, those projects tend to take a little bit longer. It's a newer product and they're still figuring all that out. But it's comparable to any other vendor up there.

ROI depends on what the clients are looking for as the outcome. If the client doesn't know what the questions are that they need to ask in machine-learning, they can spend a lot of money and get really poor outcomes based on the data and what they're trying to get out of it. That isn't really a Pure issue, it's more a business issue in terms of the outcome wanted by the client.

Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors, as we've looked at some of the other competitors on the market. Pure, for the quality of gear we're getting versus the price, is a good value for us.

One of the "buyer beware" issues would be, if you're going to buy a $1.5 million installment of Aries, which is the NVIDIA, it's got a high cost. If you just need a cucumber cart to be pulled on wheels, you don't need to buy a jet plane, although the seller might say, "Hey, this is the best, greatest, and newest." These are some of the things that you'd want to be aware of as someone who is looking to get into AI. Make sure you need that much because you could probably build a scaled-down version at a significantly lower cost.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. Pure is a partner of ours that we use for a lot of our machine-learning deployments and some of our smart-data applications which we build in Canada. We pursue the same clients together for some of the government contracts, and we use the FlashBlade for some of the storage for our machine-learning algorithms, with the NVIDIA DGX. We're exclusive to Pure, versus the other hardware vendors who are in the same place for flash storage. This is who we use and who we decided to go with, due to some of the innovation that they have within their stack.

In Canada, they've got a very good strategy where they're partnering with some of the good software vendors there, and they're making good relationships on the government side and with some of the VARs. They're doing a good job.

Everything is kosher with the documentation. They've been fantastic, a good partner supporting our pursuits. They have even delivered some prototypes for us, before we started using them, to some of our vendors. That way, we could have a sandbox where we could use some of their storage to create demos and proofs of concept for some of our clients.

I rate the product at ten out of ten because the performance of the storage is just unbelievable.

I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end.

It's extremely stable.

It scales absolutely, to the highest level you can think of.

Pure did help us by coming onsite and deploying it.

We were previously using EMC. The difference is unbelievable. We are buying more.

The initial setup was very easy and straightforward.

Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop.

I would absolutely suggest this solution to a colleague or a friend because of the performance and reliability of the product.

Provides awesome performance, and it's been able to shrink all of our data center from two-and-a-half racks to one rack and give better performance with SSD drives versus spinning disk drives. It has saved overall costs from our heat and power within our data center where we're now just powering up a 3U device.

More than five years.

It's very stable. We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade.

Scalability is great. Pure's model is adding more disk space to it and then getting a better controller to make sure you are going to stay with your performance. It's a wonderful model.

We have our dedicated resources that we have reached out to, but because there have really been no issues with anything, we're not on the phone with them constantly. Whenever we have had an issue or question, someone is always very responsive. They even come onsite for major issues, such as an NOS upgrade, just to hand-walk us through what we're doing.

Deployment was easy. I didn't do it. I am not a technical guy, but my team was able to get it deployed and then connected to our ESX environment within two hours.

Like anything, when you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it. But what you are getting for it, you are definitely seeing a good ROI.

We considered other options. I have used the others, EMC and NetApp, etc. We have looked at all of the platforms, and to see what Pure was able to do within a PoC environment meant that we never turned back our PoC environment. We just bought it and kept running with it. It was an amazing product based on what we had seen out there in the market.

I would definitely recommend it to colleagues. I have not only used it where I am currently at, but I have also used it at other locations before. I have recommended it to partners, and colleagues that I have worked with in the past, across the state of California.