Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Our primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the project.

The analytics that we gather is used for just one environment (which is big in the banking industry). Production wise, it's running Oracle. Performance wise, it's basically running enterprise applications.

Once the project was enabled with data persuasion and we had Pure Storage behind it, there was a lot of saving storage. Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes. 

Infrastructure as a base is important, but the end game is to have the DevOps pipeline, which is the most valuable feature. 

A three wave application or multi-wave application synchronization would be an improvement. 

The company started off with a small chunk of the product. Now they have moved up to where Pure Storage became the direct responder in our Australian office, they said it was very stable on their end.

We have a capital of storage with EMC, our previous solution. The fact that Pure has a petabyte of storage means that Pure Storage will become a de-facto standard in all the global organizations.

We don't use the tech support, but we have an in-house engineer in one of our offices.

The initial setup was really straight forward.

We needed to choose a new investment because our solution couldn't do data provisioning very quickly. The main solution that the bank normally had was EMC. We looked into HP, IBM, and Pure Storage. But, cost, rate per terabyte, and speed is why we chose Pure Storage. It was a no brainer.

Latency defines everything.

The primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the product.

We are moving into a DevOps environment and CI/CD. Their departmentalization was an enabler because database is a service in the pipeline where the underlying risk factor has to be correct, especially the storage. This primarily applies to the driver and the infrastructure as a base, but the end game is to have a DevOps pipeline.

We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, e.g., our database team used to spend 93 days backing up and restoring databases. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us.

Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products.

If Pure Storage had its features at parity with its competitors, it could move ahead. 

One to three years.

It is very stable.

It scales well, around a petabyte.

We have an in-house engineer in one of our onsite offices.

The initial setup was straightforward. We started with about 60TB and have grown from there.

We have seen ROI.

We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space.

We did a vendor search, which included a big payments project across Asia-Pacific for a company that could do data provisioning very quickly. Then, Pure Storage was chosen. 

We also considered Dell EMC, HPE, and IBM. We picked Pure Storage because of its ratio per terabyte and speed.

Pure Storage is now our de facto standard product to use.

The analytics were gathered for this environment, and the environment is big. Production-wise, it is running Oracle, and performance-wise, it is running enterprise applications.

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.

We've been using this solution for four years. We are on-prem with Pure and we are not using any of Pure's off-prem product. We do have experience with a variety of storage in AWS. For us, it's still two very different things, we like Pure Storage because our key business systems are still on-prem. It's been extremely reliable and gets the job done. 

Our primary use case is for Oracle databases, data warehouses, and mission critical apps. 

This solution has improved my organization because we can easily snapshot and share the same storage platform for non-production production and so we've been able to get very high performance from non-production environments as well. 

The ability to seamlessly and easily upgrade storage capacity and upgrade to a completely new generation of the array are the most valuable features. 

There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there. 

In the early days, we had issues with stability right up to an actual crash during an upgrade. That was three and a half years ago and since then there's been a dramatic improvement. We've found the product to be extremely reliable. 

Scalability is near excellent. In terms of provision capacity, a total footprint is over 400 terabytes provisioned out to systems in my organization. 

Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk. 

We considered different products from Dell EMC and NetApp. We didn't choose Dell EMC because it was a cost issue. For NetApp, there was an ease of use difference and we felt that Pure Storage was an easier product for our team to use. We chose Pure Storage primarily because of its combination of performance and ease of use. 

I would rate this solution as a nine because of the scalability and upgrade flexibility. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to take the opportunity to take a look at the product. Take a demo and actually run through day to day operations and see how easy and reliable it is. 

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 it for storage of critical data, and for storage of replicated backups.

We use Zerto Virtual Replication software. We write all of those backups to Pure, then we use those in our disaster recovery scenarios. 

It has simplified our storage. We use it for a pretty specific use case of replicating between sites. I have two data centers, a primary data center and a secondary data center, with a Pure Storage device in each location. We do backups of critical data in both locations, then replicate them back and forth between the sites. 

The value for the storage, in the way it stores the data, but also the robustness of the product, it's very stable. And then the support that we get when we have an issue.

One to three years.

The stability is very high with almost no problems. 

Excellent. Best of any of the vendors we work with.

Everything with Pure Storage is so straightforward. It was an easy setup, and we were storing data almost immediately.

We used a third party for deployment. When we bought it, we built-in some professional services who did great work. 

We actually originally went with a competitor's product, and after about eight months, a lot of wrangling, had them buy it back from us. And then we bought similar Pure Storage product, and it's just been great.

This solution has improved my organization because it has good performance. The interface is simple. Its ease of use has simplified storage for us.

The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free. 

I would like to see more cloud integration. 

Scalability is great. 

We used a Pure Storage engineer for deployment. He came on site and did the setup. 

We also looked at NetApp. We chose Pure Storage because we did research and heard good things. 

I would rate this solution a ten. It's fast and simple. I would recommend this product to someone considering it. I would advise to look at your budget and use case and decide from there.