Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Provides awesome performance, and it's been able to shrink all of our data center from two-and-a-half racks to one rack and give better performance with SSD drives versus spinning disk drives. It has saved overall costs from our heat and power within our data center where we're now just powering up a 3U device.

More than five years.

It's very stable. We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade.

Scalability is great. Pure's model is adding more disk space to it and then getting a better controller to make sure you are going to stay with your performance. It's a wonderful model.

We have our dedicated resources that we have reached out to, but because there have really been no issues with anything, we're not on the phone with them constantly. Whenever we have had an issue or question, someone is always very responsive. They even come onsite for major issues, such as an NOS upgrade, just to hand-walk us through what we're doing.

Deployment was easy. I didn't do it. I am not a technical guy, but my team was able to get it deployed and then connected to our ESX environment within two hours.

Like anything, when you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it. But what you are getting for it, you are definitely seeing a good ROI.

We considered other options. I have used the others, EMC and NetApp, etc. We have looked at all of the platforms, and to see what Pure was able to do within a PoC environment meant that we never turned back our PoC environment. We just bought it and kept running with it. It was an amazing product based on what we had seen out there in the market.

I would definitely recommend it to colleagues. I have not only used it where I am currently at, but I have also used it at other locations before. I have recommended it to partners, and colleagues that I have worked with in the past, across the state of California.

It has allowed us increased performance along with massive consolidation of space and power. We went from a two cabinet EMC VMAX to a 12U racked system. Very impressive.

Compared to Pure Storage, the IBM V7000 has not improved anything yet within our environment.

The Pure Storage system is, of course, very fast and completely redundant. All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are performed online with no impact. The Pure Storage customer service is by far the best part of the product and organization.

We have found that the NAS portion of the software has limitations. For example, the number of Filesystems is limited, which is not the case on the EMC VNX. 

The service team assigned to the project has good, hard-working people, but we are not receiving the kind of care we should receive to get the project done.

As for IBM, they could increase the maximum storage capacity so more disk shelves can be added.

There have been no issues with the stability of the Pure Storage solution. By contrast, with IBM we have had performance and spiking issues for which IBM applied a workaround patch.

There have been no issues with the scalability for either Pure or IBM.

Customer Service:

10/10 for Pure Storage.

6/10 for IBM.

Technical Support:

Pure Storage is excellent, while IBM is only average.

The IBM V7000 was bought for just NAS and secondary storage and for use as storage for our AS/400 platform. We switched to Pure Storage because of the way the system performs and the fact that it does everything in 32K sizing. The IOPS are high and the support and customer service are exceptional.

Setting up the Pure Storage solutions was simple. It took 45 minutes to rack it and get it online. The IBM system was also fairly simple, taking about two hours to rack and get online.

Both devices were installed through one of our partners who did a good job.

We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both.

We evaluated EMC (which we already had), Dell, and HP.

The Pure Storage FlashArray is very good. Everything that Pure Storage told me is exactly what we have found to be true. It is the best production and implementation experience I have ever had.

Regarding IBM, the sales team was great, as was the technical team. I now feel that EMC VNX and NetApp are both better NAS systems. If I had to do it over again, I would stay with the EMC VNX for NAS.

We have not had a good experience with the IBM device. The installation and service were very good. However, the services to help us migrate our NAS data from an existing EMC VNX system have failed once already due to ACL permissions issues, specifically on how the V7000 NAS works. I have had to involved IBM Global Support by actually contacting high-level VPs. As of January 26, 2016, we have not successfully migrated our NAS data.

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for VMware data storage.

The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are management and administration user-friendliness, provisioning, and performance.

Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography.

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

Pure Storage FlashArray is highly stable.

Pure Storage FlashArray is scalable, but it has a 5 GB ratio for data which helps with the reduced need for more investment for it to be more scalable.

We are using the solution with approximately 20 VMware hosts.

I previously used other solutions.

The initial setup of Pure Storage FlashArray is straightforward. The time it took for our complete implementation took one week. However, it could be done in one day but we had some challenges.

We used the Pure Storage FlashArray team to do the implementation.

I recommend this solution for production because it has good performance and capacity management. 

My advice to others is they need to fit the solution to their needs. There are many models available and the one they choose is going to depend on the front-end data that they're going to accommodate in storage. Additionally, the latencies needed are important to consider, such as how many milliseconds they can tolerate and overall performance.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

Pure Storage FlashArray is used for hosting applications, such as Vmware, HyperV, and virtualized applications.

The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions.

Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features.

The integration with other vendors, such as antivirus and security vendors they are lacking.

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

The stability of Pure Storage FlashArray is good.

Pure Storage FlashArray is scalable.

I have used the support from Pure Storage FlashArray.

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

Positive

The initial setup of Pure Storage FlashArray is very simple and it takes four hours for a new system.

Pure Storage FlashArray is not difficult to maintain.

My customers have received a return on investment.

The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive.

There are no licenses outside of the storage. When you buy the solution, you receive all the software capabilities and license with the box.

One of the advantages of Pure Storage FlashArray to other solutions is the Evergreen Program. The program allows you to never have to purchase storage that you already purchased again. For every terabyte that you purchase, you don't have to purchase it again, they will replace it. As you maintain the solution, even if the old storage becomes at the end of life, it will replace with newer technology as part of the maintenance.

My advice to others is they should try the solution, it works well.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

Pure Storage FlashArray is applicable for virtual environments, e.g. CSS, VR, and YouTube platforms. It's an NVMe data storage platform.

One of the things I like about Pure Storage FlashArray is that it has a high data reduction average, e.g. 4.5.

Pure Storage FlashArray is also advantageous for data centers in terms of rack space for maximum capacity.

Many high-end platforms from other vendors like Dell EMC or Hitachi, their backend has Active/Active architecture, unlike Pure Storage FlashArray which doesn't utilize an Active/Active architecture on the backend. Instead, it has an Active/Passive architecture. Its frontend is Active/Active, but its backend is not. I see this as a disadvantage of this product.

The highest storage capacity of Pure Storage FlashArray is the petabyte, and it should be expanded. This is what I'd like to see in the next release.

This product is stable. It's working very well. Our elementary response time is 0.5 milliseconds, and with 100,000 IOPS in our virtual environments.

The technical support for Pure Storage FlashArray is good. Support is quick and responsible. We get quick responses from the team.

The initial setup for Pure Storage FlashArray was easy. It was completed within one hour.

Pure Storage FlashArray was implemented by a local product solutions team.

I'm working for a telecommunication company, and we use different products.

We have five people in our company working with this product.

My advice to people who want to implement Pure Storage FlashArray is that it's a good NVMe solution, has a lower response time, and also good for entry-level storage purposes, e.g. small offices, small to medium-sized business, etc. It's also easy to use, e.g. comparable to an iPhone in terms of ease of use. This solution also works very well on the Active/Active version, for combining two storage.

I'm giving Pure Storage FlashArray a score of nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for storage. 

The administration is very easy and quite minimal.

The performance is very good.

The installation is pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is good.

Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable. 

We've been using the solution in two places. We have used it in Washington for six months and London for six months as well. 

We have found the solution to be stable. We've not had any performance issues and not have any stability issues with it. The performance is good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is scalable to an extent. Its deduplication ratio is quite good. You don't actually always need the full amount of physical storage, as opposed to the deduplicating amount of space.

Its scalability beyond a certain amount of petabytes makes it so that it is a separate system if you scale to that much storage. If you're a normal enterprise where you don't scale that much, it's fine. The X90 goes beyond a certain amount, and you have to have a new system that works as a separate system.

Across two locations, we have about 800 people. 

From the feedback I've gotten, for the most part, the technical support has been quite good. They know their product quite well and they've been quite responsive. We are satisfied with the support.

We previously used EMC VNX.

The solution is pretty straightforward. It's not too complex or difficult. 

I haven't personally deployed it, however, from the team's feedback, they had very little issues with regards to the deployment and bringing it up and then setting up. The deployment was within days or a week at a maximum. That was for the migration time. For migrating from the old storage to new, it might take a while, however, in terms of getting it up and running, it was days. It didn't take that long at all.

It's easy enough that the normal system administrators can take care of the storage. There's no one dedicated to managing the storage and it's not that complicated that it needs someone dedicated just to manage it all.

You do have a license that is required and you also have to pay for support.

The license we have is not a monthly subscription model.

For London and Washington, we had EMC VNX. At the time we were transitioning from the EMC to a mid-tier flash storage, and they didn't have anything in the market. We did look at others. We looked at the Nimble from HPE. When we were looking to purchase, EMC just came out with EMC FlashSystem. We didn't get to the IBM FlashSystem. 

We're a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time. 

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

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

What I like most about this solution is the simplicity of the array.

The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it.

The education, compression, and the speed to perform these are astonishing.

The array is really resilient.

The price of this solution is high and should be lowered.

It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays.

I have been working with Pure Storage for about three years.

The stability of the Pure FlashArray is 100%.

With respect to scalability, it would be nice to create a LAN or a cluster on top of multiple arrays.

The technical support is 100% and they respond really quickly. Their Evergreen support plan is astonishing. They are a leader in this regard.

I have worked with similar solutions from IBM and NetApp. The advantage to those solutions is that you can create a LAN on top of multiple arrays.

The price of this solution is high.

With respect to comparing other solutions, when you put all of the features in a box, leverage them and migrate your application to one of these arrays, it will give you a lot of benefits. Some people have compared benchmark performance tests against other arrays and from my point of view, overall as a whole package when you sum everything up, Pure Storage is the winner.

Overall, this is a very good solution and my main complaint is about the price. Out of all of the arrays that I have worked with, Pure Storage is one of the better ones.

I highly recommend both the solution and the company. My suggestion to anybody who is considering this product is to do the mathematics regarding the budget and the price really well because the rate can be expensive when it comes to upgrading in the future, either scaling it up or out.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for VM storage in a private cloud model. The main motivations we had to run VMware on Pure were the simplicity and cost.

We're using the M70 R2.

We went from a four-cabinet VMAX array, where we paid $16,000 a month for a pod just for the array to sit in, and we took that down to seven U's of rack space in our existing co-lo facility. Not only did we save time, but we saved money, power, and air conditioning; all of that good stuff.

We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use. It's really plug-and-play. It just works and it works really well.

I haven't really had a bad experience or something I think that they can improve on. I'm not saying that to be really nice. The way the platform works, the way that their sales team works, the way their support team works, everything just works really well. If they could make it cheaper, that would be something.

It's stable and we've never had an issue with it. The array has just worked. It's been a little workhorse. It's just perfect in every way that I can think of.

Scaling is easy. You just plug in new disks, it sees them and it works. I can't explain it any better than that. You just plug it in and it works.

I have used Pure's tech support quite a few times. It's probably the best tech support experience that I've had. I love that, by utilizing Pure's SaaS platform, they let me know about problems that they've seen with other customers who are using the same version of the software or the same model array. They reach out proactively and say, "Hey, we've seen these kinds of things happen with other customers. You should do X to fix this so you don't experience the problems." It's something that most storage companies don't do nowadays. They make my job easier by being really proactive.

We were looking to get away from Dell EMC to some other platform, and Pure was the number-one disruptor in the market. Their story, their price point, and what they said they could deliver are what sold us.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took about 30 minutes from unboxing to actually being on the network and being able to utilize it in our VMware environment.

A Pure engineer was onsite with me to do it. It was very simple. He asked me about five questions about IP address and NTP, etc. Then he did the rest with a script.

We easily save, on just the basic costs for facilities, $16,000 a month.

We also evaluated Dell EMC, 3PAR, Nimble, Tintri, and NetApp.

Like I tell everybody else that I deal with, if you want to focus your time on doing more valuable things for your company, and you deal with storage on a day-to-day basis like I do, the best thing you can do is put Pure in your environment. It really is set-it-and-forget-it. I've come from the days of VMAXs where you're sitting there tweaking and turning knobs all the time to try to make sure that your storage environment is tip-top. With this, you literally plug it in, connect it and serve it, and then it does everything else itself. I get to focus my time on doing other things that are more valuable to the company.

On a scale of one to ten, Pure is an 11.