Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

From the first test that we have conducted, we are very satisfied with this solution.

The interface is easy to use.

At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way.

We are not sure what needs improvement at this time, as we have not started using it in the production environment.

It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated.

We are in the process of implementing this solution, but we haven't started using it in the production environment.

The vendor was helpful during our implementation.

The initial setup was easy, with help from the vendor.

We have had help from the vendors, they have been very close to us, helping us all the way.

We decided to go with the Pure Storage solution because of the business model that they presented to us.

We have hired Pure Storage and a distributor to help out at the beginning but mostly we deal with Pure Storage directly.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

It is storage for our database system.

The access in our system is more reliable and provides our users better speed.

For flash storage, the speed access is its most valuable feature.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression is very good.

The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before.

There are a lot of things to improve.

They make a reliable storage. We use it as a very critical system, and we don't want any corruption on our system.

Since our design is a high availability design, it can work 24/7.

The product is scalable.

The technical support is very fast.

Previously, we used Oracle, Hitachi, and SAN storage. We switched because we needed storage that could be accessed and support our system very quickly.

The initial setup was straightforward in configuring the database and storage.

We used a Pure Storage partner for the deployment. They were very good, supportive, and responsive.

We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing.

The features that we wanted have already been added.

We integrated the product with VMware and vCenter. It was a very simple configuration to integrate the VMs and have them read our storage.

It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future.

I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable. Of course, it is, after all, solid-state. It's not the same as "cheap and deep."

It's a very stable product, all self-contained and very well-supported as well.

It's definitely scalable. It can grow with a company's needs.

It's one of the easiest out there, in terms of installation.

It's a great return on investment, based on the mission. When you're interested in high-performance there isn't much else that competes with it.

We looked at everything. In dealing with this, we got mission-specific. It's like different kinds of planes or sailboats: What's the mission? For this high-performance mission, that's what Pure is about.

I would recommend it to colleagues. When performance is important, that's what Pure is all about.

I rate the solution at ten out of ten. Solid-state storage makes a lot of sense, they're 100 percent solid-state when you need that kind of performance. The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money.

We run our production Oracle workload on it.

We have been able to scale it to ten terabytes. Whereas, before we were stuck.

The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes.

I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product.

Stability has been really solid.

The technical support has been fantastic.

We were previously using Dell EMC.

We used an integrator for the deployment.

We have seen ROI. Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks.

It makes things ten times easier.

It is the SAN backbone for our company. We have multiple SANs, all Pure at this point. It runs everything from tasks to business intelligence to enterprise applications.

Snapshot recovery has been very helpful. When there have been snapshots that we've had to restore it's been easy for our SAN team to make those available for our server team.

There are a couple of things we really like: the flash storage, the deduplication, and IO times are very good. The snapshots are also fairly useful.

The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN. There was a situation where all of our LUN were essentially made illegitimate. They were corrupted by a redactor. We have snapshots enabled on the majority of our SANS and that was great, we were able to snapshot and restore. There was one data center that our SAN admins had not intentionally gone in and checked the box to allow for replicas to be created. Because of that, we lost that whole data center and everything that was on it. If there had been a checkbox that had been checked by default to have the snapshotting, they wouldn't have gone in and unchecked it and we would still have our data. It generated a lot more work on the server side to rebuild everything that was corrupted.

Also, an additional feature would be replication from our on-premise to AWS that could then be used directly with the cloud. The way the VMware cloud is engineered is we have to have hosts up the entire time to run beats and to have HCX replicating things over to it. If we were able to have replication from Pure over S3 buckets, so that we only had to spin up the VMware host on demand, that would be a tremendous cost saving to us as Pure customers.

We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us. 

We have around 5 Pure Storage SANs and several of them are maxed out on trays.

We are currently having a situation where one of our VMware hosts is not being detected. It has been told to us that it has been presented to Pure, but the VMware host is not capable of seeing it. The support has been working with us, although it's not an instant fix.

It was cheaper to purchase Pure than it was to stay with the SAN we had because of the support costs. 

Pure Storage is a good price and it's a solid product for the price point. Only two or three times over the last 5 years have we had Pure flash drives die to a point where they had to be replaced, so the reliability is also very good.

In the past we've considered EMC, Dell Compellent (Dell EMC), NetApp and of course Pure Storage. We had Dell Compellent in the past and there were some issues with the implication and the way that it used storage. We had firmware trouble with it, which drove us away to seriously consider other brands offerings. We considered EMC, except EMC was expensive. Pure came in at a better price point than EMC and performed better than Compellent.

When we do a mass migration of data to the Pure SAN, it along with any other SAN out there still has to deduplicate that. So, it arrives in a large chunk before it can finally shrink it down to what Pure is capable of reducing it to through deduplication. Now that we have streamlined our environment on the VMware side, we're able to dump stuff in a large amount. However, for those dumpings we have to wait for Pure to sit and chew on it and then de-duplicate it before we could move the next large amount over there.

Our VDI with VMware Horizon include 100 VM for office and graphics desktop with nVidia GRID, the low latency and the high deduplication permit to reduce storage footprint, power consumption and to increase the consolidation on few VMware Host.

We have consolidated all the VSI (55 VM) and VDI (100 VM) in the same storage, improving performance and overall virtual desktop acceptance.

The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression.

We liked the non-disruptive downgrade from FA-420 (POC) to FA-405 in production and the non-disruptive upgrade from FA-405 to M20.

Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved. The VVol support is just released in GA.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

There were no stability issues. It is always on from the first LUN deployment to VSphere.

There were no scalability issues. NDU and NDD were very simple, without interruption or performance decrease for its cluster nature, active/passive.

Customer Service:

I would rate the customer service as very high.

Technical Support:

They are all skilled. They upgraded the storage firmware from remote every time we asked via a phone appointment.

We have used 3PAR for VDI and NetApp for VSI. The new solution has a very low price/performance ratio. With the price of the SSD upgrade of our NetApp FA3220 and the one year maintenance of the old 3PAR, we bought Pure Storage with a three-year support agreement.

The initial setup was very simple. In two hours, we started to use Storage vMotion.

The product was implemented directly by the vendor’s team and they are very skilled.

In two years, we will start to save. With their Evergreen Storage subscription, we can enjoy protection of our investment.

Everything is included, so there is very simple licensing. F

We evaluated EMC XtremIO and NetApp FAS.

Test it in your environment in a PoC or in a Try-and-Buy to check your deduplication and compression ratios.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

IPv6 is now fully supported, Windows Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) is added in the latest firmware as supports for Docker APKG 1.0.1 and Dynamic Volume in the Purity Container Engine.

The dashboard of the product provides a lot of value to the administrator. It provides everything needed in a single view.

The product improved the organization functions by increasing system response time and productivity. Before the product was installed, applications ran poorly, and slow, which affected the productivity of the workforce. Once the product was in use, the applications ran quickly, and the workforce did not encounter any bottlenecks and became more productive.

The product could improve by providing the capability to support NAS storage – CIFS and NFS. Currently, the product only supports block storage (SAN).

The solution has been in place for three years.

There weren’t any issues encountered other than firmware upgrades that needed to take place.

The capacity we needed did not cause any issues with scalability. However, fairly large companies may have issues expanding. The controllers are limited to a certain amount of storage. When that capacity limit is reached on what the controllers can handle, another set of controllers will be needed to compensate for the additional storage.

Their support and customer service is excellent. They monitored our storage arrays and knew about issues we had when they were reported. They assisted and made themselves available for some work where help was needed.

I would rate their level of support an 8/10. Only because issues require escalation during off hours, but they do respond when issues are escalated.

The technology the company had were from two competing vendors, but none had flash storage. This was the first time the company ever used flash storage.

The deployment was very quick. It is one of the easiest storage equipment to implement.

The initial setup was very simple. The storage array comes very compact with minimum amount of hardware so it’s not bulky equipment which gets delivered in pallets. The setup instructions are extremely easy.

The product was installed by the vendor’s SE. Their level of expertise was a solid 10/10.

There was a case study on the product. The work performed by four people is now capable of being performed by one person because of the applications running faster.

All the software is included in the hardware at no additional cost , unlike some of the other storage vendors who charge for certain features such as encryption, replication, etc.

We looked at the other offerings from existing vendors but we took advantage of the free POC and also the special introductory rate.

Based on my experience with the product, I would recommend it. I have never experienced an outage with the product or had any support that was below excellent. But there are other products in the market which compete well, however, I do not have any experience with the other products’ pricings and support.

We use it for our financial core storage.

It has been a good product. It has a lot of good features on it.

Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both. Therefore, we are NCA compliant.

The solution has minimized the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.

It has helped by shrinking our space requirements.

The encryption is its most valuable feature.

The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are pretty good.

Its ability to simplify storage seems good.

The stability is very good. It has been stable.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is very good.

We need the encryption at REST. That is why they wanted this solution.

We used an integrator, Jack Henry, for the deployment.

The cost has room for improvement.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, and Dell EMC.

Look into Pure Storage because it seems to be a good solution.