Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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 using Pure Storage FlashArray for data protection. We keep our backup data on the solution.

The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management.

Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately one year.

The stability of Pure Storage FlashArray has been stable.

We have had some issues with Pure Storage FlashArray capacity. We were guaranteed capacity which we did not receive.

The solution is scalable, all storage solutions are scalable.

We do not have end users of this solution, but all of our data from the company is going to the Pure Storage FlashArray.

We plan to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

The support from Pure Storage FlashArray is very good.

The initial setup of Pure Storage FlashArray is quick and was not a difficult process.

We used the reseller to do the implementation of Pure Storage FlashArray. It took one engineer from the reseller and one engineer from my team.

We have approximately 10 users who are managing Pure Storage FlashArray.

Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a seven out of ten.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray for databases.

Pure Storage FlashArray has helped our organization because it effectively (price/performance) stores databases and we do not need an every day/detailed  administration.

The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides.

The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better. 
I don't think NEW features are needed. And I want to point out that the Pure team regularly updates the functionality.

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

Pure Storage FlashArray is highly stable. If we experience any issues the support resolves the issue immediately.

The scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray is good. We are able to upgrade changing disks and controllers and it is simple to do.

The technical support from Pure Storage FlashArray is perfect. If we have some trouble or we need to change something, we need to ask for support and they are helpful and answered immediately. 

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

Positive

I previously used IBM, HDS, LSI Storages.

The initial setup of Pure Storage FlashArray was simple. The process took approximately one week. 

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves and when we had some issues we contacted the support for assistance.

All vendor support engineers are good qualified. In case of escalation it was quick and effective.

The cost of the array includes the cost of the basic functionality. The Evergreen support includes free upgrades. This is not an inexpensive solution, you need to understand the value of your data before you buy it.

We evaluated Dell, IBM, HP, and Huawei solutions before choosing Pure Storage FlashArray, which was the best (3 years ago!).

We are wanting to expand and we are looking at other solutions currently, such as Huawei, which is a very good solution from China. However, the documentation can be difficult to understand and their support was not very good but they successfully try to improve it now.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten. 

The setup was extremely simple. 

The solution offers amazing performance. The speed and reliability of their flash arrays are great. In terms of flash storage, they're on it. The performance is there.

Their evergreen solution is probably the most needed in any industry. Especially today in unprecedented times and supply chain issues, their evergreen solution is amazing. 

Whenever we come out with a new feature for our system, we just swap out the storage controller. We don't change anything on our desk and we get the new features. That evergreen approach in your third year costs you nothing. 

It's a great company, great solution. They're dominating in their space for a good reason.

Even their management, their interface, is just the best in the industry. 

The solution can scale.

They're in a continuous act of improvement with a continuous delivery state. Everybody should be following their model right now. We are so impressed with Pure that even as we are an M&A-based company, if we acquire another company, Pure is automatically selected to be the storage that's going to replace whatever they have if they're not already using it. We have no complaints about how they run things.

I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more. Even so, it's not so expensive. Even at the price point that they have right now, no one's complaining. 

The solution is very stable. Its performance is amazing. There are no bugs or glitches, it does not crash or freeze. 

The scalability is right there if you need it. It's instantaneous. You add another roll of flash right in there. It's literally plug-and-play. That flash becomes online and immediately available. You couldn't ask for a smoother experience. It's just been amazing.

We have 19,000 employees and 3,000 employees from a corporate level. There are about 4,000 different businesses functions that all run their products off of these solutions that we provide from IT.

We've never really had to call tech support for this product as we haven't had any issues. I attribute that to these guys paying attention to everything, every single detail, to make sure that their product is seamless.

We used to use IBM XIV.

We migrated from IBM XIV into Pure Storage FlashArray and we did that migration ourselves. Due to Pure Storage's professional services, we did an entire migration in under 30 days, which was unprecedented for a company this size and we did that without impacting business. 

Nobody was taken down, our stores were still running, our warehouses were still shipping. However, the entire time, this was the equivalent of basically moving the basement from underneath your house, while you are sleeping and replacing it with one we wanted. The process was amazing.

We use one person to handle the maintenance. There's a backup to them if we need to have something covered, however, they've not had to do anything with the storage. One person might look at it one hour out of the week to make sure we're doing fine.

We were able to do our migration due to the brilliant people at Pure Storage. We worked through all of it together. It was an amazing setup experience. 

There are true cost savings with this product. If you're an OPEX-adverse organization the cost per period is just really low. We were paying $90,000 per period with IBM and we have 13 periods. We went to Pure Storage and now we're doing $38,000 per period - and yet we have the highest performance here. Pure Storage will give you savings.

We entered into a partnership with Pure Storage.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

The core use for us is to test development.

Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray.

It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing—things like CPU and how it's coping.

For the next release, I would like to improve on certain functionality. They have a thing called SafeMode. So, I'd like some kind of SafeMode Manager because the SafeMode is a good feature, but it's very basic in its functionality.

I have been using this solution for three years. We have the I3 and I2 versions.

So far, it's been faultless. It is a stable solution. 

For us, it is a scalable solution. Traditionally, with Pure Storage FlashArray, there has been a problem with scale at the high end, but that's not us anyway. So, it's not something that concerns us.

It's probably around 150 users in my organization. 

I have spoken a lot to technical presales, and it's been fantastic.

The reason my company decided to use Pure Storage FlashArray rather than something else was the simplicity and proper simplicity of the solution. 

The initial setup is easy. 

It's not cheap. It's priced higher than the market.

I would definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten because the team is great, and it simply just works.

Pure Storage Flash Array is used for data storage.

Pure Storage Flash Array has helped my organization by having the ability to have access to our data immediately.

The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring. 

The price of the solution can improve.

I have been using Pure Storage Flash Array for approximately seven years.

Pure Storage Flash Array is highly stable.

The scalability of the Pure Storage Flash Array is good and it is easy to do.

We have approximately 2,000 users in my enterprise that are using the solution. The whole company is using the solution.

The support from Pure Storage Flash Array is amazing. I have never seen a vendor support a product this well. They knew challenges even before my team was able to figure them out.

We were using another solution previously and we switch to Pure Storage Flash Array because we wanted the latest and greatest solution.

The initial setup of the Pure Storage Flash Array was of a medium range of difficulty. It was not easy or difficult. The full deployment was not very difficult.

I rate the initial setup of the Pure Storage Flash Array a two out of five.

We use a consultant from Pure for the implementation of the Pure Storage Flash Array.

We have seen a return on investment from using Pure Storage Flash Array.

The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contact clarity. We went with the Evergreen plan and I don't have clarity on what am I supposed to pay each year or every three years. There was not much contract clarity.

We evaluated every solution at the time before we chose Pure Storage Flash Array.

My advice to others is to evaluate the Pure Storage Flash Array. Do a proof of concept if you can it is a fantastic solution.

I rate Pure Storage Flash Array a ten 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 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.