Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We are a reseller of Pure Storage FlashArray. Our customers use it for virtualization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

It has helped to simplify storage because it has a very easy graphical user interface.

Our clients see a reduction in total cost of ownership by around 40%. We have also found that the total cost of ownership of flash is lower than SSD implementations. I track a whole bunch of business markers on the cost of components. I do a lot of cost analysis for customers and I get pricing from all the component manufacturers; Ingram Micro, Toshiba, Seagate and then I compare the pricing. I do that almost every week. I constantly see that it's cheaper than SSD implementations.

The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward.

The performance analytics are moderate. It's not the best performance platform out there but it's the easiest to operate.

They need to find another way of doing data protection, RAID is not working very well. It takes performance away from the SSD.

I would like to have multi-cloud integration.

Latency needs a bit of work. It's pretty good but it needs to get below 300 microseconds. Then the data reduction would be excellent. On average I see twelve to one data reduction.

It's very stable.

It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that. 

I've used their technical support and would say that it's excellent. I would give them a ten out of ten. 

My clients know it's time to switch solutions because I run a proof of concepts where I test the manufacturer's equipment. If I find something that is a big difference then I let them know about it. Cost, performance, tools, and ease of use are all factors that we take into consideration when choosing to switch. We also chose this solution because of the Evergreen upgrade and the ease of use.

I also install Pure Storage for my clients. The initial setup is very straightforward and very simple. It takes me an hour to set one up.

My client's return on investment with Pure Storage is in about 7.3 months.

We also looked at Nimble, which is now owned by HPE, and E8, Dell EMC, and NetApp platform.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Not a ten because nobody's a ten. We haven't achieved perfection yet.

I would advise someone considering this or a similar solution to push Pure Storage for multi-cloud integration.

I use Pure Storage for multiple clients. One is a client related to postal services. We are using a database to manage six petabytes. 

The main benefit of Pure Storage is performance. We have critical applications running on FlashArray without any noticeable impact on performance. I can immediately see the difference between Pure Storage and the other arrays I've used. 

It has optimized the storage footprint, delivering savings to our clients by drastically reducing the cost of infrastructure and maintenance. 

Deduplication is an excellent feature. I also like the NAS and support.

The latest release contains bugs that shouldn't be in a production environment. Two incidents impacted our client, including hardware-related bugs. They need to be more cautious in testing before they release.

We have used Pure Storage for two years.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray nine out of 10. We have reduced downtime by 30 to 50 percent. 

We can upgrade Pure Storage without any latency problems.

I rate Pure Storage support. The response times are good, but they use third-party support. They come and work on hardware issues. Support is available when a client needs it. 

Positive

I have worked with EMC and IBM arrays. Pure Storage is simpler to manage than other arrays. If you already have an array but you don't have the budget for Pure Storage, I wouldn't recommend migrating. 

Pure Storage FlashArray isn't completely flash. It's a semi-hybrid that combines SSDs and SAS disks. IBM's flash array is also good in terms of performance. Pure Storage and IBM have comparable conformance. 

We had some complications configuring the NAS, and some features did not work for our environment. We achieved ready integration in one domain, but we had two domains in NDRRS. The deployment took less than a day, but we had to complete all the prerequisites. If you are using NAS, you must implement many things before configuring it and working with other teams. It takes maybe a week to complete the array configuration and bring it into production. One person is enough, and Pure Storage doesn't require maintenance.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case is SAP. 

Its ease of use has allowed us to stand up landscapes faster.

The most valuable feature is its upgradeability.

Pure Storage helps to streamline storage because of its simplicity.

What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it. 

We have never had an issue.

We just doubled it in size it was painless.

The technical support is fantastic and proactive.

Our previous platform did not support SAP.

The driver for us to implement Pure Storage in our SAP landscape was that it was SAP certified.  Additionally, it had really good numbers and reviews.

We plugged it in, and in an hour, we were using it. It is very straightforward and simple.

We deployed it in-house.

We did not displace any other technology with the Pure Storage purchase so it's doesn't have a traditional dollar ROI.  From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things.  

Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs.

We looked at Pure Storage, EMC and HPE. We chose Pure Storage because of its innovation.

I would recommend the product.

I'm a pre-sales architect. I architect, and I sell them as a partner with Pure Storage on the VAR side. Our customers use it for storage, mainly block-based storage and virtualization storage. Some solutions have both block and file storage, and some solutions only have file storage from Pure. 

It provides additional protection against ransomware threats. If you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or some kind of malicious attack, you can revert your data back in time to a previous version or snapshot.

One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table.

Scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades are also valuable. They're not using flash just for your tier one storage needs. They're recommending flash for data protection and archive backup, which is the way to go.

If you get the gold support, which is what I sell and recommend for my customers, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades, which is another feather in Pure's cap. They make several claims that once you move to Pure Storage, you can take your team of five dedicated storage admins and trim it down to just one person. Their mantra is getting customers out of the game of managing storage and letting the vendor manage the storage. They want to see their customers just consume storage. They have non-disruptive upgrades. You just set up the software and hardware and just consume the storage. They're continuously looking at the dial-homes, the logs that are automatically sent, and fingerprinting potential issues before they're even a problem. That cuts down on a lot of support tickets the customers have to open up. They'll proactively open up tickets when they see something in their analytics on a particular customer's array and recognize that one of their hosts might have a certain HBA with a fault or a bug. They reach out and open a ticket. So, you get your system upgrade, patched, or whatever is needed to resolve the potential problem.

I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. They can work on the price to make it more competitive.

Its stability is very good. I have not heard any of my customers having issues with FlashArray. It is very solid. They claim 99.9999% availability. I haven't had any problems with outages with my customers. 

They have another product called FlashBlade, which is a different type of storage appliance that Pure does for unstructured files. FlashBlade doesn't rank as high in reliability as their flagship FlashArray product does. The FlashBlade product is a notch below. It is a newer product or code, and I have heard of some issues with it.

Its scalability is very good. It scales up instead of out, which is typical for a block-based appliance. It is very easy to add expansion shelves or disks. You don't need to worry about shuffling drives around and creating RAID groups. This is all legacy stuff. Most vendors are now the same, but I really think that Pure led the effort for non-disruptive upgrades. They coined the term, and other vendors have since followed suit. They're the leader in the industry for that.

Their regular support is good. With gold support, Pure's support personnel takes care of both software and hardware upgrades. The only difference between free support and gold support is that you don't get free hardware upgrades with free support. If I understand the offering correctly, software upgrades are still included. 

If we're just talking about Pure Storage, it is straightforward and simple. You can get it up in minutes as opposed to hours that some of the other solutions take. Compared to its competitive solutions, Pure is very well known for its simplicity and ease of use, especially during setup and initialization.

A single 2U appliance from Pure Storage for block-based workloads, including rack stack and initialization, is ready to be provisioned to your servers in an hour or an hour and a half to the max. It is definitely straightforward.

If you get the gold support, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades. So, you don't have to manage storage. Pure takes care of that.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing.

They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance.

I would advise others to chose well. Prepare to have extra time on your hands to focus on your business's core needs and outcomes and not having to worry about the day-to-day maintenance of your storage appliance.

All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions. They might ask for customization level, but I think Pure is doing the right thing by its set-it-and-forget-it approach. Most customers don't need to fine-tune and customize their all-flash storage appliances anymore. It is not a legacy spinning disk appliance.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of 10. Its pricing sometimes plays a big part where customers might go in a different direction, and that's the only reason why I'm not giving it a 10.

I use Pure Storage FlashArray to provide LUNs or volumes for end users who want to work on a database for zoning, enabling them to operate effectively with end-user arrays.

The device gives us a lot of protection in maintaining our data in the storage. It gives high throughput across many locations.

We have faster data processing with low file consumption. This includes multi-terabyte databases in memory with read-write speed four times faster than any HDD. 

Pure Storage FlashArray offers numerous valuable features, such as low latency and high throughput. It has significant data protection in the form of snapshots. It allows data portability around the cloud and on-premises devices. Performance backup is also a key feature.

The support that we received from the vendor during upgrades has been very good. They instructed us very well through the remote connection.

I have worked with two types of Pure Storage FlashArray. So far, I have not found any issues. There is not a great need for improvement, but better pricing could be beneficial.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for three years.

It is stable. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

There is always downtime when working with production servers. I have to plan downtime of three or four hours when launching new servers or logging into new servers with new LUNs. If a lot of people are logging into a FlashArray server, it will require downtime if we have to modify anything.

It is scalable. I would rate the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

It is being used at a single location. We have 30 people using it.

Their support is too good. As soon as I log a case with them, they are always available. They are very fast. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have worked with different storage boxes such as Quantum, NetApp, and HPE, but they are different. They are block storage. Pure Storage provides a unique compatibility when working with LUNs and volumes, offering a totally different SAN product. It is also easier than the others.

The initial setup was straightforward and took about 40 minutes.

The solution has saved us time and resources. It has saved about 20% of my time.

I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved.

I would recommend Pure Storage FlashArray to anyone because it offers great resilience, high throughput, and excellent storage provision to users on SAN boxes. It simplifies the process of zoning or taking backups.

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

We use Pure Storage FlashArray for storage allocation, DR, replication, and performance. We are migrating both servers and storage to Pure Storage.

It has reduced downtime significantly, and the self-service upgrade feature allows us to handle upgrades smoothly through the console.

It has helped decrease our organization’s storage footprint. There is about 15% reduction.

The snapshot feature is valuable. It protects data based on the policy. We can schedule snapshots and have unalterable data. It reduces management efforts.

Vendor support is good. After raising a case, we get a response within an hour or two.

I have been primarily working with storage and have not fully explored other areas, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to performance reporting.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for one year. I have been using Hitachi Storage and Sun Storage on all legacy devices. We are migrating all these servers and storage to Pure Storage FlashArray.

Our experience with the stability of FlashArray has been excellent. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it an eight.

The scalability of the solution is quite good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

For a P2 issue, the SLA is 4 hours. They were able to resolve the issue within two hours. Just a month ago, we faced an issue, and they were able to resolve that within an hour. We got support immediately.

The technical support provided by Pure Storage is exceptional, and I would rate it a ten out of ten.

Positive

We have been handling all the legacy environments, such as Hitachi USP V/VM, Hitachi AMS, Sun StorageTek, and EMC. They all were at the end of life and out of support. We have more than 1,000 devices and servers. Our servers were also out of service and end of life. We planned to migrate all the servers and data into Pure Storage as single devices. Instead of using multiple storage solutions, we wanted to use a single one and move to Pure Storage. We also had to deal with different vendors for support. We wanted to have a single vendor.

With these legacy devices, we were not getting any support. When we had any hardware failure or some issues, we were not getting a solution. For any hardware failures, we were not getting the parts. That is why we thought of migrating to Pure Storage.

The deployment took about two months, primarily due to planning and the time taken for customer approval processes.

We are primarily using it on-premises, but we have plans to move to the cloud over the next one or two years.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a seven out of ten.

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.

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.