Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

VMware is currently our main use case because it dedupes really well.

Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles. 

Firstly, dedupe is the most valuable feature. Hands down. Simplifying storage is also a big win overall. As far as the monitoring with the latency goes, we're not monitoring the apps to see how they're doing at different periods, which saves us time. We're just setting thresholds, walking away, and waiting for emails if they're broken.

The big thing would be to simplify the compatibility to Openstack. The Openstack going into Nova works really well, but if Pure had a few more of those features that would be my win.

It's been rock solid.

So far it seems good.

We've used them a few times, mainly with upgrades. They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good.

They gave us the rundown and was simpler than expected. They gave us the sheet and sent us off saying, "Hey, if you need us, give us a call." We just plugged it in and up it came.

We used a reseller, but then we did our own deploy along with their help. They came in and gave us a training course so that we could maintain it ourselves.

There are a lot of companies that give a solid performance and a lot of places you can get flash. The pricing wasn't that much different, It's really the simplicity that makes a difference. If the data starts flowing too fast, it slows things down and does it later. Those features are the winners for us.

We're constantly on the hunt, and we always keep three to four vendors in. Usually, it's been the bigger players, the IBM's, the EMC's. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but we were looking for something a little different this time around.

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.

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 use it for nearline storage.

Right now, we just have lab equipment that we test them on and we try to compare them with other solutions.

The thickness and the sizing for when we put it in the data center. Also, the performance and price.

It has good stability for our company.

It's granular.

The support is good.

Our storage is old, so we were searching for what would be the next good solution for us. We had an integrated solution with a supplier, so we were looking to get rid of this kind of model. 

The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple.

We used a retailer to buy it and it was easy.

Compuverde. But, we like to have data sheets and a more traditional storage than a complex unit.

I would rate this a seven out of ten because it's a good performance storage, but the price is a little bit high. Our predicted performance analytics is also going really well, so if you need faster storage and a good product, this is the one you should go ahead with.

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.

All of our production and development workloads run on Pure Storage.

It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore. The solution mostly works. We used to have to babysit our previous storage system, such as managing the volumes and looking at the capacity to predict when we would we eventually run out of space. All of these things used to be challenges with our previous system. After moving to Pure Storage, we don't have to worry about them too much. We have defined our policies once, then things mostly work.

Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been. The latest problem, which we are currently dealing with as of today, is after the latest upgrade, utilization ran out because of the system's space. It is consuming more than it should. The deduplication and compression are not happening in time. The quality is always behind, and Pure Storage acts like it is a bug, and they have a new version that has a fix for it. So, it often goes into a cycle. Then, you keep upgrading, then the new upgrade may have some other problem.

FlashArray is more geared towards bigger, organic workloads where our real need has been around other backups. While it has its own snapshot concept, it should have a separate backup system similar to what Commvault provides. Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations. This is an area that we have already discussed with our account team.

In general, the stability has been perfect. The primary worry for stability is upgrades. The system works unless you touch it, then there are a ton of upgrades.

We can quickly add more shelves and drives with larger sizes, which is perfect. The whole concept of keeping it all modular is definitely new.

While the technical support is good, they are not as good as we would like them to be. We often have to get our account team involved, who are stars. This always solves the problem. Support is available 24/7, but sometimes not as detail-oriented in investigating problems. E.g., we get our Account Team involved to manage the engineers involved and figure out what the problem was. Support is not perfect.

We were previously on legacy storage systems. After moving to Pure Storage, our stability and performance both drastically improved.

The setup is straightforward. We recently added two more areas to our ecosystem, and the setup was phenomenal.

We used a reseller for the deployment named SHI, and our experience with them was good.

For one of our systems, the data reduction which was initially anticipated when we bought the FlashArray was lower than that expected production when we moved over.

Pure Storage is expensive. It comes with features, so you get what you pay for. It is expensive compared to our old storage systems, but from the amount of human effort that you have to pay to babysit a storage system, it reduces that. I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us.

The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations.

You get what you pay for; it is expensive, but it works. Therefore, I would recommend using Pure Storage.

I don't use the predictive performance analytics too much.

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.

We use this solution for storage of critical data and for storage of replicated backups. We use Zerto replication software. We write all of those backups to Pure Storage and then we use those in our disaster recovery scenarios.

It helps us simplify our storage because we use it for a specific use case of replication between sites. We have two data centers: a primary data center and a secondary data center. We got a Pure Storage device in each location and we do backups of critical data in both locations and then replicate them back and forth between the sites. This is the biggest thing it does for us. 

We have seen a reduction in total costs of ownership. Most of the data that's on the Pure came off of Dell EMC VNX. The money I saved by not renewing maintenance on the Dell EMC devices paid for the Pure Storage devices. I've saved a lot of money and gotten better-performing storage.

With every update we get, we get a reduction in the space used which has been pretty dramatic with each one of the upgrades that we've gone through.

The value of the storage in the way that it stores the data is a very valuable feature for us. We also like that it's robust and stable and that we get good support from them when we have an issue. 

We put very high stress on this solution and we've almost never had any problems with it. We originally went with a competitor's product and after about eight months and a lot of wrangling, we had them buy it back from us. Then we bought a similar Pure Storage product, and it's been great.

Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with. 

We decided it was time to switch because the other solution was terrible. We were using Dell EMC Unity and it never worked properly and was full of software bugs. Dell EMC couldn't fix it and they had no intention of fixing it. 

The initial setup was easy and we were able to sort data almost immediately. The time from racking to being in production was very short and very simple.

We used a third-party for the implementation. We bought it and we built in some professional services. They were great. Everything with Pure Storage is straightforward. 

The cost of implementing Pure Storage was less than the cost of continuing to maintain the Dell EMC solutions which is ROI for us. In addition to that, the more data we store, the more compression we get, the better it looks.

We initially looked at Pure Storage and Dell EMC Unity. We made the poor decision of going with Unity and eight months later we went with Pure Storage. 

I would rate this solution a ten because of the way the product works. It never blinks. Also because of the progressive support that we get from Pure Storage with updates and opening tickets on the device before we even knew that there was a problem happening. The entire experience of working with them has been great. 

I would advise somebody considering this solution to buy it.