Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We have FlashArray and FlashBlade. We're using FlashArray primarily for VMFS storage tools for the VMware environment.

We have its latest version. It is on-premises, but we operate a private cloud.

We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin.

We do a lot of data replication as well, and the replication features are all easy to set up. The networking controls for setting up interfaces and sub-interfaces are also easy to manage.

We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform. The idea is that they would run a basic NFS or CIF share from the controllers. FlashBlade is the powerhouse for File and Object storage, but if you don't need all that power, a lightweight file function would make FlashArrays more versatile.

The other thing is multiple key support for encryption. The standard solution encrypts the whole array, but we also have certain tenants that use dedicated LUNs. So, it would be nice if, in addition to just supporting the VMware stuff, we could have a per LUN key. Even better would be interfacing with an external Key Management Server (KMS) so that tenants could manage their keys.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It is very stable. There are no stability issues. The bugs we've encountered have been nuisances or minor things, such as how some metrics are reported, but there hasn't been anything that has affected our service.

It is very easy to scale. We have about 4,000 users.

They are very good, but we are a large enough customer. We always deal with the same people, so it's not like we're going into the tier one service desk.

We previously used Dell EqualLogic. It was going under life, and it was just a legacy spinning disk with an SSD cache. So, the main reason for switching was just a tech refresh and an upgrade.

It is very straightforward and very simple.

We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it.

If you need a high-performance storage appliance that is easy to install and maintain, you pretty much can't go wrong.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of 10.

Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature.

Pure Storage FlashArray is painful in certain areas, and because of this, in my company, we wish it was made to be a bit more user-friendly, especially in a VMware environment, so that it can be made less of a cumbersome process. I don't know if its less user-friendly nature in a VMware environment is indicative of some of the encryption features and other stuff of Pure Storage FlashArray. Pure Storage FlashArray would just be easier to manage if it didn't have to jump through so many hoops.

I have experience with Pure Storage FlashArray. My company is a customer of Pure Storage FlashArray.

It is a stable solution. As long as you don't accidentally cut the power off in your company, the product remains stable, making it pretty reliable.

It is a scalable solution.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a nine to ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of the product is complex.

Pure Storage FlashArray's team had to install the product in our company.

Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a solution that can be described as a product that functions amazingly fast in terms of speed once it is up and running.

In our company, we only semi-manage the product. Three people who look after server infrastructure, networking infrastructure, and virtual infrastructure in my company look after the product's maintenance.

I rate the overall product an eight to nine out of ten. I wish the product wasn't cumbersome to do certain things and should provide a little more flexibility.

We use it just for test purposes in our organization.

Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool. We don't use any special features in our organization.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for about six years. Also, I am using Pure Storage FA-420. I am a customer of the solution.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I can't comment on the solution's scalability since we use it in a test environment. From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable. It is only me who is using the solution in our company.

The solution's initial setup process was easy. It may look like a lot of work, but it is easy.

The solution is expensive.

It is an old storage we use for testing, and our production storage is IBM. It will be five years old since we are using the solution. We are also planning to buy a new storage solution. So, we are looking out into the market to see what we can buy.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it since I trust it is a great storage solution.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

At the moment, we're migrating our complete infrastructure onto Pure Storage. All of our storage is going onto it.

We are using its latest version.

I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is.

Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations. 

In terms of features, we are really happy with it. We haven't had it long enough to give feedback on that.

I have been using this solution for a year now.

So far, it has been brilliant. We haven't really had it long enough to judge it.

It seems pretty good, but we haven't really tested it.

We have about a hundred users. We will possibly increase its usage. It will be done slowly.

It has been really easy to use. Their support has been very helpful.

We were using another solution. We switched because it was very old, and we were looking at something that was an SSD. 

I was not involved in the initial setup. For its deployment, we had a couple of engineers.

It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure.

We evaluated Pure and NetApp, and we eventually went with Pure. A positive point with NetApp was the price.

If it's financially viable for you and you can afford it, it's worth it.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We use the private on-premise deployment model. Our primary use case of this solution is for virtual machines. We just use it as storage for our vCenter environment.

It has improved my organization in the way that we have high reliability and faster access to our data.

It has improved our IT organization in the way that we are able to provide systems to our customers quickly and provide high availability and reliability for their applications. 

We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver was speed. The joint solution has helped our organization through speed of delivery and speed of applications.

The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution. 

In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption.

It's highly stable. It's one of our biggest successes. 

It's been really easy to expand storage with no downtime. It's one of the things we like about it. 

Their technical support is great. 

We knew we needed to switch to this solution because the industry is going away from spinning disks. We were on spinning disks, and the whole industry is going away from that. 

We are still using IBM but we are not happy with it. IBM has taken old technology and tried to make it new. Pure has started from the ground up and built it.

The integration was straightforward. 

Pure Storage did the integration for us. 

Our costs are around $100,000.

We also evaluated Nimble, EMC, and HPE 3PAR. We ended up going with Pure because of the architecture, speed, and support.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for its reliability, speed, and support. The support is awesome.

Our customers primarily use Pure Storage for virtualization, whether it is VMware or Hyper-V. They choose Pure Storage for its high-performance, low-latency, and reliable all-flash arrays, which are essential for efficiently running virtualized workloads, including critical applications, databases, and virtual machines.

I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity. I value its simplicity and artificial intelligence monitoring. It also integrates seamlessly with major platforms like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Microsoft SQL, while offering tight integration with backup software for faster restores. This connectivity promotes cyber resilience and can be leveraged for disaster recovery solutions.

I don't see any major issues with Pure Storage, but one thing to note is that Pure Storage can be seen as a premium product, and other vendors are catching up in terms of performance and features. However, overall, the feature set and performance are excellent.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for two and a half years.

It is highly stable, especially if you follow recommended patching and software upgrades. Pure Storage offers an officially published uptime guarantee, ensuring device stability, which is legally binding.

Pure Storage is very scalable. Even the smallest model can be successfully upgraded all the way to the largest model, which is a feature I haven't seen with other solutions.

Pure Storage's tech support is excellent. They use AI effectively, and their support team is highly reliable and responsive. Our customers have experienced no issues with their support.

Setting up Pure Storage is incredibly easy. You just plug it in, connect it to the network, and start building your storage – it is that simple. Deployment takes less than a day. Deployment is straightforward and typically manageable by a single person or resource. However, when lifting heavier equipment, like the larger Pure Storage units, it is recommended to have two people, but the rest of the setup can be accomplished via servers. Maintenance is straightforward. Once it is connected to the internet and secure communication is enabled, it sends monitoring data to Kubernetes and artificial intelligence in the cloud, providing early warnings of potential issues. This cloud-based AI can often assess the health of your device better than you can.

Our customers see a return on investment and value for their money with Pure Storage. They measure it through methods like net present value and comparisons to the weighted accumulated cost of capital, which provide a robust financial assessment.

It has a flexible, pay-as-you-go option.The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations, but this is the only major downside.

My advice for new users is to not be afraid to start using it from day one, but take the time to educate yourself on all the valuable features available to make the most of it. Since it is a significant investment, ensure you manage and protect the asset effectively. Overall, I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten.