Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

In our environment, we use Pure Storage FlashArray for VMware storage. We have a few hosts that are used for creating virtual machines (VMs) and provide storage to them. We also use it for providing storage to databases.

Using Pure Storage FlashArray has reduced downtime significantly. With its replication feature, the downtime is almost negligible.

Pure Storage FlashArray is much better than the traditional storage we had. It is good for reducing downtime.

We also have some traditional storage tools that are being used in our environment. We have some servers that are still using traditional storage. I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be much better than traditional storage because it has a GUI interface. It makes the process of allocating the storage much easier, and most activities are automated. It is like clicking a button for every task.

I like its simplicity. It is very user-friendly.

Currently, Pure Storage FlashArray is mostly being used for high-performance environments that have low latency requirements and high workloads. For environments that do not have such high requirements, it could be costly. It would be beneficial to have a separate pricing point for environments with lower performance requirements or less workload.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately 1.5 years.

I have not observed any crashes or issues with Pure Storage FlashArray. It has been running smoothly without any stability problems.

In terms of scalability, we have enough storage allocated through Pure Storage FlashArray, and I believe it would not present any difficulties if more scaling is required.

The quality of support is good. The response time is good. They do not take much time to respond. They ensure someone is always available to address any issues. There is no leniency in their work. I find them good in terms of response.

Positive

I have used some traditional storage tools, such as VPLEX XIO. The difficulty there was that provisioning and reclaiming storage was very tedious and required a lot of human effort. Using Pure Storage FlashArray has made this process much simpler and efficient. I am happy to use it.

When I started using Pure Storage FlashArray, it was already being used within the environment. It was easy to learn and use. It only takes a short time to understand how to use it efficiently.

It does not require much maintenance. They do make frequent updates and the upgrades smooth. We can do the upgrades without any downtime. There is no impact on the environment when the upgrades are made. So far, it has been good.

I have not worked with other Flash solutions. I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be a reliable product. It has features for backup and restore and it integrates well with cloud environments. For high-performance environments, it is cost-efficient and user-friendly.

I have not spent much time using the dashboard that we get with Pure Storage FlashArray, but I know that if we have any performance issues, we can monitor them through the dashboard.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten. I have been using it, and it has been performing well enough. It has helped me with my work. It has made my work much easier, but there is always scope for improvement.

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 use Pure Storage FlashArray for storage provisioning.

The single pane of glass is good for management. It has improved our company, but I have been working with this solution for only six months, so it is hard to measure the improvement. However, I know that our usage has only increased. We recently purchased two more models, so my company must be seeing some benefits in continuing with this product.

The best feature is that it is easy to learn and use. We can easily do various tasks related to storage provisioning. We do not have to struggle.

The speed can always be improved.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for six months, but my organization has been using it for about five years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability. It has helped us with uptime.

It is scalable. I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability. The upgrades are easy.

The whole organization is using the storage, but we have only five people on the storage team working with it.

We are facing some issues and working with their support to resolve them. Their support is good. We have an account manager, and we can easily raise a case. They also have a good knowledge base.

Positive

It is easy to deploy. It does not require any maintenance from our side.

I would recommend Pure Storage FlashArray. I would rate it 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.

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for all of our SAN storage for our VMware environment

The solution has benefited our company because of the ease of use and the performance and reliability.

The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level.

The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately eight months.

The solution has been highly stable and we have not had an issue.

I rate the stability of Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

We have one person that using the solution to manage it.

We do not plan to increase our usage.

I rate the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

I have not used support often but my experience was good.

I rate the support of Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

Positive

I was not there when the initial setup was done, but we recently we swapped the controller and it went smoothly.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a good investment.

The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive.

My advice to others is for them to plan and try the solution out.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.

We are in the health industry and use this product for block storage. We have VMware hosted on our Pure FlashArrays and we have a Citrix environment. We also have Oracle running as our SQL database. Our VMs run from Pure.

We have also done a couple of PoCs with the Blade solution for using the file share system.

One of the requirements from our developers and test and development team is that from time to time, they want to clone the production environment. We are able to accomplish this within seconds, using a script. This is one of the best parts that I have seen. This feature is not available with other storage solutions.

Performance-wise, it is giving us a very good result.

We are happy with the data compression and deduplication capabilities.

The interface is user-friendly and very easy to use.

Taking a snapshot and cloning data is very easy to do. We can create a script and it will clone the environment. Similarly, we can replicate the environment from one site to another site, and we can restore the environment where we choose.

The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard. For example, I can see all of the utilization and it has port monitoring capabilities. With other storage vendors, multiple tools are required for this, and there is an additional charge.

Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases.

Integration with VMware tools can be improved.

The reporting can be better.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for between five and six years.

This is a very stable product and we haven't had any downtime. We use this product extensively and I have seen that we have a 90% I/O load in our environment.

This is a flexible system that is easy to scale.

We initially purchased two FlashArray systems. One of them was small or midsized, and the other was high-end. Then, later, we started upgrading. As per the Everygreen contract, we get free upgrades. Every three years, we get a new controller upgrade, free of cost.

We have also upgraded our capacity and now everything is on the X series. We have four FlashArrays in total and all of our database users are connected to them. The infrastructure and database teams are directly involved with it.

The response from the technical support team is very good. We have not found any difficulties with their ability or engagement.

We have worked with solutions from HPE, IBM, and Hitachi. We don't work with any of these vendors now. We switched because Pure storage is much easier to manage. It is also more stable and it is very easy to work with.

For example, there is no shutdown procedure. If you want to power down the environment then you just unplug the power and that's it. Once you reconnect the power, it is up. With legacy storage, there is a shutdown procedure. You have to shut down the host, then the SAN switch, then the storage.

With legacy storage, there is also a procedure to bring it up. You have to power up the enclosures, then the controller, then the SAN environment, and then the server. We had to follow a long set of steps with more dependencies.

After a power outage, the storage devices from the other vendors did not always come back online. For example, we implemented a PoC with the IBM FlashSystem and a power outage occurred. The management tool crashed and did not come back up. We had to wait for IBM engineers to come and fix the issue. Whereas, with Pure, when the power came back on, the system came back online immediately.

The other storage systems were not as user-friendly. For example, I had a Hitachi G600 and I wanted to extend the block capacity. I had to spend between 30 minutes and one hour to complete it. It's quite complex. With Pure, that would be taken care of in seconds by going to the console, selecting the volume, and performing the reset.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy.

The day that we received the box, we unpacked it, racked it, and configured it. The next day, we were able to utilize it for production.

Upgrading the hardware, such as performing a controller upgrade, is a seamless process. We are planning to do a major upgrade and it will be done on the fly.

We engaged Pure to assist us with our implementation, and our experience with them was very good. The technical team came onsite for the deployment. If we have any problems then they will return to our site to help.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance.

You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced.

We completed a PoC with most of the leading brands.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that I can recommend Pure. We were the first customer for Pure Storage in the UAE. It's stable, reliable, and you can trust it.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Pure FlashArray is that it's user-friendly, easy to manage, and very flexible. You can scale out and it's easy to upgrade. The upgrade process is not complex and it can be done on the fly, without any disruption.

My main complaint is that the garbage collection mechanism draws heavily on the resources. They have integration with VMware tools, although they can improve it slightly, and I would also like to see some improvements in the reporting.

We have been using it heavily and all of our people are happy with it. This includes the DBA team. Whenever we have a requirement of it, it's very easy and it can be done within seconds. With our previous storage solutions, we had to spend more time looking into problems and they were not user-friendly.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use our Pure Storage FlashArray system for all storage allocations and management tasks, accessed through its standard graphical user interface.

My team is responsible for operating and maintaining our storage applications, including hardware replacement and vendor coordination with Pure Storage. The implementation of Pure Storage FlashArray has been successful due to its reliability and user-friendly interface, which has minimized disruptions and allowed for efficient workload management.

Pure Storage FlashArray's single pane of glass simplifies administration, particularly for testing, offering benefits for all users.

The system's wide range of configuration options allows for the use of various products and adaptable cost structures for different storage scenarios. Pure Storage also presented opportunities for business growth and expanded access, with the primary benefits being its performance and user-friendly interface.

Pure Storage FlashArray simplifies maintenance and management with its intuitive GUI, making storage allocation and other processes easy to understand, even for beginners. This ease of use is a significant benefit throughout the entire implementation process.

From my limited experience with Pure Storage FlashArray, I haven't encountered any significant areas needing improvement. However, enhanced documentation and beginner-friendly guidelines would benefit users with less configuration experience.

I have been using it for almost three years.

I would rate the stability of Pure Storage FlashArray eight out of ten.

Pure Storage offers a wide range of configurable products that can help expand our infrastructure to suit various scenarios, providing business growth opportunities.

I would rate the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray eight out of ten.

Customer service is quite good.

Positive

At the time we were moving to Pure Storage FlashArray, we were also  using  vendors like Dell EMC and Hitachi. I'm not clear why the business chose Pure Storage as well for the storage deployment, as I am more into the administrative and supporting side.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray eight out of ten.

We have deployed Pure Storage FlashArray in various data centers across multiple countries and testing environments. We have over 1,000 users in our organization.

Pure Storage FlashArray requires maintenance to avoid issues.

I recommend Pure Storage FlashArray due to its simplicity and attractive features. There's no particular reason not to recommend it.