Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We use Pure Storage FlashArray for machine learning, storage, backups, and computing.

After installing Pure, the processes that would take 40 minutes to two hours to complete are now done in five minutes.

It is easy to install.

The stability and scalability are awesome.

The technical support is awesome as well.

Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes.

Also, we can use more capacity and pay less.

I think the areas that they have been working on for quite some time are the CIFS and SMB Shares, that is, being able to mount them directly. I think they're on the right track.

One wish I have is that they will have a solution to help archive data to the cloud, that is, a Cloud Tiering Appliance.

I've been working with it since 2016.

The stability of the solution is awesome too.

The scalability of the solution is awesome. You have the opportunity to grow as needed.

The entire company uses this solution, so that would be close to 2100 people.

It is very extensively used, and we are continuing to expand.

Technical support has been awesome. Sometimes, they've let us know about problems before we've even known that they were there.

We previously used an EMC Array.

We switched because the response time went from a few hours to minutes.

The other piece was the amount of space that we were able to use because of the duplication and compression built in the unit. We can use more capacity and pay less.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The deployment took a couple of hours.

We did a PoC with the product and checked to make sure that it worked in our environment.

We have a group of about 6 to 10 people managing the system.

When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us.

We evaluated NetApp, Kaminario, EMC XtremIO, Tintri, and Nutanix.

We used scalability, support, the evergreen model, the cost per terabyte or per gigabyte, and the footprint as the factors for comparison. We also looked at how they are able to provide support globally, not only here in the US but also overseas.

I would recommend that you do a PoC to ensure that it works according to the needs of the company, and that will help prevent a lot of headaches.

I think it's a very complete solution at this point, and I would rate it at ten on a scale from one to ten.

Pure Storage has been the go-to storage array for me. It's a lot smaller, easier to set up, faster to upgrade, and more reliable. 

The performance is very stable. This is something which I don't get out of a solution such as, for example, 3PAR. 

The code upgrades are very smooth. They're actually all tracking their vulnerabilities. As a customer, Pure Storage gives sufficient time to the customer to showcase the new features and to say this is how to go about going over to the upgrade, and so on. We are quite prepared. We can schedule ahead and be ready for these things. That's something which I like - the selective approach - and everything is on the cloud which helps Pure reach out to their customers and gives these new features. 

Its ability to use multiple services such as the file services, the block services, backup, fast backups, lightning backup, and so on, is great. These features are something that StoreServ or HP doesn't have. They have multiple products for that. Pure tries to bundle them together. That's something which I really like. It reduces the footprint and helps me sell this a lot more to the customer.

Pure Storage support could be a little better. 

The pricing can be a bit high.

In general, I'm quite satisfied with what product they have on offer, and what new features are being released.

I've used the solution for a while. 

The stability is good. The performance on offer is excellent. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Technical support needs improvement.

With respect to them being able to respond, they're more marketing people, less technical. Some of these technical SMEs who I've worked with on Pure Storage, they're really good. However, overall, some accounts still have that thing in their mind that the support isn't as great as some of the bigger companies like Dell or HPE.

That said, that's not the experience for me.

I've also used 3PAR. Performance on Pure Storage is a lot faster than 3PAR.

The initial setup is easy. It's also quick to upgrade. A company shouldn't have issues with the process.

They're okay with the pricing. They're expensive compared to some of the hyperscalers today. When it comes to a private cloud, enterprise-class, where we're looking at highly encrypted, high-performance, highly reliable systems. I might not go with Pure. If I can go with the data center class, I can go with Pure Storage. For enterprise-class, I would still lean back to Hitachi or Dell.

We are partners.

Most of my accounts have multiple storage arrays, and Pure Storage always happened to be one of them.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're pretty happy with it overall.

This solution has been part of a POC. We've been evaluating the solution. 

We went through many renditions of testing with a full load. Even if we pulled a controller out, there was just a blip of response, and it was still extremely acceptable within the limit of what we would consider acceptable - and we're talking about one millisecond here.

This code was mature. We found the hardware to be extremely robust. 

It worked flawlessly.

The deployment was fast. 

The plugin for the ESX, the VMware, was great. That integration is just perfect. They're enhancing it all the time, from what we can tell, so it works flawlessly.

Support is excellent. 

It was a very good proof-of-concept experience.

In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation. 

It's going to be a hard one to manage. They have most of what we were looking at, including some things that we're looking at down the road. The growth on this particular array is almost unlimited for most shops. I would say they still need more enhanced speed, however, that's always a thing with storage.

I've used the solution for six months. 

The stability and reliability are excellent. I would rate it nine out of ten in terms of stability.

The scalability was great. I'd rate it nine out of ten overall. 

We have 20,000 people who were virtual machine users that were just on the test load. 

There is potential to increase usage in the future. That said, it's not up to me right now. We're working with the vendor. 

They have very good technical support. The support model was great. They usually had things resolved in under four hours. Service is very fast.

Positive

The deployment is easy. It was implemented in 15 minutes, including SNAP policies. The process was extremely fast.

It required two people to set up the solution. 

We had the whole thing up and running in 20 minutes and probably was done in an hour for everything, including end-to-end connectivity and having ES6 running on it. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing is okay. It's somewhere in the middle. I'd rate it five out of ten overall. 

We are using an all-flash X-series deployment. 

I'd advise people to test it and give it a try. They need to pay attention to their data reduction rate while doing so. 

I'd rate it nine out of ten overall. 

This product is for database usage and consolidating performance.

The Pure Storage FlashArray provides us with faster data access. Our processing time is faster for tasks that used to take a long time before. Now, it's a lot quicker and more responsive.

The low latency and the performance, in general, are very good.

The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity.

Replication and active-active features are available.

The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in. For what the peak says, I'm very happy with it. However, if you compare it to similar devices with multiple controllers that are scaled-out, it's not a true active-active.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately one year.

Over the past year that we have been using it, the stability has been good. That said, we're still testing it. It is very low maintenance; on the Pure side, they don't have much involvement apart from a bit of monitoring.

We've not had to increase the capacity yet but it does have the flexibility to scale if we need to. At this point, we have 25,000 end-users and we don't expect that to increase. Our user base is fairly static.

We have been in contact with technical support a couple of times. They are quick to respond and we are very happy with the customer support team.

The support plan makes it simple to plan ahead.

We have used other flash arrays in the past.

This initial setup is very straightforward. A couple of hours on-site is all that was needed for the engineer to complete it. It took that long to make sure that everything was in place and available.

Overall, it is very simple.

For the deployment, we didn't need many people but we do have a wider storage team that deals with it.

Installation was included with the purchase. We didn't do it ourselves.

There are no licensing fees aside from the support. The support plan is simple and quite easy to understand, and it covers issues such as hardware failures.

We evaluated all of the options that were presented to us at the time, and Pure won.

Feature-wise, there's nothing specific that is lacking for us at the moment. The features that are there now are really what we need.

Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is focused on enterprise solutions, a support solution that needs either performance, reliability or cost. For example, most companies have databases, virtualized workloads, or VDI workloads. So with those kinds of environments like the Block Storage, it is perfect because it switches very well with the cost, performance, and reliability ratio. Additionally, it's easy to deploy to benefit the IT team in the management costs.

We find the ease of usability and setup valuable.

Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions. The amount of storage the customers receive is approximately 20% higher when you compare it with similar solutions. So it can be a problem when you are positioning the product.

We have been using the solution for seven years as partners and are currently working with the latest version.

The solution is highly scalable, but scalability is sometimes undervalued, but everyone can scale. In the case of Pure Storage FlashArray, our experience with upgrading the capacity only involved changing the controllers. So, for example, if you have 20 terabytes and want to go to 100, you only have to change the controllers when paying for that storage capacity upgrade. You can also include the controllers, and the controllers' upgrade does not impact production. You can do it without stopping, so the upgrade of the machines can start with the smallest to the biggest machine that can deploy up to five petabytes. If you cannot do it smoothly, you don't have to stop production and will not have a disruption.

Our experience with customer service and support has been very good. It is very good even though they are still growing, and they are very responsive to issues. They promise a 15-minute response time and are very good at keeping that promise.

The initial setup is straightforward. Two engineers are usually tasked with deployment.

Our return on investment is good.

The licensing cost is close to zero. Every new function or functionality is included when paying the annual maintenance. Our customers value it because the maintenance is always the same regardless of whether it's the first year, the seventh or the tenth year. Additionally, the products use the same operative system with new capabilities, like ransomware and safe mode. Another thing that is quite nice to have is outstanding performance. They can provide a lot of performance, so there is not a lot of difference. Still, efficiency is something customers value because the compression can be up to twice of the second competitor. I rate licensing costs a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by improving upgrade prices.

My primary use case of this solution is array management. 

FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy. 

FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool. 

I have been working with FlashArray for the past two years. 

Compared to other products, this solution is more stable. We haven't had any performance issues. Oracle RAC and most of the Microsoft applications perform well on the block storage. 

This solution is easy to scale. 

FlashArray is best suited to a large company. We provide any kind of hosting service in our region, so we have multiple customers hosted in our data center. The environment is large and we have more than 25 different customers and terabytes of data. 

I'm satisfied with the support. Comparatively, it matches with Windows. I don't see any difference in the levels of technical support. 

The initial configuration, the base configuration, is really simple. Compared to other products, it's really easy. The racking and stacking will take time, but that has more to do with the data center operations, not specifically the Pure Storage configuration. I'll say this: once the base configuration of the storage array is connected with those cables, once the IP is assigned, the setup process won't take long. It won't take more than 30 to 45 minutes to complete the base configuration, and then it will be ready for provisioning the contract data. 

We implemented through an in-house team. We are the service providers in this region, so we did it ourselves. We only engage vendors and their local partners if there is any hardware issue or hardware replacement we need delivered. 

I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC.  

Overall, this is a good product and I would recommend it. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The experience has been very good so far for the company. It's very fast and it's very easy to configure the storage. 

It's very efficient. 

The snapshot feature is great. It's very easy to apply. You can see present error applications by going back using snapshot. It's very good for the company.

We haven't had any problems with it in the time we've used it.

I like the user interface.

Support has been helpful.

We have no issues with pricing.

Integration is easy.

The initial setup is simple. It's easy to deploy using the whitepapers on offer. 

The compression is quite good compared to other options.

We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The stability is good and we haven't had any issues with it. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is possible. It's pretty simple to just add more storage as needed. We plan to do so next year. Our impression is that it will be an easy process.

We have about 2,000 users at this time. It may even be as high as 10,000 when you factor in academic users. 

Technical support has been good. We haven't had any issues so far with them. We are satisfied with the level of service. 

In the past, we had an IBM storage device, however, when we compare this old storage with the Flash Pure, it's just so much better.

The initial setup is very simple. We have experience in using the storage and using the new Flash Pure Storage is even easier. It's quite an intuitive solution, which makes the setup process a breeze. 

It takes about six months to move from old to new storage. 

There are seven people on half that can handle the deployment process. 

Our organization did use an IT consultant to assist us with the implementation. 

The pricing is okay. We pay to license on a yearly basis. It's just a standard fee with no extra costs. 

We are a user and a customer.

While right now we are using an on-premises deployment, we likely will move to the cloud.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

We use it for block storage workloads. We don't use a lot of the features on it.

It has reduced provisioning time. There is ease of management.

The availability and ease of use are the big features. 

Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see.

I have been working with this solution for about three years.

It has been really stable.

That's the only feature that isn't as good. It doesn't scale as large as some of the competitors, but they have started to make them bigger.

We probably have a dozen or so admins who use it, including me. I take care of its maintenance. It is pretty light in terms of maintenance.

It is being used extensively. We'll be increasing its usage. I'm on the networking side. Our IT group is a pretty heavy user too. Both of us will be increasing its usage, but their scale is a little bit bigger than ours.

I would rate them really high. On a scale of one to five, I'd give them a four.

Dell EMC and NetApp would be the two big ones that we used before. We switched because of the cost and the ease of use. Those are the two big ones. In terms of the cost, a lot of it was just introducing a second vendor.

Its setup was really straightforward. It took about half a day. It is pretty quick. All the cabling and facility stuff is usually the longest part.

We had the vendor do most of it. It is like a team, and there is usually one installer guy. Our experience with them was great. Our account team with them is really good. 

Its setup is easier than you think. It is a pretty straightforward deployment.

They have been correcting a couple of things. One of them was that they didn't really scale that large. So, we had to deploy a lot of arrays. They have started to make them bigger now. In addition, until recently, they didn't do a file on the FlashArray. Now, you can share files on it. They recently implemented that, but we haven't tried it yet.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It does everything we wanted to do.