Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We use the solution for virtual machine storage. Any virtual machine that we run is stored in Pure Storage. Everything from databases to applications runs off it.

The product provides ease of management. It has a lower cost of ownership. The tool has reduced our power consumption.

We use the metro cluster. It is very intuitive and easy to set up. The data reduction technology is pretty good. We see quite a good reduction in our data. It’s probably in line with other vendors. The performance is excellent. As a storage platform, the solution has been good and very reliable. It's quite difficult to find anything negative to say about it.

There should be improvements in internal data management. If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it. The vendor has said that it would be fixed in future releases.

I have been using the solution for 20 months. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The scalability is excellent. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The support is okay.

Positive

The deployment process was very straightforward. It was up and running in an hour. We need two engineers to maintain the product.

The price is reasonable. We don’t pay to license any of the features. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

I also use Dell EMC and XtremIO.

We do routine upgrades. It’s not that often. It happens every six months. I will recommend the tool to others. Pure Storage has simplified our operations and released our engineers to do other functions. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The tool provides storage to new servers and maintains provision storage volumes like creating new servers for Windows and Linux, which are the system administrations of the storage system.

We have hundreds of servers that use the tool for the storage of Oracle and SQL databases. It also provides tier-one storage for systems and production servers.

The tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC.

I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for the past three years.

I would give a nine out of ten for the stability of the tool.

I would rate the scalability of the tool as nine out of ten. The solution is very scalable. There are 12 users of the tool in our organization. We have no plans to increase the current usage unless we merge with another company.

I would give a ten out of ten for the technical support of the tool. The solution has got good support and has always been able to help us.

Positive

I have previously used EMC PowerMax. I chose Pure Storage FlashArray because it was of lower cost. Also, we wanted to keep competition between the vendors.

The implementation of the tool is straightforward.

The company must be having ROI but I am not sure since I am not involved in strategic decisions. I do not have access to the metrics to analyze the ROI.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I am using the latest version of the solution and it is deployed on-premises. The tool is easy to implement and does not require much training. Moreover, it has good support.

I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much.

We primarily use the solution for storing data for applications. 

The user interface is very good. It is easy to navigate. 

The deployment is very easy.

It is scalable.

The solution is very reliable.

Technical support is helpful. 

The pricing could be better. It is a bit expensive. 

I've been using the solution for three or four years. 

It's a stable, reliable product. It isn't buggy or glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. 

It is scalable and easy to extend. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. It's very easy. 

We have about four engineers using the solution. 

We increase the storage capacity, however, it depends on the future application usage. 

Technical support is very good. They are helpful and responsive. 

Positive

I've also worked with Dell, which is a bit harder to set up. 

The setup was very straightforward. It's very easy. We find it even easier to set up than Dell. The deployment takes about a few hours or so. You mount it on the rack and power it up and do some configurations to set it up for storage. 

We were able to handle the setup ourselves with the help of a local partner. 

I haven't looked into ROI. It isn't part of my scope. 

It's a costly solution. It is not cheap. 

There is no subscription fee. There is just one initial fee.

We are using an older version of the solution, not necessarily the latest. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I would recommend the solution for its capabilities, however, the price is too high.

Pure Storage is located in manufacturing plants. Basically, we have VMware clusters and those clusters are supported by Pure Storage, and those clusters are intended to support those manufacturing plants.

The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using. They have excellent rates of deduplication and compression. To offer 20 terabytes of storage, we just need maybe five terabytes of physical hardware. That's great. At the time, there was a notable difference as it was the only vendor with those numbers in terms of deduplication and compression in real-time.

Today other vendor software offers something similar, however, when it was just Pure, it was the best thing. I want to check again, however, usually, we use the Gartner charts to make decisions and start looking for different vendors and maybe the vendors we want to test. At the time, Pure was the leader in every aspect in terms of flash arrays and deduplication and all of that.

I don't really have complaints about the solution. It works really well. We are using Pure for something simple, which is just running a small VMware firm. That's why I don't have any other impressions. It works and I'm happy with it. I don't have any problems with the storage we have.

I’m not sure if there are features missing. I'm the one who chooses the technology; however, after the implementation, I don't have too much contact. I'm not in the operations, I'm not working with the console, creating or putting up a launch. I'm not doing that kind of operation work, so I'm not sure what might be missing.

When we start having some issues with transformer attacks and security threats, I had to contact Pure to ask about software patches. With other vendors, they contact us immediately. They would say, "Hey, we had these vulnerabilities. We need to install these patches, and this is super urgent. And we need to do it now." Yet, with Pure, in a couple of situations, I can remember we tried to go to them and send an email or open a support case to ask them, "Hey, I'm pretty sure you are aware of these threats. Are there any patches or updates available, so we can protect those systems?" There were patches available, however, for some reason, we had to ask. It was not proactive communication.

I want them to initiate contact and have automatic requests for their clients to get the patching. Especially if there are critical security issues. I would expect them to contact us immediately and tell us, "Hey, we identify the security threats, and let's plan together how to implement the security patches or whatever is needed to secure systems."

I've been using the solution for a couple of years. 

It is stable. We only had one issue during the last two years and the support team was able to help us really fast. For the most part it is reliable and the performance is good.

The solution is scalable. It's modular. You just need to put additional two unit expansions, and that's it.

The data storage is supporting a manufacturing plant. In the end, a lot of people are using those systems. I cannot say a number, however, there is a lot of people. There are probably more than 1000 per each side, considering the 24/7 roles.

Technical support was good. We’ve contacted them multiple times and they were great. They have been helpful every time.

It’s easy to set up and support is excellent. The administration console is super easy to understand and extremely intuitive. Even if you are not a storage expert, you can easily understand what you are doing. I like it - it's not complex at all.

We are just customers.

We have two different deployments. One is located in a big data center, and another two are in smaller remote data centers.

We have multiple data centers. We’re a manufacturing company and we need to keep a physical footprint in almost all our manufacturing plants and some of the branch offices. We try to put almost all of our workloads in the cloud, however, if there's a reason like latency or security or some stuff that prevents us from using the cloud, then that is when we put those systems in local data centers.

I’d advise potential new users to be careful during the scoping phase as some things will take up more room than you might anticipate or be hard to compress. Since this solution uses compression and deduplication, if you have a lot of databases or media files like videos or images, or that kind of information, it is not great when you try to compress and deduplicate. 

We have had some issues with that. One POC was supporting a call center, and this call center is recording the agents' screens as well as the audio of those calls.

That kind of information is extremely bad when you try to compress it. That's why, on that specific storage example, we had capacity issues. That specific application was eating almost all the storage. If you have different information, like application servers, a lot of repeated operating systems, if you have a hundred windows running on precisely the same version, that's great for deduplication and compression. That's something that the pre-sales team from Pure can help with; however, it is important internally to identify all those workloads as that could modify a lot, including what is the result in terms of the estimation of capacity required.

I’d rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray because of the increased demand for high IOPs for some of our internal applications that were required to read and write in faster sway. 

This solution helped our organization a lot to increase the performance of reading and writing in the storage itself.

Our business is in the utility functionality where we are creating and maintaining IT service for our utility sector. We are an electricity and water company where we are consuming a large number of bandwidth regarding the bill cyclings, read and write from the meters in the fields. All of this data is stored in the same storage. Pure Storage FlashArray has helped us to improve the reporting and the billing cycle.

The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic.

I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately three years.

I have found Pure Storage FlashArray to be stable.

Pure Storage FlashArray is scalable. However, I think we are reaching the maximum for the current version of the storage. We are looking for the advanced version, which is the X2 model.

We are a large company and the total number of end-users that are using the solution is approximately 3,000.

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray extensively in our organization. We use it for everything, such as binaries and databases. We plan to increase usage in the future.

When we set up the solution we did not require a lot of support from the teams. The good thing about the support is they can access and upgrade the framework and all other aspects. However, the account managers from Pure Storage are not communicating very well with us. We want to talk to them about what features should be used, use cases, best practices, and other technical discussions. Additionally, we would like to know about the new features, the introduction of new technology in the storage itself. 

It would be nice if they could communicate this information to us.

The support is very good. They always call us for technical upgrades and firmware. If we have any issues they log in and we open a session for them, and they help us. The only issue is the time zone difference between our time zone and their time zone.

I would rate the support from Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of five.

Pure Storage FlashArray was straightforward and easy to set up. The full process took approximately two weeks.

I rate the initial setup of Pure Storage FlashArray a four out of five.

We used a combination of implementation assistance. There was a remote team from Pure Storage and a local team from a general local partner that helped us.

There were three people who did the handling of the deployment. The management of the solution is completed by only one of our teams, only they can handle everything in the installation. There are engineers and architects that are part of the team.

The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support.

We were looking for a FlashArray solution, and at that time we compared the other products in the market. I found that Pure Storage, is a company that focuses only on storage and they are very specialized in this area. I tested the solution, we did a BOC for six months. After we did all the tests for all the scenarios for six months, we were very happy to move to the Pure Storage FlashArray.

We evaluated HP, EMC, and Oracle solutions.

The feature that impressed us with Pure Storage FlashArray was its ease of use and simplicity.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is very simple to use. Many people are looking for a solution from an engineering perspective, they want something very easy to use and that everybody can use it. They want a solution that does not require an expert engineer to operate it. A normal engineer can manage and handle it with ease. Reporting is very good in the storage it gives you an overview of everything, and it is very easy to provision, deprovision, especially when you have a cloud environment. It is easy to provision and deprovision when you have customers.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

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 a contract with Pure Storage, and we use it for VMware and database server storage provisioning.

We have multiple applications in the environment, and we are provisioning from Pure Storage.

The single pane of glass is important for us because we can view all the array details in one place. We can see the details about the capacity, utilized space, available or free space, alerts, and performance in one place. This overview is important.

It did decrease the storage footprint compared to other models and storage, but I do not have the metrics.

It helps to reduce the downtime.

We are not using any replication features. We only have storage provisioning, so the provisioning feature is good. The compression and deduplication are good.

It does not require much improvement. They can maybe improve the file services. The focus is on block storage. They can also include file services such as NAS shares and CIFS shares. There should be provisioning of the file shares from a unified array.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for one year.

There is no lagging or crashing. It is quite stable.

It is good in terms of scalability. We can scale up to a higher number.

I have interacted with their technical support. They were good at providing support when I requested.

Positive

We have different flash array systems from HPE GreenLake. Pure Storage is better than the HPE GreenLake flash array. Performance-wise, Pure Storage is better. The cost of Pure Storage might be high, but I am not sure.

It is on-prem. I do not know about its initial deployment because I was not there at the time of deployment. So, I do not know if its benefits could be realized immediately after the deployment. However, it has been effective in terms of utilization and capacity. We are now planning for different storage and doing the migration from Pure Storage to others because of the EOC limit that we have.

In terms of maintenance, there are firmware updates. We have to schedule a change window and then update the firmware.

It is good. Working with it is easy. Provisioning is smooth and good. The GUI and everything else is good. You can just do training with Pure Storage and get on with your storage tasks.

Overall, I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

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.