Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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. 

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.

Our primary use case has been our production Oracle campus management database environment. We use Oracle PeopleSoft as our campus management solution and underneath that we have about six terabytes of Oracle Database. Our most demanding use-case for Pure Storage has been hosting these high performance, transactional databases, while also hosting all of our other critical application storage needs (MSSql data-warehouse, BI/Analytics, VMWare).

As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit we saw, from our very first benchmarks, was that our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other changes. That increase in performance allowed us to then redesign our database environment in ways which had many knock-on benefits, primarily virtualization and automation. Our primary activity as DBAs is copying databases: making clones, doing refreshes, and creating development/test copies. We spend all day, every day doing this. Pure Storage's technology allowed us to automate these tasks, reducing a manual database-deployment process that started as a 12-hour turnaround to an automated solution that takes about 15 minutes.

The most valuable feature has been its performance. It has allowed us to virtualize our production environment, which has many secondary benefits, primarily involving the automation of database administration activities. Very close to that primary benefit has been the effectiveness of their data reduction technology, a combination of deduplication and metadata indexing. In our environment, nearly all of our databases are copies of copies. With Pure Storage's data-reduction technology we can host an unexpectedly large amount of functional data in an affordable amount of storage.

Also, their system-management REST API is excellent: well-documented and very easy to use.

In the higher-education industry, things moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of their existing features. 

In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. I've done a lot of automation work using their existing features and tools, so I'm always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about extending their phone-home centralized analytics interface (PureOne) into a does-everything management console with a list of new cloud, WAN, and backup features, but this doesn't seem finalized. 

We forget they're there. We plugged the first one in, then we didn't look at it for months. We copied more and more stuff into it over that first year and got more and more impressed at how effective Pure's data-reduction technology was. You copy more and more stuff into them and they just sit there, working away. Now that a lot of our daily operations are automated, we barely even log into them.

The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive. We really like its ability to host diverse additional workloads, categories of data, and vendor database technologies.

We have purchased a second array. We also added an additional shelf for capacity to the first array. The process of adding both of these devices took less than an hour in each case: The SE shows up, plugs stuff together, turns it on, and the data moves over.

We've been incredibly happy with their tech support. There was even an instance where we were having an unrelated problem with our production Oracle Databases. If you can imagine having your production Oracle Databases randomly reboot approximately every 12 to 17 hours for no reason that you can figure out. It tends to be something approaching a resumé-generating experience. Out of the blue, we received a proactive, spontaneous call from Pure Storage support saying, "We're observing something weird on one of your Fibre Channel connections. We think you should take a look at this one SFP optical connector on this one channel, because we're seeing stuff on the array which looks unusual." We looked and it turned out to be the problem. We were having this timing error that was causing our databases (because they were clustered) to lose track of the fact that they were part of a cluster. They would just reboot. Pure Storage support, using their phone-home data analytics, solved it, proactively.

They even showed up at our office, just in case it was the Pure Storage array's SFP, not the one in our fibre-channel switch. Our salesperson and sales engineer showed up within an hour at our location with a replacement SFP that we didn't even need. 

Therefore, we are very happy with their tech support.

It was very straightforward, to the point that our SE said, "Watch me as I do this. You'll never need to do this again. It will just sit here." The array set up, for our first array, from taking it out of the box to mounting the first volume, took less than an hour.

Pure Storage showed up, plugged it in, and we attached it to our Fibre Channel SAN and our iSCSI network. We were copying data within an hour and a half or so. Our Pure Storage team is great. There wasn't really an "implementation". No assistance was necessary.

Compared to legacy spinning disk, we have absolutely seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). I don't have an actual sort of number, but it's dramatic. 

In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for. It isn't priced for you to just go buy one off-the-shelf. It isn't a casual purchase. If you have an appropriate use case though--heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or workloads that just really need low latency and high throughput--you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage. For example, we are starting to use our second array for high performance computing, primarily machine learning, and for that sort of research analytics and heavy math computation you really need all-flash. 

We had existing relationships with vendors who had spinning disk technology. What we weren't getting was the type of flexibility for automation and copy management that all-flash technology offered with the same level of functionality. 

Spinning disk, if you're going to copy things, is zeros and ones on a piece of metal or glass, being moved to another piece of metal or glass. There is physics involved, physical changes. All-flash is largely a metadata-based environment, which means you can make copies of things by changing a few bytes in a table somewhere. 

Pure Storage was chosen because we wanted to move our university's database environment forward in terms of optimization and automation for everyday database administrator activities.

I work with a lot of different storage technologies, including other all-flash solutions, and Pure Storage stands out.

When researching or selecting potential purchase, start with performance, then try to narrow things down by looking at the additional functionality that a particular solution is going to bring into your environment. There are use cases where raw speed is everything, but almost no one is ultimately in that use case. Most people don't want it to be just fast. They want it to:

• Be fast.
• Make their DBAs lives easier.
• Make their VDI work. 
• Run their VMs in VMware in a more reliable, faster way, with better HA. 

Definitely investigate your options. Research a solution's whole set of functionalities, strengths and weaknesses, then compare that to your needs. Don't chose it because it's fastest, cheapest, etc.. Look hard at how you're going to be using it, in detail, over the next 18 to 36 months.

If you are using a storage solution in an enterprise, you need something that has an infrastructure, an ecosystem around it, a whole vendor environment. You're not going to just plug it in. You will want to use it in complex environments for important tasks.

This is why we have never implemented any sort of homegrown SSD or stripped-down, generic SSD storage arrays. We'd need to build all of those additional "ecosystem" features ourselves.

We haven't made a lot of use of Pure's built-in predictive analytics. However, they were beneficial in a couple of our storage capacity-planning discussions. We did use and trust them to understand when it was time to purchase a second //M20, which is the model of array that we use. Partially based on the built-in analytical projections, we purchased a second //M20 array and added capacity to our existing one.

Pure Storage helps to simplify storage. Some of the simplification that we observed simply comes out of its all-flash nature. We suspect that most other all-flash storage arrays in the enterprise would have shared a large percentage of that simplification. However, what Pure Storage adds, uniquely, is that their software is very much aimed at reinforcing and sustaining simplification. Performance is not the only goal; it is performance, simplicity, and ease of use.

We use the private deployment model of this solution. In terms of our cloud provider, we use Azure, we are signing on with AWS, and we'll be using vCloud in the next quarter.

It replaced an earlier tier. It replaced 3PAR Storage and gave us faster performance than the single databases.

VMware has benefited our IT organization because we're 100% VMware, everything is running on it.

We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver was the performance for SQL servers. The joint solution has helped my organization in the way that the databases run faster. 

My organization is taking advantage of the VM integration developed by Pure. We've deployed it. I think it gives the storage administrator some additional insights on metrics. I don't think we're using it to actually manage the data stores. He's getting more insights on metrics. Pure has a VAAI plugin that allows you to manage the data stores. We're not doing that, but I think it gives them heightened analytics in addition to SD-Pure1, a web interface. The integrations have helped in the way that they're another dashboard to have. Somebody could think that the databases are running slow and our database administrator can look at that tool and say, "No, it's unique to your SQL databases, it's not the other VMs on the data stores."

The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad.

A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption.

It's very stable. 

It's scalable. You can hit a point where you fill up enough drives in the shelves. We're at that point now where we've got to expand. We've got to add another shelf.

Their technical support is good.

We have switched to EMC. They gave us more array for less money. 

The initial setup was very simple.

We used an integrator for the deployment.

Our ROI is that we're still running. It's been two years later, and we're still up and running with no downtime.

We looked at HP, NetApp, Pure, and EMC. EMC gave us better-performing storage for a better price. 

I would rate this solution a 7.5 out of ten. To get to a perfect ten they should be more competitive in their pricing. It's expensive. It's premiere storage but there are other premiere providers out there as well that are beating them on price, at least in our case.

The encryption is another area that needs improvement. It was huge. Right now we're at 82% on the Pure array. If they come up with that and pass to read through the more metric encryption, we would probably get 30 or 40% available disk space back, so it's huge.

We primarily use the solution for internal storage for all virtual environments. We also use it for the SQL database, Oracle and private cloud. The storage is used to manage the internal private environment.

Compared to what we used to use, it has improved the utilization. It has improved the statistics for all the users as well. It's better, and people are happy, but we're not quite there yet.

The joint solution has helped my organization. The users are more satisfied. They were looking for better performance, which they got once we moved them into Pure Storage compared to what we had before. Now they are trying to add more and more applications because they're getting better performance and stability. There's a lot of stability now. We have fewer problems, fewer outages.

The solution has a lot of automation features that helped us to deploy the environment faster and to speed the of rate integration. Integration has helped because it helps us to understand the user's requirements. Deployment is done faster, and their applications are more secure. They are reassured that their data is saved in their environment. 

The solution needs better IOPS for the storage. That's where most of the user requirements come from.

We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help.

The solution is stable. There are less complaints, less downtime. That helps us to work in that environment more effectively.

The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster.

Technical support is pretty good. They helped us with a holiday show in case we needed anything. So far, the product is doing well with less downtime, so we didn't have that much opportunity to use support. But anytime we've needed them, it's pretty good and all the issues are dealt with much faster.

We used EMC in the past. The reason we switched was the requirements of the users. They need better IOPS and better performance. That made us move to Pure.

The initial setup was straightforward. The hardware was installed by the vendor and the integration and the configuration pieces were simple.

We did evaluate other solutions, including IBM. The other vendors also had a Flash, but Pure was the best because of the performance. That's why we shortlisted them.

We are using the private cloud deployment model on the Azure platform.

The solution benefits our IP presentation. We have a lot of cost savings. We do a lot of virtualization compared to buying physical hardware. That's a major chunk of cost-savings for the company. 

We are running VMware on Pure. It offers better performance. The utilization and the requirements from the users suggest that they want to move into Pure.

I would definitely recommend that others go for this solution. They can start slow, but they can surely move forward.

I would rate this solution seven out of ten. I would rate it higher if the solution could help us troubleshoot better and if the performance itself was even better. The users sometimes complain that it's still slow.

With Pure Storage FlashArray we have been able to deploy several thousand VDI servers, virtual machines, very quickly and efficiently. We were also are able to virtualize 80% of our workload, and we are planning to get 90 to 94% of our workload virtual. That's a huge reduction in the cost of hardware.

What I like most about this solution is that it is simple to bring in, install, and get it going. You can get it installed in a few days.

What's more, the compression ratio that we're getting is that our database portion is pretty high, so it saves a lot of money.

We have had no issues with the stability so far.

The solution is very scalable because it is fairly smooth and easy to upgrade. 

The technical support has been pretty good. The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing.

Pure was the first solution we used and now we use a couple more. One of them is an EMC product and then we also have a new start-up called Vector, so we currently use three solutions.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and the integration was very easy to do. There were no hidden features and the GUI was very straightforward. 

Traditionally we have been buying massive storing arrays from EMC and from Hitachi, but most of them were built for very high tier applications. For VDI with your desktop, you really don't need that so it was easier for us to go for an array that used high-speed devices, providing Hadoop capabilities because the nature of your desktops are literally the same. So we needed to look at newer technology, and this really was one of the first ones to be there, and it was very popular. We did a study on the market and found that VR was one of the leaders in this space, so we brought them in.

We ran into some issues with the program at first and we had to work around those issues to fix our problems. So at the end of the day, it wasn't really a smooth ride. It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure. That's why I would give it an eight or a nine out of ten. But definitely not a 10.

We use the solution for the vendor support. It's a banking software system. It's an IBM system and it requires some Pure Storage for the backend and SSDs for performance. The vendor supports Pure Storage. 

It saved a lot of space, as far as physical space in our data center. The old sand took up an entire rack and this entire system to about 6U. It's about 1/10th of the space and the power too. You get those power savings and space. The speed has also vastly improved. It's a lot faster than what we had before. We've been running VMware for over 10 years now, so we're all virtualized at this point. The solution has helped us to virtualize everything. 

Pure allows us to upgrade hardware anytime we want and not have to worry about converting everything. It makes everything easier to switch from one vendor to another if we want to. We just recently updated our sand from a Dell EMC. It allowed us to move it seamlessly without having to do anything with the software because it's all VMware.

The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day. 

We're pretty complex. Back there, we've got three or four different systems. It's important that we have something that's easy to manage so we don't have to learn something completely new. This solution offers a GUI that you can just set up and it's ready to go. We had it up and running in three or four hours.

I haven't had any issues with stability. The solution has run since the first day we implemented it and so far has done everything they promised.

We haven't had to scale out yet because the solution is new to our organization, but I have heard it's pretty easy to do. Right now, we have a capacity of about 100 TB. We don't plan to scale right now. When we bought it, we sized it to allow for about two years of growth. So unless something unexpected happens, we should be okay.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed it in our VR site first. We got it set up in VR and made sure everything was working. Then we brought it into production and deployed it on the production side.

We tested it first on the VR site. We personally didn't test a unit, besides our VR site, which was about two weeks. Our vendor-approved it and they used it. We went on the advice of our vendor and got the system.

We implemented the solution with the assistance of a vendor. 

Our experience with that vendor was good. They had everything up for us and there were no problems. Everything worked. They pre-configured it before they brought it out and then they just set it up. 

So far, I'm not sure if there is an ROI, as the solution is brand new. It's too soon to tell.

We have a package deal on the solution because we bought it through a software vendor, so they packaged it with their solution. I don't know what the individual costs would be for the Pure side of it.

It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside.

We looked at two other solutions but we liked that Pure seemed a bit easier to use. That, and we had recommendations.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

VMware was one of the primary drivers when choosing Pure. One of the banking vendors that we use as a primary banking system had limited vendors that they support for storage and Pure was one of them. It was also recommended by a different credit union, which is why we went with them.

I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten.

I would definitely recommend them. They're recommended for a reason. They're not the cheapest, but the performance is, from what I read, the best, and it's easy to manage, so it's worth the extra cost.