Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Most of our customers who use Pure Storage have one of two scenarios: 

1. They have production data with high performance requirements running out of Pure Storage, and they want an efficient way to make a copy of that data onto some other storage for backup and DR purposes. For this scenario, we have integration with Pure Storage that allows us to very efficiently leverage their APIs to capture that data without the need to do things like repeated full copies of that data, leverages their snapshot APIs and differential APIs which tell us what's different from one snap to another to another.
2. The customer has their data, maybe it is on Pure Storage or it's on some other array, then they want to use Actifio to get a copy onto a Pure Storage array. 

For example, an Oracle user might need to make a copy of a large Oracle Database. They would want us to spin that database up in one or more lower, testing, or QA environments. These environments sometimes have high performance requirements, which could be met by placing a copy on Pure Storage on them.

Another example is a customer who has Oracle Exadata. Obviously, Oracle engineered systems have very high performance, and they don't want to have all of their test and dev copies in that Exadata platform, because of the cost of the platform. Therefore, Pure Storage, combined with Actifio, captures the data efficiently from the Exadata environment, then stores it on the Pure Storage disk. We then present that data to their test servers, which can be the Exadata Compute Servers or it can be any non-Exadata Linux-based Oracle servers. Then, they can have great performance because of the high speed delivery of data from Pure Storage using Actifio.

1. The performance of the high speed FlashArrays. 
2. They have a good API set. Their flash snapshot technologies are efficient. 
3. The deduplication in the array, which is one of the main reasons that it's a cost effective platform, and combining it with the snap technologies, allows the product to be remotely controlled, manually controlled, or scheduled. It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution.

They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable.

Customers don't talk about problems, outages, or crashes with Pure Storage, while I do hear this with some of the other vendors that I have dealt with. I have nothing but the highest regard for Pure Storage when it comes to stability.

The setup is straightforward. Anyone who is familiar with setting up Pure Storage can set it up with Actifio in the mix. Anyone familiar with Actifio can integrate it with any back-end storage. Actifio runs, in most scenarios, as a virtual machine. We use whatever storage the hypervisor gives us. Setting up Pure Storage to present the storage to a hypervisor, like VMware or Hyper-V, is run of the mill, and the most common use case there is. 

It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point.

If I want a product which has reliability and high speed, and Pure Storage is the first name that comes out of my mouth. I recommend them.

These days, most storage products, with a few exceptions, are simple to operate. The market has made a huge emphasis on simplicity over the last five to seven years. I don't know that Pure Storage is simpler than anybody else's product, but it certainly is in the category of simple and easy to use.

We sell a SaaS offering of the storage to our customers. We use the storage as our main storage and also as our backup storage.

You don't have to go and buy your own storage. You can get your storage access within two minutes, which is great, because it is a lot quicker for our team to get the servers up and running. It provides access to the systems that we want to give access to.

• Cheaper
• Quicker
• Easy to access if we need to obtain backups.
• It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything.

This may be available, but we are not using it. I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used.

I have not had it go down yet, so stability is good.

I have never had a problem getting more storage, so scalability seems pretty good.

The initial setup is straightforward. Though, I have now passed this task onto the tech team to do.

Speak to an account manager and get the right deal.

I would definitely look at Pure Storage. 

We use it for virtualization.

We have complete control over it. 

We partner with Oracle on stuff, so we have support on it. Before, we have had issues with support from our other vendors. It has been a major improvement from a support perspective.

The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. We've run Fibre Channel for our historical storage, and going from Fibre Channel to InfiniBand connected has blown up the amount of traffic that we can do. Now, we can support 40Gs per link, and there are eight links. When we went from being able to support four Fibre Channels at eight gigs a piece. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels.

The most valuable feature is the speed of it. It is much faster than anything that we can get from similar competitors.

The solution helps to simplify storage.

Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics.

The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it.

We haven't scaled yet, but we're planning to. We do upgrades constantly.

It's very scalable and easy to do.

We moved from an infrastructure that was owned by another team, so we needed something to move our own stuff onto. We originally tried some hyperconverged solutions from Dell EMC, but they didn't perform well at all. It took years to get that together and when we ran our benchmarks on them, and we decided they were not good. So, we immediately turned eyes to Oracle who is a big provider for my whole company, not just my team, and talked to them about what they had that was going to suit us, and they pointed us towards Pure Storage. As soon as we had a proof of concept and were testing it, we decided to run with it.

The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case.

We used Oracle.

I would recommend Pure Storage.

We investigated some flash storage implementations for it and based off of the way that the appliance works the added cost of flash doesn't scale with the performance that you get with it, so it hits on our middle ground. It works perfectly for us. We don't need to look at any type of flash storage.

We use Pure Storage for most of our databases, as well as for other application binaries.

Our biggest database is the Oracle ERP. Right now, it is around nine terabytes. It has grown from four terabytes in the last five to six years. Initially, we were worried because most of our functions and processes got slower. We thought we might have to add more  infrastructure and upscale it from a CPU perspective. Then, we moved to Pure Storage, and we suddenly saw some of the processes, which were running slowly, sped up automatically.

We have also seen a reduction in the latency.

The most interesting feature is the speed at which it executes I/O. After moving to Pure Storage, I have noticed that our databases are considerably faster.

Our performance has improved by at least four times.

The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything. We have shared APPL_TOP on our Oracle ERP, which would require an NFS type of storage. So, we had to resort to building our own NFS VM, then attach Pure Storage to it, and have it go through the server. This didn't really serve our purpose, as it's a lot slower because it's now going through a VM installer NFS server.

While we know Pure Storage supports snapshots, we haven't been able to implement databases or replication using them.

It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it.

It looks like it is scaling pretty well.

I have not used the tech support.

We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Use Pure Storage for databases. I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray as the storage for our virtual servers and our reporting databases.

FlashArray has allowed us to go all flash. There is no more worrying about how many IOPS our different storage tiers have and trying to buy more disks just to get higher performance. We simply don't worry about performance.

The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible.

I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity. 

Our VDI with VMware Horizon include 100 VM for office and graphics desktop with nVidia GRID, the low latency and the high deduplication permit to reduce storage footprint, power consumption and to increase the consolidation on few VMware Host.

We have consolidated all the VSI (55 VM) and VDI (100 VM) in the same storage, improving performance and overall virtual desktop acceptance.

The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression.

We liked the non-disruptive downgrade from FA-420 (POC) to FA-405 in production and the non-disruptive upgrade from FA-405 to M20.

Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved. The VVol support is just released in GA.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

There were no stability issues. It is always on from the first LUN deployment to VSphere.

There were no scalability issues. NDU and NDD were very simple, without interruption or performance decrease for its cluster nature, active/passive.

Customer Service:

I would rate the customer service as very high.

Technical Support:

They are all skilled. They upgraded the storage firmware from remote every time we asked via a phone appointment.

We have used 3PAR for VDI and NetApp for VSI. The new solution has a very low price/performance ratio. With the price of the SSD upgrade of our NetApp FA3220 and the one year maintenance of the old 3PAR, we bought Pure Storage with a three-year support agreement.

The initial setup was very simple. In two hours, we started to use Storage vMotion.

The product was implemented directly by the vendor’s team and they are very skilled.

In two years, we will start to save. With their Evergreen Storage subscription, we can enjoy protection of our investment.

Everything is included, so there is very simple licensing. F

We evaluated EMC XtremIO and NetApp FAS.

Test it in your environment in a PoC or in a Try-and-Buy to check your deduplication and compression ratios.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

IPv6 is now fully supported, Windows Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) is added in the latest firmware as supports for Docker APKG 1.0.1 and Dynamic Volume in the Purity Container Engine.

SAN solution for Tier 1 storage for VMware, Exchange, SQL, and physical servers; trying to fit as much production load as possible on them.

The speed to deploy or move VMs is ridiculous. By migrating our important systems to the Pure arrays, we have removed any storage issues and questions when there is a problem of "is it the storage?"

The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive. The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size.

• Ease of setup
• Migration to it
• Upgrading
• Support responsiveness
• Kick-butt mobile app
• On box analytics and vCenter plug-in
• The ease of creating a snapshot for testing or recovery.

I cannot stress enough the stability, speed, and awesome deduplication and compression rates. The amount of data we have moved to it has allowed us to remove units four times the size. The mobile app is kick-butt and support has been topnotch.

Mainly, just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI.

None.

No issues.

It has been great; easy to work with to resolve cases or perform upgrades.

Yes, plainly put, it sucked and we wanted to get to a solution that was fast, easy to maintain, and reliable.

We had issues with it not handling the load and could never trust that it was serving data fast enough to not be causing issues.

Easy as pie.

In-house.

• Speed
• Time saved in management
• Availability
• No fingers pointing at storage as an issue.

It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for. I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue.

We looked at Nimble and EMC.

I never have to worry about its performance impacting the firm. It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.

I had high expectations and they have met or exceeded each one of them. It was an exciting day when I finally got them up and running.

Production storage for a lot of virtual machines. As a service provider, it is very important to have something with this much performance.

• Cuts VM deployment down to seconds. 
• Cuts latency under MS. 
• Amazing performance. 
• Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle.

• Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry.
• The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive. 

I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it.