Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

We have a lot of MEDITECH electronic health records systems running on it, as well as some other ancillary applications, but it's core hospital EHR, predominantly.

We've seen a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. When we bought this product, the arrays that it replaced were just shy of about $1,000,000 apiece and they were the size of big refrigerators. The product that we replaced them with is a couple of rack units, like the size of a stack of a couple of pizza boxes, consuming way less power. There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself.

Everything could be cheaper. Other areas where we would always like to see improvement with products like this are in compression and deduplication. Increasing the overall storage efficiency of the platform would be great.

One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade. That would be an intriguing and interesting feature for us. Other than that, we've not had any big needs or demands.

It's been a stable product. In six years, we've never had downtime as a result of it. It's been very stable that entire time.

I believe it will scale nicely. We've not had reason to push that limit yet. We just haven't had a need to do that. I believe they've got a very broad portfolio so that we could scale it fairly dramatically beyond where we're at right now.

The approach that Pure takes is what they call it their Evergreen policy, where they will upgrade the brains of the storage array every three years at no additional charge. Many of the competing systems would require big forklift upgrades and fairly significant reinvestment to do the same thing. We are on our third Evergreen lifecycle upgrade so far, and it's been exactly as they advertised. 

When we look at return on investment over time, we've not had to replace or upgrade it during the timeframe that we've had it. As long as it's supported under maintenance, that continues to be an Evergreen process.

It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective, but I would say better than many in terms of performance and service.

The product is an easy ten out of ten. We've been very happy with it. We've found them to be a great value. Service and support is phenomenal. It's really hard to find reasonable things for them to actually improve it on.

The primary use case is block storage for retro machines running on VMware ESXi and Red Hat with Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs).

We have perfect run through times and latency. We have a cluster system using two machines on Active-Active with a synchronized mirror. 

The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements.

The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser. Hopefully, in the next release, this will be fixed.

We are not using it at the moment in production. Therefore, I can't talk about the stability of the system. The PoC and tests indicate that the stability is okay.

At the moment, we have one data pack. We think that we may buy another data pack this year to scale the system up.

I have used the technical support through the phone and online tool. I used them to upgrade the software, which work okay (as it was designed).

The technical support team provided the help that we needed.

We have been using another solution, IBM XYZ. We plan to migrate away from the IBM system to Pure Storage. We are planning to switch because of cost and performance. Also, the Pure Storage FlashArray is an upgrade in technology. All-flash storage arrays will be the future.

The setup is straightforward, not complex.

It has a very simple installation. Installation took about three hours, not one or two hours, but three hours. We had an issue with our network during the first installation, but now it is up and running. 

We used a consultant from Pure Storage.

We did not evaluate other solutions since our partners were using Pure Storage, so we decided to move forward with Pure Storage.

We are not using predictive performance analytics at the moment.

Our primary use case of this solution is for Microsoft SQL. 

This solution was installed at my organization before I got there but having worked with it in the past, I would say that the responsiveness with any SQL applications has remarkably improved.

It has simplified our storage. It's a "set it and forget it."

It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive. It's hard to monetize the difference in performance that we're seeing, but it's obviously there and measurable.

Performance is the most valuable feature. 

Very stable. I'd give it a ten out of ten. 

We've got two arrays. Capacity-wise, we've over-subscribed on storage, so we haven't had to expand them at this point. 

Technical support is very responsive. We had an SSD fail and they replaced it within 24 hours.

Previously, we were on Dell EMC. We went with HyperFlex in a hyper-converged environment. We switched because we really wanted our SQL on SSD.

It's expensive, but it's worth it.

I would rate this solution a nine because I've worked with NetApp in the past, and other vendors as well in storage. I didn't find the content quite as intuitive as what I got in NetApp but in terms of hardware and all that, it's a 10. It's just that one little issue. 

I would advise someone considering Cloud flash storage that it's the way to go, with SQL. Definitely, Pure Storage is at the top of the game for that. 

The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup. It meets the customer's expectations. 

I would like to see them lower the costs. They could also include data mining in their next release. 

We have performance monitoring tools and it's hard to integrate them with this solution. 

It's very stable, we haven't had any issues with it. 

Their technical support is great. We don't have to contact them frequently because we don't have many problems. 

We also looked at IBM and Oracle. We did internal evaluations and we decided to go with Pure Storage. We chose Pure Storage because of the processor's performance. 

I would rate this solution a nine. It's extremely stable and has good performance. The only issue is the cost. I would definitely recommend this solution to somebody considering it. 

We use Pure Storage FlashArray as the storage for our virtual servers and our reporting databases.

FlashArray has allowed us to go all flash. There is no more worrying about how many IOPS our different storage tiers have and trying to buy more disks just to get higher performance. We simply don't worry about performance.

The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible.

I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity. 

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for all of our data. We use the deduplication feature and it is working well.

The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster.

The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature.

I have been Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately two years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is very stable.

We have not had an issue with the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray.

We plan to increase the usage of this solution.

The support has been very good from Pure Storage FlashArray.

The solution is simple to implement. It's a new kind of storage, it is very easy to use. It is similar to NetApp, it is straightforward.

We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves.

It is a very good product.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

We attach it to a Cisco UCS for VMware.

The product has helped with speed. Previously, on disk, we would see latency issues with our SQL boxes. With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration.

• Resiliency
• Speed: It's fast. It's like I don't notice anything. 
• It's very easy to use. The GUI is simplistic, which can be nice.

The predictive performance analytics are great. I get everything I need to know: IOPS, latency, etc. The tech support works with me if I have any questions that need to be answered.

The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it.

I would like to have better training. I would like to have an hour class or more online training.

It is very stable. 

The only thing that we have ever had an issue with is connecting to the Cloud Mediator. Because we run in an active cluster situation, it has to connect to the cloud. Recently, we lost connection to the cloud, so it sent us alerts, making us all worried that our active clusters would separate. However, when the time came, it worked really well, and we were fine. Then, tech support fixed it, and it was better.

With scalability, you just add more shelves and buy new controllers. If you have the Evergreen Storage subscription, then you get new controllers every year. 

I can buy more storage, if needed. However, with the dedupe and compression, it will be a while before I need to.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to setup because everything was brand new. We had brand new Cisco UCS servers with the FIs that plugged right in. It was seamless.

We have experienced an upgrade of firmware controllers. The process is very easy.

Before my space was a whole entire rack. Now, it is 4U or 6U. Space has been nice, because now I can put other things in that rack.

The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years.

I would recommend Pure Storage. We have already done the research.

I could plan to do capacity on my Pure1 storage, and the deduplication works very well with it. For VMware, it has been a humongous savings. Once we get our file system onto it, we may see the dedupe work better, but we haven't got that far yet.

We have integrated the solution with VMware, which is great.

Our compression rates are 4:8:1. We are using it for VMware and our Oracle solution. It's a little higher on the Oracle solution. However, it has been great. 

For the IOPS, I don't think we ever really hit anywhere near what we thought we were going to hit. You always think you need more than you need.

I have found the whole deduplication and compression process enlightening.