Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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. 

We have our own hosted environment that utilizes Pure. We also use it for customers. We use the solution both internally and externally. We use the tool for data storage and backups.

What we had previously wasn't quite working for us. Pure Storage FlashArray gives us the required availability and sufficient performance. We use the secure snapshots for malware protection. We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.

Pure is not designed to be a backup storage. It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups. It would be nice to get specialized backup storage with immutability, multifactor authentication, and very high deduplication and compression without sacrificing performance.

I have been using the solution for about five years.

It is an extremely stable solution.

We can start with the base array. As we scale on the contract, we get the higher-end controllers. It's a zero downtime upgrade, which is also very nice. We have some large enterprise customers.

The support is amazing.

Positive

The implementation is easy. The time taken for deployment depends on the engineer. Typically, it takes less than one hour. We need one engineer for the configuration. The tool is very easy to maintain. It has no failure rates.

The ROI is good.

We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.

I am also working with Nimble and HPE Alletra. One of the pros of Pure Storage is that it deals with all-flash arrays. It's a lot simpler. The other advantage is the collaboration with Pure.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for tier 1 critical applications on-premises. 

Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integration developed by Pure by integrating with vRealize.

With this program, all of our applications are able to perform faster and this enables us to provide faster platforms and services to our customers and employees. This solution is, therefore, a huge benefit to our IT organization. 

VMware is basically the platform that our entire on-premise residence runs on and we incorporate vRealize, vOperations, and SRM. We're also looking at partnering with a backup solution Zerto, so it just gives us a lot more flexibility.

What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability.

In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput.

The stability of this solution is extremely solid.

I am very impressed by the scalability Pure offers.

I haven't had any need to make use of the technical support team yet.

We realized that we needed to invest in a new solution when we ran out of space. We didn't really switch over to Pure, we basically just put the non-critical apps on our Unity storage and brought in Pure to be the tier 1 for the performance of critical applications. We had a few programs on our shortlist, like Dell EMC and Pure. We actually have all three on-site currently. 

The initial setup was very straightforward and we used FlairTech for the deployment. 

I would like to see a reduction in the cost and speed, but I still think that this program deserves a ten out of ten rating. My advice to others would be, if you can afford it, get Pure. 

The primary use case is virtual machines.

We can now quickly roll out multiple instances of virtual machines or FlashArray storage, more than we could before.

Speed: Things function pretty quickly for our SAN management team. We have seen a good reduction in the amount of total storage space that we're using because of the deduplication.

It runs fast and is easy to use, and our SAN manager likes it.

The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing.

I rated the solution as a nine out of ten because I knew about a disk failure. Other than that, it would probably be a ten. Disk failures are out of anybody's control. 

The stability is good.

It seems highly scalable.

From what I have heard, the technical support has been good.

We went with Dell EMC first. When we had a ton of trouble with it, we dumped it for Pure Storage.

We are fairly new to using it, so we'll have to wait to see what our data usage is over the next year or so.

The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments.

It simplifies storage. Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth.

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for all of our SAN storage for our VMware environment

The solution has benefited our company because of the ease of use and the performance and reliability.

The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level.

The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately eight months.

The solution has been highly stable and we have not had an issue.

I rate the stability of Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

We have one person that using the solution to manage it.

We do not plan to increase our usage.

I rate the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

I have not used support often but my experience was good.

I rate the support of Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

Positive

I was not there when the initial setup was done, but we recently we swapped the controller and it went smoothly.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a good investment.

The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive.

My advice to others is for them to plan and try the solution out.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight 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.

We are in the health industry and use this product for block storage. We have VMware hosted on our Pure FlashArrays and we have a Citrix environment. We also have Oracle running as our SQL database. Our VMs run from Pure.

We have also done a couple of PoCs with the Blade solution for using the file share system.

One of the requirements from our developers and test and development team is that from time to time, they want to clone the production environment. We are able to accomplish this within seconds, using a script. This is one of the best parts that I have seen. This feature is not available with other storage solutions.

Performance-wise, it is giving us a very good result.

We are happy with the data compression and deduplication capabilities.

The interface is user-friendly and very easy to use.

Taking a snapshot and cloning data is very easy to do. We can create a script and it will clone the environment. Similarly, we can replicate the environment from one site to another site, and we can restore the environment where we choose.

The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard. For example, I can see all of the utilization and it has port monitoring capabilities. With other storage vendors, multiple tools are required for this, and there is an additional charge.

Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases.

Integration with VMware tools can be improved.

The reporting can be better.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for between five and six years.

This is a very stable product and we haven't had any downtime. We use this product extensively and I have seen that we have a 90% I/O load in our environment.

This is a flexible system that is easy to scale.

We initially purchased two FlashArray systems. One of them was small or midsized, and the other was high-end. Then, later, we started upgrading. As per the Everygreen contract, we get free upgrades. Every three years, we get a new controller upgrade, free of cost.

We have also upgraded our capacity and now everything is on the X series. We have four FlashArrays in total and all of our database users are connected to them. The infrastructure and database teams are directly involved with it.

The response from the technical support team is very good. We have not found any difficulties with their ability or engagement.

We have worked with solutions from HPE, IBM, and Hitachi. We don't work with any of these vendors now. We switched because Pure storage is much easier to manage. It is also more stable and it is very easy to work with.

For example, there is no shutdown procedure. If you want to power down the environment then you just unplug the power and that's it. Once you reconnect the power, it is up. With legacy storage, there is a shutdown procedure. You have to shut down the host, then the SAN switch, then the storage.

With legacy storage, there is also a procedure to bring it up. You have to power up the enclosures, then the controller, then the SAN environment, and then the server. We had to follow a long set of steps with more dependencies.

After a power outage, the storage devices from the other vendors did not always come back online. For example, we implemented a PoC with the IBM FlashSystem and a power outage occurred. The management tool crashed and did not come back up. We had to wait for IBM engineers to come and fix the issue. Whereas, with Pure, when the power came back on, the system came back online immediately.

The other storage systems were not as user-friendly. For example, I had a Hitachi G600 and I wanted to extend the block capacity. I had to spend between 30 minutes and one hour to complete it. It's quite complex. With Pure, that would be taken care of in seconds by going to the console, selecting the volume, and performing the reset.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy.

The day that we received the box, we unpacked it, racked it, and configured it. The next day, we were able to utilize it for production.

Upgrading the hardware, such as performing a controller upgrade, is a seamless process. We are planning to do a major upgrade and it will be done on the fly.

We engaged Pure to assist us with our implementation, and our experience with them was very good. The technical team came onsite for the deployment. If we have any problems then they will return to our site to help.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance.

You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced.

We completed a PoC with most of the leading brands.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that I can recommend Pure. We were the first customer for Pure Storage in the UAE. It's stable, reliable, and you can trust it.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Pure FlashArray is that it's user-friendly, easy to manage, and very flexible. You can scale out and it's easy to upgrade. The upgrade process is not complex and it can be done on the fly, without any disruption.

My main complaint is that the garbage collection mechanism draws heavily on the resources. They have integration with VMware tools, although they can improve it slightly, and I would also like to see some improvements in the reporting.

We have been using it heavily and all of our people are happy with it. This includes the DBA team. Whenever we have a requirement of it, it's very easy and it can be done within seconds. With our previous storage solutions, we had to spend more time looking into problems and they were not user-friendly.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I'm a pre-sales architect. I architect, and I sell them as a partner with Pure Storage on the VAR side. Our customers use it for storage, mainly block-based storage and virtualization storage. Some solutions have both block and file storage, and some solutions only have file storage from Pure. 

It provides additional protection against ransomware threats. If you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or some kind of malicious attack, you can revert your data back in time to a previous version or snapshot.

One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table.

Scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades are also valuable. They're not using flash just for your tier one storage needs. They're recommending flash for data protection and archive backup, which is the way to go.

If you get the gold support, which is what I sell and recommend for my customers, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades, which is another feather in Pure's cap. They make several claims that once you move to Pure Storage, you can take your team of five dedicated storage admins and trim it down to just one person. Their mantra is getting customers out of the game of managing storage and letting the vendor manage the storage. They want to see their customers just consume storage. They have non-disruptive upgrades. You just set up the software and hardware and just consume the storage. They're continuously looking at the dial-homes, the logs that are automatically sent, and fingerprinting potential issues before they're even a problem. That cuts down on a lot of support tickets the customers have to open up. They'll proactively open up tickets when they see something in their analytics on a particular customer's array and recognize that one of their hosts might have a certain HBA with a fault or a bug. They reach out and open a ticket. So, you get your system upgrade, patched, or whatever is needed to resolve the potential problem.

I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. They can work on the price to make it more competitive.

Its stability is very good. I have not heard any of my customers having issues with FlashArray. It is very solid. They claim 99.9999% availability. I haven't had any problems with outages with my customers. 

They have another product called FlashBlade, which is a different type of storage appliance that Pure does for unstructured files. FlashBlade doesn't rank as high in reliability as their flagship FlashArray product does. The FlashBlade product is a notch below. It is a newer product or code, and I have heard of some issues with it.

Its scalability is very good. It scales up instead of out, which is typical for a block-based appliance. It is very easy to add expansion shelves or disks. You don't need to worry about shuffling drives around and creating RAID groups. This is all legacy stuff. Most vendors are now the same, but I really think that Pure led the effort for non-disruptive upgrades. They coined the term, and other vendors have since followed suit. They're the leader in the industry for that.

Their regular support is good. With gold support, Pure's support personnel takes care of both software and hardware upgrades. The only difference between free support and gold support is that you don't get free hardware upgrades with free support. If I understand the offering correctly, software upgrades are still included. 

If we're just talking about Pure Storage, it is straightforward and simple. You can get it up in minutes as opposed to hours that some of the other solutions take. Compared to its competitive solutions, Pure is very well known for its simplicity and ease of use, especially during setup and initialization.

A single 2U appliance from Pure Storage for block-based workloads, including rack stack and initialization, is ready to be provisioned to your servers in an hour or an hour and a half to the max. It is definitely straightforward.

If you get the gold support, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades. So, you don't have to manage storage. Pure takes care of that.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing.

They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance.

I would advise others to chose well. Prepare to have extra time on your hands to focus on your business's core needs and outcomes and not having to worry about the day-to-day maintenance of your storage appliance.

All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions. They might ask for customization level, but I think Pure is doing the right thing by its set-it-and-forget-it approach. Most customers don't need to fine-tune and customize their all-flash storage appliances anymore. It is not a legacy spinning disk appliance.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of 10. Its pricing sometimes plays a big part where customers might go in a different direction, and that's the only reason why I'm not giving it a 10.