Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

Pure Storage has been the go-to storage array for me. It's a lot smaller, easier to set up, faster to upgrade, and more reliable. 

The performance is very stable. This is something which I don't get out of a solution such as, for example, 3PAR. 

The code upgrades are very smooth. They're actually all tracking their vulnerabilities. As a customer, Pure Storage gives sufficient time to the customer to showcase the new features and to say this is how to go about going over to the upgrade, and so on. We are quite prepared. We can schedule ahead and be ready for these things. That's something which I like - the selective approach - and everything is on the cloud which helps Pure reach out to their customers and gives these new features. 

Its ability to use multiple services such as the file services, the block services, backup, fast backups, lightning backup, and so on, is great. These features are something that StoreServ or HP doesn't have. They have multiple products for that. Pure tries to bundle them together. That's something which I really like. It reduces the footprint and helps me sell this a lot more to the customer.

Pure Storage support could be a little better. 

The pricing can be a bit high.

In general, I'm quite satisfied with what product they have on offer, and what new features are being released.

I've used the solution for a while. 

The stability is good. The performance on offer is excellent. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Technical support needs improvement.

With respect to them being able to respond, they're more marketing people, less technical. Some of these technical SMEs who I've worked with on Pure Storage, they're really good. However, overall, some accounts still have that thing in their mind that the support isn't as great as some of the bigger companies like Dell or HPE.

That said, that's not the experience for me.

I've also used 3PAR. Performance on Pure Storage is a lot faster than 3PAR.

The initial setup is easy. It's also quick to upgrade. A company shouldn't have issues with the process.

They're okay with the pricing. They're expensive compared to some of the hyperscalers today. When it comes to a private cloud, enterprise-class, where we're looking at highly encrypted, high-performance, highly reliable systems. I might not go with Pure. If I can go with the data center class, I can go with Pure Storage. For enterprise-class, I would still lean back to Hitachi or Dell.

We are partners.

Most of my accounts have multiple storage arrays, and Pure Storage always happened to be one of them.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're pretty happy with it overall.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray for machine learning, storage, backups, and computing.

After installing Pure, the processes that would take 40 minutes to two hours to complete are now done in five minutes.

It is easy to install.

The stability and scalability are awesome.

The technical support is awesome as well.

Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes.

Also, we can use more capacity and pay less.

I think the areas that they have been working on for quite some time are the CIFS and SMB Shares, that is, being able to mount them directly. I think they're on the right track.

One wish I have is that they will have a solution to help archive data to the cloud, that is, a Cloud Tiering Appliance.

I've been working with it since 2016.

The stability of the solution is awesome too.

The scalability of the solution is awesome. You have the opportunity to grow as needed.

The entire company uses this solution, so that would be close to 2100 people.

It is very extensively used, and we are continuing to expand.

Technical support has been awesome. Sometimes, they've let us know about problems before we've even known that they were there.

We previously used an EMC Array.

We switched because the response time went from a few hours to minutes.

The other piece was the amount of space that we were able to use because of the duplication and compression built in the unit. We can use more capacity and pay less.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The deployment took a couple of hours.

We did a PoC with the product and checked to make sure that it worked in our environment.

We have a group of about 6 to 10 people managing the system.

When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us.

We evaluated NetApp, Kaminario, EMC XtremIO, Tintri, and Nutanix.

We used scalability, support, the evergreen model, the cost per terabyte or per gigabyte, and the footprint as the factors for comparison. We also looked at how they are able to provide support globally, not only here in the US but also overseas.

I would recommend that you do a PoC to ensure that it works according to the needs of the company, and that will help prevent a lot of headaches.

I think it's a very complete solution at this point, and I would rate it at ten on a scale from one to ten.

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.

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. 

I use the solution for the storage of our database and to run some algorithms to analyze data we retrieve from the internet.

I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand.

Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure.

I have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is highly stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have five customers using this solution.

The technical support is very good.

The installation is the simplest I have ever done from any solution.

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves with the supervision of the integrator.

We have a team that does the maintenance and operations of the solution.

There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution.

I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray in a couple of backup products. Our DDP offerings, data platform offerings, is where we use Veritas with Pure Storage FlashArray. Then, we use the Pure Azure Service model with the secure multi-tenancy features. Pure Storage FlashArray can be managed centrally.

In individual file cases where most customers were looking for performance-based, minimum latency applications, we have deployed Pure Storage FlashArray.

The integration and migration features have been really good.

We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray.

It has an Evergreen model and always maintains the controllers, so the controllers never let you down.

I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays.

It would be good if Pure Storage FlashArray gave a library-type access.

Maybe, small box releases could be utilized for backup purposes such as Data Domain offered by other vendors.

I've been using Pure Storage FlashArray for the last two and a half years.

We have deployed it both on-premises and on hybrid cloud environments.

As for stability, Pure Storage FlashArray is definitely a reliable solution.

It can be easily scaled. I work with over 500 customers who use this solution.

The technical support is awesome, and there's a lot of documentation available online.

The initial setup is very easy.

My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing.

I think with other products, there are issues with support systems and warranty features. Even the maintenance cost can be very high. In comparison to those products, Pure Storage FlashArray is very good.

Overall, Pure Storage FlashArray has never let us down in front of customers so far, and I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We make use of the solution primarily for storage and DR replication.

We use the most recent stable version, as the latest one is still in a beta stage and too new to be employed.

V-Vault is pretty new and its implementation is superior to that offered by nearly any vendor. It's easier to configure than most others and to import the V-Vault. A separate working machine is not required. 

I can't think of too many features that need improvement. There are no bugs, it just works and it's stable. The graphical interface is perfect and really simple. Someone who understands storage can figure it out within a couple of minutes. There are really no drawbacks.

The only minor issues that come to mind are that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad. Also, the solution should be cheaper.

I've been using the solution for the past 10 years. 

The solution is stable. It's superb. We've done upgrades in which multiple controllers were involved and, while changing from one model of the array to another, a single controller was removed. It is swapped out and a new one introduced. Once it's stable they proceed to the next one. We have never experienced an outage in any of the three companies in which I've employed the solution. Even when the controller went down, the arrays remained up.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has been amazing. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who is not super knowledgeable. The only time I entertained any doubts, whatsoever, is when V-Vaults first came out. Certain people were not very familiar with it, but this was short lived. As we were extremely early adopters of V-Vault, training was provided fairly quickly. While the general tech support was not up to snuff, within a month or two they were all trained. Since then, there have been no issues to report. 

In this company we used an IBM V 7000 and in a previous one, an EMC VMAX.

When comparing the solution to an EMC array or an IBM B7000, both of which I've used, Pure Storage FlashArray is light years ahead of everybody else. I've used a variety of these solutions and many of them are very complicated. 

Only two weeks ago we set up a new solution in a new location that we're building. It's pretty straightforward. There are certain internal matters that only the vendor can handle. But, that's fairly common with most good storage arrays. Besides this, it's really easy. The vendor is really simple to work with. One need only provide him with a list of the IP's he uses for management and replication. 

I did not do the initial storage myself, as I'm in Chicago and it is handled in Omaha, Nebraska. I did have to coordinate everything, however. We were sent a form to fill out with the name and IP use. At this point, the arrival of a technician is scheduled, who asks where the rack should be placed. At this point, it is racked, cabled up and all the initial IP configurations are introduced. This is the point at which the person can take over and start carving out the ones he wants or creating the V-Vault, should he so desire. The process is really simple.

The technician's visit lasted an hour-and-a-half. I've been doing this for a long time. So, perhaps, it took me another hour to configure everything, although the level of involvement can play a factor. We created two only and a V-Vault. Like I said, it's really easy.

The solution absolutely provides us a return on our investment. I've worked with other storage arrays such as one that IBM was promoting to us. It was the company's first attempt at doing an all-flash array and it bore much similarity to Pure Storage FlashArray. It took us a week to get it up and running. We added some development servers and the whole array went down. We lost everything. Such experiences really make one appreciate the stability and thoughtfulness that goes into the engineering and redundancy and scalability of the solution.

You could say that the licensing cost involves a one-time fee, at which point support can be renewed in what I believe to be three-year blocks. As long as a person keeps his support current he can upgrade to the newer version of the array, which can be done once every three to four years.

The solution could be cheaper.

We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee. Something that's really awesome about the solution is that the cost is all-inclusive of the features. There is no need to pay for replication or for any additional features. A person is entitled to employ these when they come out.

In my present company we have around 500 users, but my previous one had closer to 10,000.

In the current company, there are five or six of us that are responsible for overall maintenance and we handle everything. This is in contrast to the company before last in which there were three of us who handled nothing but our four different storage arrays. To be honest, Pure Storage FlashArray does not leave us with much to do. Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup. It frees us up to do real work.

My advice to others is that this solution is the best available. For someone who's not a storage admin, the support is awesome and help is provided gladly for unfamiliar areas. What's nice about the solution is that it very rarely breaks, which vastly cuts down on downtime. There is much redundancy and support is super proactive. This means that if a part goes bad they will generally know about it before we would. It's such a clean, easy to use, great supportive product. It really frees one up to do other things that are more important.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten, although I would give it a score of 50 were this possible.