Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We are a solution provider and the Pure Storage FlashArray is one of the products that we implement for our customers. I have installed three of them in the past month.

The primary use case for this product is high-performance storage.

This is the best all-flash storage array on the market. They were the first brand that provided access directly from CPU to memory to disk.

This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve.

The Pure Storage FlashArray is very stable.

This is a scalable product but not as much as the Infinidat InfiniBox. That solution is more expandable.

I have approximately 20 years of experience with enterprise solutions. These include various hyper-converged systems, all-flash storage systems, business continuity, and disaster recovery solutions for data assurance.

My experience is with products from a lot of different vendors. These include IBM, Dell EMC, Pure, Infinidat, and others.

The best features come included without any additional cost.

The InfiniBox is more expandable than Pure FlashArray. InfiniBox is more for big data than the Pure product.

The suitability of this solution depends on the customer's environment. Depending on the use case, we propose the right product. Pure Storage is not better than InfiniBox and InfiniBox is not better than Pure Storage.

In comparing products, I would rate Pure FlashArray an eight out of ten, InfiniBox a seven out of ten, Dell EMC products receive a six out of ten, and all of the other all-flash storage systems that I have experience with would be rated a five out of ten.

With PowerMax, there is a big difference in cost when you start adding more features.

The Pure Storage solution has only two active controllers and one passive controller. InfiniBox has three active controllers, and PowerMax can have up to six active storage controllers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for block storage.

I like that every few years, they provide us with a free controller upgrade.

It would be nice to have a little more control. I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input. There's not a lot of options for the administrator compared to other solutions

This is our first year using Pure Storage FlashArray. 

This solution is very scalable.

We did a POC before buying this solution. If you're interested in using this solution, I recommend that you do the same — see if you like it. It's a good product for block storage; It offers very good performance. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Pure Storage FlashArray a rating of nine. 

The primary use case is for on-premise storage.

I have personally used this solution for 15 years, and now, four years with my current company.

It's a product that we hardly ever call tech support for, because it just works. The performance and ease of use are all there, which is what we were looking for. We don't want to always have to call into tech support for something. It's one of those products where you forget about it because it just works.

It is an easy to use product for all of my team members.

Granular growth of the storage needs improvement. Right now, if I wanted to add storage, I have to buy a whole shelf. It would be nice to just buy a few drives.

I would like to see data tiering to AWS.

We put a lot of stress on it, and it is very stable. We have only had one tech support call in the last four years for a hard drive replacement.

The scalability works. We are using between 30TB to 50TB.

I would evaluate the technical support as good, I have a team who calls in for support, if there an issue. They have not complained to me about any problems.

The configuration was very easy.

The cost of the storage needs improvement.

We also evaluated Dell EMC and locally attached storage. We chose Pure Storage because it had the best performance of all the products that we tested. Also, its virtualization performance is extremely fast, and it has good ease of use.

Definitely test the performance, compression, and deduplication. You are going to get more out of the storage than what you anticipated.

We are a Cohesity customer. We have use cases where we integrated Pure Storage with Cohesity.

We are using Pure Storage as an all-flash product. It is a niche product, and only used for high performance data.

With Dell EMC, they have all-flash arrays, but they also have other types of storage. Our client use the solution for DevOps and their high speed databases. 

It reduces space and the the polar consumption. It also accelerates the applications.

The VME feature is interesting. Additionally, I like the way they went to market with their All Green Program.

The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so.

The scalability is good. 

I have 19 years experience with Dell EMC products, and almost two years of experience with Pure Storage. The main difference between Dell EMC All Flash and Pure Storage FlashArray is that the Dell EMC product is building on a traditional architecture. You have more functionalities and more connecting possibilities with Dell EMC at this moment. Of course, Pure Storage FlashArray is on a quick road to closing the gap.

It is easy to install. It took us only a half an hour to deploy. If you have a complex environment with a lot of servers, it may take a bit more. I would say the average setup time is one to two hours. 

It is key for a customer to consider the ROI of the product. One has to consider the price, and the architecture of the product. 

The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities. 

When comparing Pure Storage and Dell EMC, I think that Dell EMC has to improve its real performance. Also, Pure Storage is a lot easier to install than the Dell EMC product. 

It's really fast.

So long as it's powered, it is stable. We had someone drop the power to our Pure Storage array once, then everything went down. However, that wasn't Pure Storage's fault. It was just what happened.

The support has been good.

We moved off of VMAX storage. It wasn't keeping up with the workloads that we had. Pure has done this for us.

From my previous employment, where we used it, everyone thinks about Pure Storage running their EMR or HIMS. One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage. People should think about that with their help record. They don't think about that with something like their messaging platform or their interface engine.

It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.

I recommend the solution to my colleagues.

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.

The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup. It meets the customer's expectations. 

I would like to see them lower the costs. They could also include data mining in their next release. 

We have performance monitoring tools and it's hard to integrate them with this solution. 

It's very stable, we haven't had any issues with it. 

Their technical support is great. We don't have to contact them frequently because we don't have many problems. 

We also looked at IBM and Oracle. We did internal evaluations and we decided to go with Pure Storage. We chose Pure Storage because of the processor's performance. 

I would rate this solution a nine. It's extremely stable and has good performance. The only issue is the cost. I would definitely recommend this solution to somebody considering it.