Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

The primary use case is for on-premise storage.

I have personally used this solution for 15 years, and now, four years with my current company.

It's a product that we hardly ever call tech support for, because it just works. The performance and ease of use are all there, which is what we were looking for. We don't want to always have to call into tech support for something. It's one of those products where you forget about it because it just works.

It is an easy to use product for all of my team members.

Granular growth of the storage needs improvement. Right now, if I wanted to add storage, I have to buy a whole shelf. It would be nice to just buy a few drives.

I would like to see data tiering to AWS.

We put a lot of stress on it, and it is very stable. We have only had one tech support call in the last four years for a hard drive replacement.

The scalability works. We are using between 30TB to 50TB.

I would evaluate the technical support as good, I have a team who calls in for support, if there an issue. They have not complained to me about any problems.

The configuration was very easy.

The cost of the storage needs improvement.

We also evaluated Dell EMC and locally attached storage. We chose Pure Storage because it had the best performance of all the products that we tested. Also, its virtualization performance is extremely fast, and it has good ease of use.

Definitely test the performance, compression, and deduplication. You are going to get more out of the storage than what you anticipated.

We are a Cohesity customer. We have use cases where we integrated Pure Storage with Cohesity.

It's a high performance storage array. We want some deals regarding replication and stretch cluster. 

In our case, we are not using it for us. So, it helps us to go to customers and provide the full stack solution. So, we provide storage from Pure Storage.

It's very fast, easy to use, and the cloud-based management is good.

The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage.

I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good.

It is quite difficult to read documentation and get documentation. To get some things on the web, it is really easy. However, I would to have some in-depth information about how the product is working.

From an API point of view, it's quite a complex product.

We have it in our labs, so it's not in a production environment.

Scalability is okay. We can scale it quite high if we want. This is what we have seen on some projects, which is good,

To set it up is quite easy. When you know how it works, it's really easy. You can set it yourself without any problems. Plug it in, the software updates, and that's it.

We had a guy from Pure Storage helping us and sharing skill sets. This way, they could know our stuff and we could know their stuff.

Test it, get familiar with it, then decide whether to purchase it.

I don't have any experience with predictive performance analytics yet.

We are using Pure Storage as an all-flash product. It is a niche product, and only used for high performance data.

With Dell EMC, they have all-flash arrays, but they also have other types of storage. Our client use the solution for DevOps and their high speed databases. 

It reduces space and the the polar consumption. It also accelerates the applications.

The VME feature is interesting. Additionally, I like the way they went to market with their All Green Program.

The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so.

The scalability is good. 

I have 19 years experience with Dell EMC products, and almost two years of experience with Pure Storage. The main difference between Dell EMC All Flash and Pure Storage FlashArray is that the Dell EMC product is building on a traditional architecture. You have more functionalities and more connecting possibilities with Dell EMC at this moment. Of course, Pure Storage FlashArray is on a quick road to closing the gap.

It is easy to install. It took us only a half an hour to deploy. If you have a complex environment with a lot of servers, it may take a bit more. I would say the average setup time is one to two hours. 

It is key for a customer to consider the ROI of the product. One has to consider the price, and the architecture of the product. 

The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities. 

When comparing Pure Storage and Dell EMC, I think that Dell EMC has to improve its real performance. Also, Pure Storage is a lot easier to install than the Dell EMC product. 

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.

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.

Our primary use case is a big bucket of storage for VMware. We run our virtual machines mostly to make sure that we have our SQL databases sitting on Pure Storage, because it's the fastest storage which we have available.

It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive.

I like the fact that, by default, we encrypt at REST. So, with database encryption, we no longer have to layer it using Transparent Data Encryption, we can use the native storage. This helps lessen the performance impact and simplify configuration.

It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us. 

We are going to start using it as a filer. In January, we're going to migrate away from NetApp and use Pure Storage as file service. 

What is interesting, because we're moving mostly to the cloud, Pure Storage may be the one storage appliance which will stay after we are done with our migration.

Stability has been great. We just put in a new data pack recently. One drive failed, but other than that, it was very stable. I haven't seen a whole lot of problems. Also, when it comes to upgrading shelves and the evacuation process, which sound a lot scarier than they are, everything has gone smoothly. I am very happy with how it works.

With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process.

I contact technical support from time to time. They have been pretty good. I have the mobile phone for one of the tech support guys, so I call him. He usually gets the ground troops rallied if need be, so the support has been good.

I wasn't part of the initial setup.

We used a reseller for the deployment: Bridge Data. They provided good expertise and timely services, so we were happy with them.

We get about a 3.3 data reduction, which is good. That is not the total reduction, just dedupe and compression.

I would give Pure Storage a high recommendation. Go with Pure (or a flasher rate which is similar) because of the ease of management and performance. It makes life a lot easier, especially if you're a smaller shop it could be prohibitive to have a storage engineer on staff. So, get a systems engineer who can do storage. This is more common with Pure Storage, then with Dell EMC.

I have not used the predictive performance analytics all that much.

I really like the end-to-end VM monitoring. I will be putting that on pretty soon.

Pure has become the main storage solution for our customers. It is mainly used for our customers' Oracle databases.

We are a Pure partner. What Pure has brought to us is a solution that our customers see has a lot of value. For the last ten years, there hasn't been a lot of differentiation between storage brands. We also deal with other products, other manufacturers, which are good products, but Pure is a different solution. It has allowed us to go with a different approach for our customers. When compared to different providers - I won't name them - there are other great companies out there, but Pure has managed to have a very different product with a differentiation that customers value.

Also, the guys who normally spend hours, or days, or weeks working with storage, trying to get something done, can do it in minutes with Pure. They save a lot of time, and they can do other stuff instead of managing storage.

The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure.

Also, performance. The box gives them extreme performance, but ease of use is the main reason they love Pure.

Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged. That's one thing they might have to look at because, if you are looking for storage, Pure is the player and the winner. But, if you are looking at HCI, Pure does not play in that area and that may prevent them from getting some deals.

With the customers that we have, and the references we have read from them, the stability is great. I have only seen 100 percent. I haven't had any failures, none of my customers has had any problem with the platform. So far, it's great. 

Technology, in general, is very good now, you don't have a lot of problems. But Pure is even better.

So far, the scalability is great. As a partner, what we want is to keep selling more and more products to our customers. One feature that Pure has is that it gives you even more storage as the company develops new functionality or does software upgrades. Even though it doesn't allow us to sell as much as we would like, our customers appreciate that. They have more capacity without investing any money. So the scalability is great.

Compared with other products, Pure's technical support is as good as anyone's, probably better. They have tools where the customer can see for themselves the performance and the statistics from the solution, so support is first-class. There are some third-party companies, that evaluate the technical support of different companies, and Pure ranks number one.

The initial setup is very simple. As a partner, we like to have products that need a lot of service because we make more money on the service than on the hardware. But with Pure being so simple, there is not a lot of consulting that is needed. That's one of the reasons why customers would rather buy Pure than other brands. While Pure does not allow us to make a lot of money on consulting, it is a very simple and easy sell to customers.

It's so simple that there is not much that an integrator or a partner needs to do on the Pure platform.

Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants. I don't have the exact figures, but roughly, in a five-year span, you would save at least 20 to 25 percent, especially on labor, on specialized people and training.

As to whether the TCO of flash is lower than SSD implementations, I don't have any specific metrics, but again, the implementation of Pure is, by far, simpler than other technologies. I wouldn't say we have lower implementation costs because of flash or because of SSDs, rather it's because of the software and technology of Pure.

Normally, when we go to compete for a customer, they are looking at all the most important brands. Dell EMC is part of most storage bids. There is NetApp and sometimes we face IBM. In our territory there is Hitachi, which is a great product, but usually it's not on the shortlist. Finally there is HPE. Those are the brands that we normally find we're competing with when we offer Pure.

In the end, so far, haven't lost one deal where we involved Pure. We have won deals against NetApp, which is a great product, we have won deals against Dell EMC - and that is the brand to beat. But when customers compare Dell EMC with Pure, there is no competition. Pure is, by far, better.

My advice is to buy Pure. I am very excited about this product. I would recommend that anybody who is looking at storage should really look at and consider Pure, and they will probably buy Pure.

The performance is great. In terms of latency, you can have failures in the system, and the system can keep performing as if nothing happened. It is a great product with great performance. For me, right now, it is the best storage solution in the market, by far.

I would rate Pure a ten out of ten and even 11. I have been in the business for 31 years. In the technology sector, most products are the same, they offer the same functionalities. Maybe 30 years ago, when EMC came out with their storage solution, it was something very different, but in the end, everybody offers the same thing. If you look at a Dell EMC box, or you look at HPE, or you look at Hitachi, they offer a SAN with certain performance, they have replication, they have Snapshots. Everybody has more or less the same thing. Pure has a different offer, because of the simplicity, the performance, and all the functionality that Pure is offering. It's a very simple package, it's what makes Pure different. That's why most customers choose Pure.

FlashArray is our main repository for all our VMware.

We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent.

When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller.

I've been using FlashArray for a year and a half.

For our needs, the stability was very good. 

The scalability was also very good.

The installation was pretty straightforward.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray eight out of 10.