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.
Download the Pure Storage FlashArray Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: May 2023
Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.
Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that prevents data loss.
Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray
Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:
Reviews from Real Users
Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution.
PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "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."
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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 this solution to assist with our on-premise database workloads; In conjunction with our Oracle database and SQL server database.
Within our organization, there are roughly four people using this solution.
Pure Storage has been of great value to us as it provides us with a lot of great tools, especially for monitoring and capacity planning.
Also, Pure Storage is extremely user-friendly.
The solution itself is pretty solid. Perhaps the time available for selecting upgrades or for scheduling things could be improved. On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial.
In the next release, I would like for them to support file systems on the lower-end models, like the X-10 or X-20.
Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed.
I have increased the capacity during working hours with no impact on production at all.
Their technical support is excellent. Once we raise a ticket, they respond very quickly. Even better, their support is proactive. In most cases, they are the ones contacting us, not the other way around.
The initial setup was extremely simple. It takes about half an hour to get it up and running.
Our licensing is on a yearly basis. They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good.
I trust them — their reputation is outstanding. Pure Storage is an amazing solution. I would totally recommend this technology. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Pure Storage a rating of ten.
If you're skeptical, there is a free demo that you can use to test it in your environment. Just give it a try, test out all the features, and experiment.
We use this solution for block storage.
I like that every few years, they provide us with a free controller upgrade.
It would be nice to have a little more control. I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input. There's not a lot of options for the administrator compared to other solutions
This is our first year using Pure Storage FlashArray.
This solution is very scalable.
We did a POC before buying this solution. If you're interested in using this solution, I recommend that you do the same — see if you like it. It's a good product for block storage; It offers very good performance.
Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Pure Storage FlashArray a rating of nine.
We put the solution onto the VMware environment and all the Microsoft SQL servers. We do the synchronization between two data centers, so that is has a very low latency. We just have a few milliseconds of latency which is a ready performance, and near perfect.
If I compare it to SAN Symphony, for instance, it's much faster, much reliable level.
The maintenance is very good. The support is very, very good. If you do any maintenance on it you have the support, and it's nice to know they are there to assist.
It's a very good product. It's very easy to manage everything.
With a snapshot, you can schedule it and you can remove it afterward. You can do a kind of production cope. That's very, very good now, and it's performing very well. The storage is amazing. It's so fast.
The total reduction you can expect is excellent. You buy the bundle storage and they give you a ratio of what you can achieve within it.
The mobile app is very helpful. I have an application on my smartphone. I view the latency in real-time on my app. You can see everything on your smartphone. You can also set up alerts on it, and things like this. I don't think you can do this on Dell storage.
The solution is not cheap. It's much more expensive than DataCore. It costs much more.
The improvement I would expect from them is maybe more if there is integration with VMware. We are also using Amazon Cloud to provision snapshots or to move or to copy snapshots to Amazon. I would expect more integration within Amazon. Amazon has tree storage or last tier so we have that as an option instead of keeping it in Pure Storage as it costs a lot of money. If they offered a hybrid cloud, for example, it would be very helpful.
The solution needs to ensure they have good integration with VVol. VVol is the future of VMware. I have spoken with Pure Storage engineers and they have an integration with vVol. They have a kind of plug-in for VMware to work with VVol, however, it's not mature enough. It's my understanding they're working on it to get it done on that side. More integration with the Windows Server for snapshots would also be helpful.
One year ago I found that instead of having the new Pure Storage FlashArray on-prem, you can have it in Tokyo or you can have it in Virginia - it depends where you are. You can just pay a certain amount per minute and you can have a Pure Storage that you manage from your prem, but have it on Amazon. That may be in production. It will be a useful attribute.
I've been using the solution since 2019 and therefore it's not so long. It's a little bit more than one year - nearly two years now as we have started in August, 2019.
5.3 is the latest stable version. They have a version 6 now, and 6.1 is in production, however, it's not as stable as the 5.3. We are running to the latest best stable version.
Previously, you were not able to scale the snapshot. You had to do it manually.
For a flash array of 11 terabytes that you buy in a bundle, you can provision for 44 terabytes. We still have six terabytes free. We can come to a ratio of four on full storage. You can optimize four times what they give to you. They give you a ratio from three to four. It depends on the application you have running. Not everything is taken on the storage.
If you would like to expand, you can always just buy more storage disks. We will have to get a new license in two years and we might increase our usage then. For the moment, we have enough space.
Technical support has been very helpful throughout the process. They can assist during the setup process. They make everything very easy.
We also use the Dell EMC Storage Suite.
This solution is easier than what we've used in the past.
For me, in terms of setup, the process much easier than Symphony, for example. Before, we had DataCore and Symphony. With this product, it was easier to do the zoning on the fiber channel side. On the network side, it was easier. Everything it's much easier than other products if I compare it to Dell or to DataCore and Symphony.
The maintenance, if you have to upgrade the firmware or the version, is very convenient. The support is good also. And they are working now to integrate more in Amazon which will be helpful for us.
While it is my understanding that the solution is a bit expensive from a financial point of view, I don't know the exact costs.
The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more. I don't have the details anymore. I know it was much more than HP 3PAR and Dell Storage Center or DataCore.
We have a five-year contract. We would need to renew it in two years or so.
We are just a customer and end-user.
With Pure Storage, you have two versions. You have the Pure Storage version 50 and version 10. 50 is a little bit bigger than version 10. With FlashArray M50, it's an X50R2, it's full flash.
We have the product currently on-premises, however, we would be more open maybe to Amazon or some other cloud.
I would suggest new organizations go with the product, even though it is new. Some companies are scared of new products. It's more mature in the United States. However, it's working well for us here in Europe. Even if it costs a little bit more, you do get more for what you pay. We've chosen the most expensive option, however, we have no regrets in that sense. It's been worth it.
Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's very easy to manage and works very well. The maintenance is also excellent. I'd recommend the solution. You don't have to do anything on the FlashArray. You don't have to deal with tier levels, or build and optimize something. Everything is done from the Pure Storage side. You're just using it, and that's it.
We use flash storage for VDI architecture and database architecture.
It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use. We transferred our old architecture from hyper storage to all-flash storage. It made our business faster and more connected to our customers.
The dashboard is very friendly. We can see information about IPs and the bandwidth and every host who connects to it — it's very useful.
We really like the easy-to-use GUI.
The integration capabilities could be improved.
I have been using this solution for roughly three years.
Pure Storage FlashArray is a very stable and reliable solution.
In our environment, there are only two nodes. We have three products. Each one has two nodes and they can't extend any further.
We haven't needed to contact customer support.
This solution is very easy to deploy. Deployment took roughly half an hour.
I was not involved with the licensing of this solution.
We recommend this solution to our friends and customers. It's perfect.
Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.
From the first test that we have conducted, we are very satisfied with this solution.
The interface is easy to use.
At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way.
We are not sure what needs improvement at this time, as we have not started using it in the production environment.
It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated.
We are in the process of implementing this solution, but we haven't started using it in the production environment.
The vendor was helpful during our implementation.
The initial setup was easy, with help from the vendor.
We have had help from the vendors, they have been very close to us, helping us all the way.
We decided to go with the Pure Storage solution because of the business model that they presented to us.
We have hired Pure Storage and a distributor to help out at the beginning but mostly we deal with Pure Storage directly.
I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.
We are basically using it for the department of space and online education purposes. We are using its latest version.
I like its speed. It has all the features that I need.
Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution.
I have been using this solution for a year and a half.
It is stable.
It is scalable. We have about 81 users.
I have interacted with them. They respond very fast to our queries.
I was using a Sun Microsystems product. Basically, the Sun Microsystems product is nothing but Hitachi Storage. They buy Hitachi Storage and label it as Sun Microsystems.
We tried it on our own and almost reached the final stage, but then we had some doubts. After that, Pure people came and helped us. It took about three to four hours to complete the whole installation.
We did it on our own. We had only two Admins for its deployment.
Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution.
I would recommend this solution. I am satisfied with this solution, and we plan to keep using this solution.
I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.
Our primary use case is to keep the disc for all the critical systems in the company.
The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc.
The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them.
This is the only problem that we have in the two years of working with Pure Storage and it is not an important problem. The interface that this solution has is really good. It senses all the errors. We get good support from the vendor.
The price doesn't really matter. It's very expensive, it can be cheaper.
I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for around two years.
Stability is very good. We haven't had any problems.
We have around 4,000 users.
The initial setup was very easy. It took around two weeks.
I would highly recommend this solution.
I would rate it a ten out of ten. It has all the features we need. It tests all the software solutions that are currently available and that will be available in the future. You do not have to pay for any additional solutions that they purchase.
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.
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:
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.
Our primary use case for Pure Storage is for disaster recovery.
We use AWS for our cloud provider.
It's fast because it's Flash storage so the IT team doesn't have to worry about it.
Besides virtualization and the benefits associated with that, we're a Workspace ONE customer, we're going to be starting that deployment Q4 of this year and we're looking forward to improving the patient experience with the doctors and the rest of the medical staff.
We are delivering a better experience for doctors and the other staff that deliver desirable outcomes. Again, it's easy on the IT staff. It's important to have infrastructure that you can rely on and not have to worry about failing.
We use SRM for VMware integration. The failovers with SRM are fantastic. It's fast and reliable. It just works, which is sometimes difficult to achieve.
The white glove customer service that I get is their greatest value. They even do the firmware upgrades for me. I don't have to worry about it.
The capability from Pure as far as sharing out files and things of that nature is a little bit lacking. However, I know it's coming so I'm not upset that it doesn't exist yet.
Their stability is second to none.
I'm confident it will grow as the hospital grows.
When I started at my current employer, our SAN was eight years old and out of support. It was very urgent that we replaced it immediately.
The initial setup was straightforward. Plug it in, then they show up to do the firmware upgrade. We connected the fiber channel, we put it on the network and within two hours we were moving workloads over.
We bought it from a reseller but we did the installation and design ourselves in-house.
We have received a return on our investment.
I have used NetApp, IBM, and EMC XtremIO in the past. We selected Pure because of its reputation. We also considered vSAN, but we ultimately went with Pure because of the ability to do things that vSAN couldn't do at the time. It has since changed. I don't know if that would change my mind about going with Pure, but I don't regret the decision.
Depending on their EMR, Pure is certified to work with many vendors including EPIC and MEDITECH, and they're a fantastic partner. Even from pre-sale to post-sales, I'm always in contact with the folks at VMware and Pure. They address any issues, problems, or questions I have. Their ability to help is endless.
I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. When the file services are available on Pure, it will absolutely be a ten.
We use the on-premise deployment model of this solution for the bank. We use AWS as our cloud provider.
High speed has been an improvement for our organization.
We are using the private cloud version. I run it on vSphere, vCenter, and vRealize.
It benefits our IT organization in the way that it's easier for the administrators to manage.
The performance is the most valuable feature.
There could be better storage.
I like this storage because it is very easy.
Scalability is good.
I haven't needed to use support. My employees say their support very good.
The initial setup was easy and straightforward.
I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000.
The team that worked with this program say it's a very good program, so I'd recommend it.
My coworkers say it's very good, so I would give this a nine out of ten. For me, no product ever gets a ten, because nothing is perfect.
We use the private deployment model of this solution and VMware for our storage provider. Our primary use case of this solution revolves around our clients. We have different tiers of storage. We use the Pure Storage FlashArray for our tier-one storage, our higher-level storage to support not only multi-tenant clients but also our private cloud clients, and to provide them with an all-flash storage solution.
We used to use a product called XtremIO which was a pretty significant improvement on the old way of deploying storage which was through standalone SANDS and we also used EMC VMAX. That was really expensive. We saw a vast improvement when we switched over to using the Pure Storage model over the XtremIO. It just made us that much more competitive. We were able to offer those workloads to our clients, we sold more, and we keep selling it.
VMware absolutely benefited our IT organization. VMware has always been just above the rest in terms of virtualization. I was not part of the organization prior to VMware being a prevalent powerhouse like it is today. But I know that back in the day of our organization, we used to have every server in a single box. Now, we've trimmed down so much of our infrastructure as well as some of our other client's that we've moved to VMware and it's been a significant improvement.
We are and we aren't running VMware on Pure. We have our ESXi hosts are not running on Pure Storage but we use Pure Storage for the back-end data stores that we run. We don't necessarily run the Hypervisor on Pure, but we run a lot of our client's virtual machines on Pure Storage.
The main driver of running VMware on Pure is for more IOPS. It's a growing trend in the industry that we have to have more clients that have more IOPS and low latency. It's an ongoing battle with the industry. When it comes down to it there's going to be a higher demand for even lower latency; even more speed, and more IOPS. We haven't hit that quite yet, but it will happen. It's just the nature of the business.
The joint solution has benefited our organization. It's with the ability to have the tier-one storage from Pure Storage that's allowed us to not only sell more at a higher cost but also it's allowed us to separate certain workloads from others. We have the tier-one storage, then we have tier-two storage on a different provider that allows us to have more storage, but also to really just give Pure Storage to those that really need it. This provides better performance for those VMs.
For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space. Everything needs more space. For us to have a solution that allows deduplication and that lets us deploy more on less.
It's a very stable solution. Even going through maintenances we can individually bring down certain nodes without any disruption in performance. It works really seamlessly with our current implementation.
The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be. In regards to storage and SANDS, it's very difficult to have a scalable solution when you're talking about hardware stores. It's just really difficult to do that. Overall, I think Pure does a good job with scalability.
I don't interface with technical support too much. Overall whenever I've had to interface with technical support it's always been a very positive experience.
We previously used XtremIO. We knew we needed to switch because of the trends in the industry. It's always going be a battle for consumer-based demands. Consumers are always going to demand more, and more; now. What that means is that you need to build apps that are quicker, faster; or have a more sleek run without as much code, or they're more highly available. That's what it really comes down to.
The initial setup was straightforward.
Pure Storage did the deployment for us.
We have seen ROI.
Pure was on our shortlist. There are not a whole lot of other competitors that do what Pure does. They architected their own SAND right from scratch and it's a versatile product.
It's a pretty simple and pretty straightforward solution. There's a lot of one pane of glass type of things that we have with Pure and I don't see much in terms of improvement.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. My advice to someone considering this solution is to just get it.
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.
We primarily use this solution for our SQL server in an on-premises deployment.
Having a dedicated array for our SQL server is very nice.
We are running VMware on Pure, and the main driver for that is because it is all-flash. Also, we wanted a dedicated solution for our SQL environment. Running on Pure has given us the ability to scale out our SQL environments. We tripled our environment in the past three years since implementing this solution, and we have not had any issues with the storage keeping up with the workloads.
We are making use of some of the VMware integrations that have been developed by Pure, but we are really waiting for the copy data management part.
We are really enjoying the speed of this solution. The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice.
In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server.
We have had zero issues with stability once it is in. However, we have had issues with migrations to different cabinets or different arrays. We had one instance with an eight-hour outage in our primary data center because the upgrade to the controller failed, and the controller redundancy didn't work. It was an odd issue that we now have under control.
This solution scales well. The issue we had with stability is now under control, so we are able to scale out fine. We can just drop in new disks when we need them.
When we've had issues, technical support has been really good about resolving them quickly. I was on the call with them when we had the issue with the controller, and they were very, very helpful.
Our older solution was not very good. Pure increased our speed a lot. We needed to increase our storage because we were filling up the array. Our SQL footprint has greatly increased over the past three years.
This solution was chosen because we happened to be doing a POC when our previous solution failed horribly, and we moved our production to Pure. It was able to pick it up, which was the selling point.
The initial setup of this solution was pretty straightforward. It was a vanilla, out-of-the-box setup with nothing out of the ordinary.
We used an integrator to assist us with the implementation and deployment of this solution. We were hands-off, but it seems that all went well because everybody is happy with it.
We have seen a good return on investment, mainly because we took our SQL Server workload out of the general population and we're able to get it separated, which is a huge advantage to us. The biggest boost is getting separation of duty.
I have used InfiniBand in the past. We are now looking at building a new data center, and the vendors on our shortlist are Pure and InfiniBand.
We are now starting to look at some of the copy data management tools that come with the new array.
This is now my go-to product, and I was an InfiniBand guy before. I like how there are database integrators on the Pure team that are actually there to help you tune your database workloads with their solution. I don't see that in a lot of other vendors.
This is a good product and the overall day-to-day workflow within it is great, but some of the issues that we've had with migrations bump it down slightly. The product is good, but it could be better.
I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.
Our primary use case of this solution is to manage our virtual environment and storage so our entire VMware environment runs on Pure.
The solution increases the overall speed of our systems. We run our virtual desktops off of them and there was a noticeable improvement once we moved from our old sand to this new sand. One could tell, the minute we switched to this program, everything ran a lot faster.
VMware benefits our IT board because all our servers are virtual, so it helps keep our footprint small. We spend less on hardware because all our servers are virtual.
I find the speed of the solution its most valuable feature. It is really fast and it is also very easy to use. You can basically set it up and forget about it. You don't have to manage it on a day-to-day basis. I also like the plugins that go into beta where you can see there. For instance, if I need to extend a datastore I can go straight to the plugin and extend the data store, refresh the VAs, and see the new store. I don't have to log in and use my credentials, so I save time and it is easy.
We only want to manage our virtual environment so this program has all the features we need. We're pretty straightforward customers. I don't see anything that needs to improve as we only use the standard features.
Once we've set everything up and running, we haven't really had an issue with it. So it's really stable.
Pure is our primary enterprise storage. We have a smaller one with about a 120 servers and a little over 400 virtual desktops. We have one 20 terabyte model and a 10 terabyte model. I believe it is scalable.
I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades. The service was pretty good. They knew what the problem was and they were able to remove in by enabling remote features. They shipped out a replacement and we swapped it out and shipped it back. I am satisfied with the technical support.
We used an older program, but it was too slow. The main reason for switching over to run our VMware on Pure was the speed and, after several meetings with other vendors, we decided to go with the all-flash model. We replace our programs every five years because we want the best performance.
It was pretty easy to set everything up. We used an integrator from Pure and we had to fill in a worksheet beforehand, so we gave them all the information they needed, like IP addresses and ports. It took less than an hour.
We looked at Pure, NetApp and Nimble. Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis. If you want to upgrade, you can simply call in and they do everything on their side. NetApp, for instance, requires you to be on top of firmware, drivers and updating. You must initiate the upgrades, do the upgrades, follow all the steps. With NetApp, you need a lot of insight to manage it and it's difficult if you have only one person dedicated to that.
I am a firm believer that everything has room for improvement, so I rate this nine out of ten.
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 on-premises and each array has a different use case. We have VDI, SQL, and General and the program provide better integration between the management and visibility of the solution. Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integration developed by Parrot and this gives us a lower level administrative access to more admins that don't have a background in storage.
VMware is extremely beneficial to our IT organization because we can scale as we increase our usage.
The solution has great efficiencies because it has scalability. It also becomes the core between our synergy of all our platform systems across the United States.
In the next release of the solution, I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption.
The solution is rock solid. Very stable.
The scalability of the solution is extremely costly.
The technical support is fair and the team was helpful.
We previously used Hitachi, 3PAR, and HP but we had performance limitations.
The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on.
An initial return on investment is easily visible. But scalability to the cost doesn't really show the investment costs. We're investing too heavy on the cost without seeing the value of the array or the efficiencies.
I am not sure what the costs for the solution are but it is embedded in the solution support.
I rate this solution eight out of ten because I saw a lot of growth beyond the performance capabilities. I do, however, want to see improved costs, integration, and encryption. Those are the big ones.
My advice to others would be to use your pre-sale targets as the layouts, as well as all your mitigated controls and requirements. Then forecast the capacity and performance metrics prior to your purchase.
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.
Our primary use case for this solution is for tier 1 critical applications on-premises.
Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integration developed by Pure by integrating with vRealize.
With this program, all of our applications are able to perform faster and this enables us to provide faster platforms and services to our customers and employees. This solution is, therefore, a huge benefit to our IT organization.
VMware is basically the platform that our entire on-premise residence runs on and we incorporate vRealize, vOperations, and SRM. We're also looking at partnering with a backup solution Zerto, so it just gives us a lot more flexibility.
What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability.
In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput.
The stability of this solution is extremely solid.
I am very impressed by the scalability Pure offers.
I haven't had any need to make use of the technical support team yet.
We realized that we needed to invest in a new solution when we ran out of space. We didn't really switch over to Pure, we basically just put the non-critical apps on our Unity storage and brought in Pure to be the tier 1 for the performance of critical applications. We had a few programs on our shortlist, like Dell EMC and Pure. We actually have all three on-site currently.
The initial setup was very straightforward and we used FlairTech for the deployment.
I would like to see a reduction in the cost and speed, but I still think that this program deserves a ten out of ten rating. My advice to others would be, if you can afford it, get Pure.
We primarily use the solution for desktop virtualization.
I have IOPS and IOPS input/output. The reason that we have virtualization required for the media is because of high IOPS and we're able to maintain it with PR. The encryption is pretty high. We like the encryption right on the storage.
I was able to put up more VMs using Pure. I'm running almost 3,400 VMs and VDIs on Pure Storage. This improves our organization because we can just set it up and we forget about it. Everything works. We do not need to worry about storage or bandwidth issues. Its ease of use is also helpful. The setup is very easy with Pure.
I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side. I'd like to say "Hey, this particular VDI, what is the performance on that? How much IO is it using, what are the issues, what is CPU?" etc. I'd like to see that layout in the portal. That would be great for us.
The stability of the solution is very good. After five years, I've had very few problems. In terms of problems, for example, sometimes I've seen some spikes in iOS. It came from our end, not from Pure.
The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I've got an A-side and a B-side.
The initial setup was very straightforward. I did the GUI configuration after Pure finished their end, so it was very easy for me to set up. They just did the back end. I did the physical setup. They came back and did the configuration on the heads and I did the GUI set up with the network configuration, so everything else we set up ourselves. The setting up volume was very easy.
Pure assisted us with the implementation. It was a beautiful experience because we had an older model on which the head had to be upgraded. They did it seamlessly. I had no drops in my VMs.
There has definitely been an ROI. In four years I've never seen another storage vendor that offers what's called an Evergreen solution. I should have my refresh next year, so I'm getting a brand new a controller with a minimal cost. By then we're going back and replacing the whole thing.
I did a POC with three different vendors. Pure won out due to its resiliency, adaptability and the IOS and the feature sets. I was able to pull up all three discs at the same time and it never failed.
We are using the private cloud deployment model.
We are running VM on Pure. The main driver around VM on Pure is the number of IOPS I was able to get out of the two controllers. That was the main reason I chose Pure.
I'm not using any plugin with the vCenter or anything else like that.
The advice I would give to others considering implementation is to do your investigation, do a POC, and try it out. Find out which fits your needs. Also, isolate your workload. Don't mix your workloads if you want to do a successful VDI deployment.
I would give the solution nine out of ten.
We use this solution for general, primary storage in an on-premises deployment.
This solution has improved our performance. We run a lot of security tools that scan for different things, and this would greatly impact our other storage arrays that were either spinning disks or hybrid storage. Even though we did see an impact on Pure, none of our applications that ran on Pure had experienced any problems.
Part of it was to simply go to an all-flash technology that shielded us from that, but it was also that the toolset was very valuable. We could quickly see how we were performing. With some of the other vendors' tools, it's really hard to know where the problem is or how it's performing. You just see the results. You see the symptoms of the problems, and it's hard to come to understand where they are coming from.
This solution is simple to install.
It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity.
We use the Evergreen Storage model so that we will get upgrades as they are needed, or as we expand. It has helped us meet some financial challenges we had internally. In the past, we had to buy whole trays of disks from another vendor. It's too much money because we typically bill people ahead of the project. This solution has helped us meet the spending needs of our customers, and allow us to be more flexible.
I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers. We're going through a transformation where we are trying to run IT as a business. I need to know how much a VM costs, so I need to know how much the compute costs, how much the storage costs, and how much the backup costs. It's really difficult to go to every single product and try to decipher how much I've spent on each of the products. It's not always as easy as just dividing, saying well this must be the cost. I'd love to be able to get that data out of Pure and into vSphere so that I can just see, by VM, how much we should charge our customer.
The stability of this solution has been great. We did have a recent problem but it was probably poor capacity management on our part, where we allowed the system to become too full and it was unable to do its own correction. Besides that though, it runs great. It's very low-touch compared to some other vendors we have used in the past. In some cases, we used to really have to have an expert to run the storage network and now with Pure, that's not as important. Once it's installed and ready to go, it's very easy to maintain, very easy to provision new space, and very easy to expand the hardware. It's been transformational just in the way that you consume the product. It's a service now.
We tend not to do too much expansion but we can easily scale with the way we have structured our purchasing model on Pure. We can add small chunks as we need capacity, and we can once or twice a year add, which is kind on our budgets. It's kind on the IT people, as we don't have to fight our way through approvals because we're buying very massive amounts of expansion. It just makes it a little easier for us to do our own jobs internally.
I have never contacted technical support for this solution.
We needed to do a lifecycle replacement, and we also knew that at the time that flash was just really starting to take hold. We had used a hybrid model before and we weren't necessarily satisfied with that product from another vendor.
We evaluated three products and Pure just really outshines them on the pre-sales. On the financing side of it they were more flexible. Today I would look at it and say that it's much more of an OPEX model, similar to Cloud, and as we try to promote our own on-premise cloud, that continues to be important to us. We want to be transparent about cost all the way back to our customer.
My understanding is that the initial setup is generally easy compared to some other implementations we have done for storage in the past.
Pure's consultants assisted us with the deployment, and we liked those guys. Our pre-sales team is really great to work with and I have never heard any complaints about the
support teams. That's typically an indicator that it was an acceptable service.
Well, as a personal perspective and from my team's perspective, we've seen a lot of return on investment. It is difficult to quantify monetarily. For example, we had one business unit that used Pure, they were the first, and it was supposed to be an evaluation at the time. We were going to come back later and do further evaluation of storage, but it performed so well that we didn't even think of evaluating again. When we needed to replace the other arrays, we went straight to Pure and life-cycled them into Pure in every segment we have. I think we only have one non-Pure storage array in the environment now, so that speaks volumes when it has worked that well.
In IT, we don't necessarily care about costs. We care about how much of a headache it is to make sure it keeps running and it was a win on both sides. It worked well in all areas for us. The other vendors weren't yet there, as Pure hit the market faster. Maybe the other vendors are catching up but it's going to be harder for us to walk away from Pure now that we have it working well.
Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models.
Prior to choosing this solution, we evaluated Dell EMC. We looked at Nimble but they weren't all-flash at the time so they didn't last very long. I am sure that we probably looked at an HP product but I don't think we ever really wanted to do business with them.
After implementing this solution, we did see the performance impact. The performance had increased, although our customers did not see it. So as IT, on the backend, we could tell that something was happening but it didn't impact our customers. That is big for us because a lot of times, you have outages that IT recognizes that don't impact your customers. Those are the good outages. When you have an outage that impacts a customer then those are the bad days.
VMware greatly benefits our IT organization. We are about ninety-five percent virtualized, and it's made it tremendously easy to support the number of servers that we have with the number of staff that we have. It increases the ability to provision and de-provision. The whole server lifecycle is much simpler than when things used to be hardware only. It allows us to leverage our spending better because we can use the whole platform.
We have been running VMware for fifteen years, but the reason we have Pure there is so that we have a general workload platform there that can meet any and all needs for our customers. Only for very specific customers do we develop anything different. It gives us the power to run pretty much any workload besides maybe AMP-analytics or artificial intelligence, so it allows us to be very flexible. A lot of times, our customers don't know how to ask for the resources. They say "Just make it run". Our response is that we have a tool that is flexible and powerful enough to basically handle any request because our customers sometimes don't know how to size for their applications.
Running VMware on Pure helps because it makes it easy for IT. The virtualization makes it easy for IT to withstand outages, to do refreshes, and to make changes. With Pure, the all-flash gives you the speed to endure bumps in performance and it shields you against performance slips on your network. In the past, with spinning disk technology, you would feel the pain. You customers would experience the pain. We help the customers by not spending so much time dealing with the hardware. It's like "said it and forget it". We set it up, it's running and now we try to spend more time working with our customers to understand what they want to do and less time on the back end just trying to make sure that everything works.
I think we are using a plug-in with vCentre, which allows our system administrators to see into the storage. In the past, they would have to reach out to the storage team to try and understand if there are any performance problems. Now they can see that right away as they are troubleshooting, so instead of having to get two or three seniors together to troubleshoot, we can get one person in vCentre. They can do most of the high-level troubleshooting right away and only if it has developed into something they can't figure out, do they need to engage multiple people. This all allows us to respond quickly to the customer.
My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider the impact on your employees. You want your employees to be successful so that your business can be successful. Don't look at just cost because any salesman can come in and make a proposal that looks appealing to you, whether it's over a one year period or three year period or otherwise. Especially when you deal with the very large vendors like Dell/EMC, who can bundle so many products together, it makes it easy for you. You have to also consider that this tool was so easy for us to implement that instead of spending three to six months fighting implementation, it was in so quickly that we were on to other efforts. There are a lot more soft costs that would have been there that we were able to avoid.
To summarize, I would suggest that you think more than just about the money and the investment, but the service level. For us, we needed support at international locations, and we took all of that into account.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
We use the FlashArray X20, M20, M10. We have regulations against cloud, so we're mostly on-Prem. However, we do use Office 365 for email and we have Azure for development on another team but I don't manage that team.
Our primary use case of this solution is to house data stores on virtual machines.
It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past and the support is extremely quick and responsive.
The ease of management, cutting edge technology, and higher availability benefits our IT organization.
We are running VMware on Pure. The main driver for this was the speed of the virtual machines and the ease of administration with Pure is pretty seamless.
The joint solution has helped my organization. Cody from Pure Storage has been a really big advocate for cutting edge technologies within Pure Storage. He's given us as a customer a lot of tools from his social media to help us do our jobs easier. That's been amazing. It's been awesome for us. The support's been great. Our SC has been great, and our sales reps have been great. Performance is awesome.
The most valuable features of this solution are the speed, ease of use, administration, and the support model.
We have the VMware plugin for Pure storage. It's the plugin that allows us to create a data store. It's super simple but we use it. It's in vCenter. The integrations have helped by making it quicker to deploy data storage.
If we have a LUN that is ready to have a data store put on it, rather than us having to give access to certain people to create data stores, they can just do it directly from vCenter and they won't have to have access to the array. It makes it easier. It's a little faster.
From a software perspective, it's been great. They've done a lot of things with VM integration from the Pure side. I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution.
The costs could be improved. They still have a very good value proposition. I'm not arguing that they're too expensive, but if they want to continue to increase market share, they're going to have to come up with better ways to get the cost down. The availability of QLC NAND is much cheaper, albeit at a higher latency.
Stability is very high. It's been amazing. They do non-disruptive upgrades that I have never seen anything like in the industry. For us, we can do upgrades in the middle of the day. We wouldn't accept that kind of risk, but we've accepted a lot more risks than we should using Pure and I've never been let down.
Scalability is very good considering the architecture that they're built around, which is the scale-up architecture. It's very good.
Before Pure, we had EMC VNX, and we were having the entire array reboot and we would lose a server room at a remote casino. All VMs would go down and have to reboot because the entire array would reboot. That happened at least three or four times and then that's what made us decide to pay for what I would say is around triple the cost, just to guarantee that that doesn't happen. To my organization, money is less of the concern as the availability. Nobody wants to get that phone call. We had EMC, it was bad. Support wasn't great. I wouldn't say it was bad but it wasn't great. What put us over the top was that Pure is stable.
The initial setup is insanely easy. It's so easy our sales guy can do it with Pure.
We used a reseller for the integration. The company was Pinnacle Business Solutions from Oklahoma city. It was pretty good. We were happy with it.
We absolutely have seen ROI in two areas. The ease of management has made it so easy that we don't have to have extra storage people or systems people. The data reduction has been very generous. We're getting roughly three and a half to one data reduction across all arrays. That's basically three VNXs right there, and three VNXs would cost more than a Pure FlashArray. That's a pretty decent return.
We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars.
I wasn't a decision-maker in the decision-making process. Had I been, I would've considered Nimble All Flash Array. I wouldn't consider anything else. Everything else that I know of in the storage industry is not worth us having insanely low latency for that. That's not our number one concern.
They're the leader in the industry and everyone's chasing them. They're a cloud-native array that no one's ever done and their storage is excellent. Even if they weren't one of the fastest arrays in the entire industry, I would use them for their support model and ease of use.
The advice I would give to someone considering this solution is to look past the sticker shock which is return on investment. I would look at data reduction. I would definitely buy into what people say about their support, which is excellent. I would say that your company, whether you realize it or not, is going to benefit from being industry-leading, pushing the edge from a technology perspective, the ease of management, administration, and even the setup. It is well worth it.
I would rate it a nine and a half out of ten. I would rate it that high simply because I think if they can take advantage of QLC NAND and bring the costs down into a different market, it would be perfect. If they wanted to do a hyper-converged solution with this type of support that they have, they would be unbeatable. They're already unbeatable, but QLC NAND is going to bring the costs down for this all-flash architecture, and if you can cut the price of half of the flash array, you can be selling to small, medium business much quicker. It would be fantastic.
Our primary use case of this solution is for Citrix.
We use the on-premise deployment model.
Our previous SAN storage environment never performed with the same levels as this does. The performance levels and the storage have improved my organization.
It has benefited our IT organization because we're a 95% virtualized environment and we're able to allocate resources as needed and manage our whole infrastructure that way.
We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver for this was to isolate our Citrix environment from the general SAN storage board.
The joint solution has benefited my organization in the way that it isolates it, giving peak performance and does not share it with other environments that have any infrastructures or competing resources.
The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution.
It has been very reliable.
We have had no issues with scaling up to whatever demands that we have.
I haven't had a lot of direct interaction with their support but VMware is very good.
We replaced another Legacy Solution. We wanted to maintain its isolated capabilities.
The initial setup was straightforward.
We haven't seen ROI.
We evaluated EMC and HP.
I would rate it an eight out of ten. The storage has been very good. I don't know that it's a large enough deployment across the boards to know how it would fit in the rest of the enterprise.
We are a system integrator and this is one of the solutions that we provide for our clients.
For our most recent customer, this solution is being used to host VMware workloads in an on-premises deployment.
Our customer has been able to migrate some of their cloud services back on-premises, which is of benefit because they were having some performance issues in the cloud.
The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity.
It is easy to deploy and it's all-flash, so it's very fast.
As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it.
This solution seems to be fairly reliable. I haven't had any issues personally, or outages or anything of that nature.
The flash array scales up well, but it doesn't really scale-out. I think that's more where Pure's FlashBlade comes into play. You'd have to replace it with the next model up controller, in order to scale.
I haven't had much to do with technical support. Typically, we'll deploy it for our customer and hand it over, and then they'll manage it from there.
Prior to this solution, our customer used Dell EMC, but there were several problems. They were not happy with it because of the performance of the array, and also the complexities around engaging the support teams. Their solution had also reached end-of-life, so they had to move to a new platform anyway. Ultimately, they wanted to move to something simpler than their existing platform, so they moved to Pure.
This initial setup and deployment are pretty straightforward.
For the setup, it is very simple to populate the information. We had a workbook that was provided by Pure to give to the customer to gather all of the details. That made the implementation very straightforward.
The one thing that was a little bit annoying was the fact that we still had to come back through Pure to get the software. A lot of our other partners, we can just download it ourselves, and as long as we've got the process, we can go and do it ourselves. But, in this scenario, we still had to come back through Pure to actually get the software.
We implement this solution for our customers. We are a partner and we're certified to do deployments.
I think that our customer has seen ROI because their existing solution was getting into extended maintenance, so it was costing a lot of money for that service. Also, with less time spent managing that old array, they had more time to do other things.
In addition to this solution, our customer considered another Dell EMC option, as well as one by Hitachi. They chose this because of the simplicity, and the fact that it is all-flash meant that they didn't have to worry about performance.
VMware benefits our IT organization because we are partners, so we deploy VMware services. It also helps our customers make their applications more readily available and reliable.
We are using the VMware plug-in for Pure. It's meant more rapid provisioning of volumes for VMware, and it gives the customer more visibility of the storage.
Both the ease of setup and the reliability of the array makes it quite simple to manage for the customer.
My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider that things are changing a lot in the industry at the moment. So, obviously, looking for things that are going to take less time to manage, are easy to implement, and give a good return on investment are important success criteria.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
We use the private on-premise deployment model. Our primary use case of this solution is for virtual machines. We just use it as storage for our vCenter environment.
It has improved my organization in the way that we have high reliability and faster access to our data.
It has improved our IT organization in the way that we are able to provide systems to our customers quickly and provide high availability and reliability for their applications.
We are running VMware on Pure. Our main driver was speed. The joint solution has helped our organization through speed of delivery and speed of applications.
The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution.
In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption.
It's highly stable. It's one of our biggest successes.
It's been really easy to expand storage with no downtime. It's one of the things we like about it.
Their technical support is great.
We knew we needed to switch to this solution because the industry is going away from spinning disks. We were on spinning disks, and the whole industry is going away from that.
We are still using IBM but we are not happy with it. IBM has taken old technology and tried to make it new. Pure has started from the ground up and built it.
The integration was straightforward.
Pure Storage did the integration for us.
Our costs are around $100,000.
We also evaluated Nimble, EMC, and HPE 3PAR. We ended up going with Pure because of the architecture, speed, and support.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for its reliability, speed, and support. The support is awesome.
We use the on-premises deployment model of this solution. Our primary use case is for virtualization.
Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications.
It benefits our IT organization in the way that it drives down costs, allows us to migrate servers from one data center to another, and gives the flexibility that having bare metal servers wouldn't allow.
We run VMware on Pure and our main driver was for cost and performance.
The most valuable feature is the speed.
We are taking advantage of the VMware integrations developed by Pure.
As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use.
The stability seems good. It doesn't go down very often.
I haven't contacted their technical support firsthand.
At the time we were evaluating a whole bunch of different solution platforms, and a lot of times it came down to use case, workload, and cost.
We are using this solution in conjunction with EMC. We might still be using both for different workloads.
We used a reseller for the integration.
I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's a solid product but all products can improve. It's technology, it's not always going to do what you need it to do. It can go down from time to time, but it's been pretty solid so far.
I would advise someone considering this solution to talk to a Pure Storage engineer to see if it fits your needs.
We use the hybrid cloud deployment model of this solution and use both AWS and Microsoft Azure as our cloud providers. Our primary use case for this solution is for mixed workloads.
We are running VMware on Pure. Pure gave us the storage because we're a partner so we're running on it.
The seamless integration into the public cloud has improved my organization. It also benefits my IT organization in many ways. We sell it, we use it, and it makes us faster.
The joint solution, VMware on Pure, has helped our organization. It's tested a lot of stuff and been put in production. It's also used for customers.
Our organization takes advantage of the VMware integrations developed by Pure, any APIs that are available to be using.
It offers seamless integrations and has made it easy for us to do. It's a simple product.
The performance and the Evergreen maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution.
In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google.
The stability is excellent.
The scalability is excellent and is very easy.
Their support is very good, first-class.
We switched to this solution because of the timing. We are using this solution in conjunction with a solution from EMC.
The initial setup was straightforward. It only took us a couple of days to set it up. It was so simple.
We are an integrator and reseller so we did the implementation ourselves on one team.
We also evaluated NetApp. It was between NetApp and Pure. The reason we went with Pure Storage wasn't a technical decision, rather, it was just purely cost and the Evergreen maintenance that Pure provides. It just makes it easier when we have a new drive and a new chassis every three years.
I would rate it a ten out of ten. It's simple. It's got great support and it's fast. It does what it's supposed to do. My advice to someone considering this solution would be to test it and build a proof of concept.
Our primary use for this solution is storage. We have a private cloud deployment.
Using this solution has improved our consolidation ratio and it saves us a lot of space.
The most valuable feature of this solution is the support.
This solution is easy to use.
The price of this solution could be improved.
So far, the stability of this solution has been really good.
The scalability of this solution is really good.
Technical support for this solution is excellent.
Prior to this solution, we were using the IBM Storage Network. The support was not very good, and the feature set was very limited.
We needed something that was simpler to manage and maintain.
The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.
We used an integrator for our deployment, and our experience with them was good.
In terms of space savings, we were able to save a lot of money.
We evaluated a second IBM-based storage solution, and after that, Pure was the second one that we looked at. We heard so many good things about it that we leaned towards that way.
Using VMware has improved our IT organization by providing a stable virtualization platform.
We are running VMware on Pure, which was driven by our interest in consolidation. It has helped us by saving space over using less dense storage.
We have the Pure plug-in for the VMware environment. It has helped us with information monitoring.
For anybody comparing this solution to similar products, my advice is to look into the numbers. This product is definitely worth the price, and it is easy to use.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
We use it as our primary application driver for all of storage reasons in our data center for both our corporate and production environments.
We just did all-flash, and all-flash is better than anything disk related.
This was our first all-flash storage enclosure, so we saw huge boost in performance for all of our servers. It has definitely helped us in terms of performance, which is what we needed it for.
We don't have to build any type of storage device, which takes a long time for an IT guy to do. For storage, this makes it much easier when it is set up, because it can be done almost the same day that it is purchased.
The deduplication and compression are its most valuable feature. They have done a really good job, as they were able to shrink down 15 gigs into five gigs.
It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use.
I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier.
It has been stable. It has been running pretty much flawlessly, except for one power supply which died, and that was it. That power supply was then replaced by Pure Storage. The replacement that Pure Storage sent us did have a bit of an issue when it was placed, but after a tech went in there and fixed it, that was it.
I try to go in there and at least keep an eye on it every once in a while, but it mostly runs on its own. There is no real need to do anything.
We haven't really scaled up.
The technical support did a good on the one issue that we contact them for (the power supply).
We didn't have all-flash. We needed a lot of performance for all of our production environment, and for everything else that was connecting to us. That is what basically drove us to Pure Storage.
The setup was very good. For my environment, which is a cluster environment, they were able to pick that up and do that (and iSCSI) very well.
I had no issues with upgrading our firmware controllers.
You are buying a premium product, and it is worth it.
We were looking at Dell EMC. We were looking at a couple of other vendors, including NetApp. We decided on Pure Storage because of the deduplication and compression that they were advertising.
If you are researching Pure Storage, make sure you are getting the right amount of space set up for what you are doing because the compression will affect how much you are getting overall. You might think you are only getting ten terabytes or fifteen terabytes, but it will be a lot less.
We use it for Hyper-V on my end and OpenStack on the production end. The integration for Hyper-V was very easy. There was pretty much no effort to do it.
The UI is pretty good. I don't use it as often as I probably should, but it usually just runs on its own.
Anytime that you need fast storage.
The back-end data reporting for Pure Storage is phenomenal. The data that you can see on the performance of your customers' array, so you can be proactive about upgrades or enhancements, and is a phenomenal tool to have access to as a partner. I haven't seen this type of stuff out of anything of the other storage systems.
Pure Storage has a lot of statistics which help out with capacity planning.
As a partner administrating the solution, the back-end reporting has positively affected the time involved in managing and administrating.
Performance is its most valuable feature. There is nobody else who is coming close, not that I have seen.
They are on the money with the predictive performance analytics. They claim high performance, and they do have it.
There are things that they are doing with the interface all the time to make it better. It is not the easiest to work with, but it is getting close. As far as interfaces, I always liked Nimble's interface the best. Though, Nimble's interface has been stuck in the mud for the last three to four years since HPE took them over. There hasn't been a whole lot of changes to Nimble. Whereas, Pure Storage has been continuing to improve, which is pretty good. It is not top of the market, but it is getting there.
The UI reporting is adequate.
The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier.
I can't think of a time I've had a problem with a Pure Storage array. You might get drive fail once in a while, but it has never been a problem. Usually, that will get reported in the partner dashboard and we will get an alert. Pure Storage will also get an alert.
Nimble used to be the best if you had a part fail. It would be on your doorstep the next morning. It just showed up, every time. No questions. They have lost some of that with HPE.
Pure Storage is still pretty good. I haven't heard any customers tell me that they just had a part just show up without even knowing anything was down, like I used to hear about with Nimble. However, usually they will get some type of an alert from Pure Storage, such as, "Looks like you lost a drive. Do you want us to send someone out or a power supply?" Then, get it out.
They are at least 30 percent faster than their closest competitor. It depends always on the differences on how you scale. I had customers get NetApp, who couldn't get anything out of it. They finally added another storage shelf and started getting some decent numbers. Well, instead of adding a couple more storage shelves, I could do that with one Pure Storage array. What if I don't need that much storage and don't want to have five shelves? You don't need that with Pure Storage, because one shelf will strain.
I don't have any massive Pure Storage installs. Probably the biggest ones that I have been apart of are five or six arrays.
I have at least three customers who have had other stores solutions and installed Pure Storage. There is no comparison. Their old storage solutions have now been relegated to archive, or they have ripped them out.
The initial setup can be challenging. If everything works the way it a supposed to, which it often does, then it is fine. However, when your encounter problems and you have to get into those local admin accounts, that can be a pain. You have to call tech, they need to look up what the password is, then send it to you, which can be a pain.
I would like to see a bit different setup. It would be nice if they have something where you can plug into the thing and see an HTTPS address, like with a bench setup. A couple of other vendors has upped their own Layer 2 protocol for discovery. As long as you are on the same network segment, it pops right up and you can do the base config, then you are ready to log into it in about five minutes. Pure Storage's process is not bad, but it could still be better.
I have never had a problem with a firmware or controller update.
With the pricing, they have, it is pretty competitive to spinning disk.
I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it.
The competing vendors are NetApp, Nimble, and IBM. I don't run into a lot of Dell EMC. Customers pick Pure Storage for performance.
There is no comparison performance-wise. I also install Nimble for storage, and Nimble has flash and all-flash, as well. However, if you are looking at the performance numbers, these Pure Storage is just killing it.
I have integrated the solution with vCenter. There is nothing remarkable about it. It works. I have no complaints.
I think all vendors have a pretty decent platform for inline deduplication and compression. There are always little differences here and there, but I haven't seen anything remarkable with Pure Storage.
It is storage for our database system.
The access in our system is more reliable and provides our users better speed.
For flash storage, the speed access is its most valuable feature.
The solution’s inline deduplication and compression is very good.
The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before.
There are a lot of things to improve.
They make a reliable storage. We use it as a very critical system, and we don't want any corruption on our system.
Since our design is a high availability design, it can work 24/7.
The product is scalable.
The technical support is very fast.
Previously, we used Oracle, Hitachi, and SAN storage. We switched because we needed storage that could be accessed and support our system very quickly.
The initial setup was straightforward in configuring the database and storage.
We used a Pure Storage partner for the deployment. They were very good, supportive, and responsive.
We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing.
The features that we wanted have already been added.
We integrated the product with VMware and vCenter. It was a very simple configuration to integrate the VMs and have them read our storage.
It provides better performance for our desktops.
It has positively affected our space requirements.
We have reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.
We haven't done as much capacity planning as we should have. I am sure it would help us.
The most valuable feature is its performance.
The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are very good.
The upgrade architecture is very good.
Our data reduction rates, latency, and availability are all good.
The stability is very good. The stability and performance are the best things about the solution.
The scalability is very good.
The technical support is very good.
The initial setup was straightforward.
We have undergone an upgrade of firmware.
We have seen a reduction in TCO.
The cost has room for improvement.
Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade.
We did an evaluation of Dell EMC, Pure Storage, and NetApp.
I would recommend trying it. We like the product, and it works well.
We use it for our financial core storage.
It has been a good product. It has a lot of good features on it.
Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both. Therefore, we are NCA compliant.
The solution has minimized the time involved in managing and administrating our storage.
It has helped by shrinking our space requirements.
The encryption is its most valuable feature.
The solution’s inline deduplication and compression are pretty good.
Its ability to simplify storage seems good.
The stability is very good. It has been stable.
The scalability is very good.
The technical support is very good.
We need the encryption at REST. That is why they wanted this solution.
We used an integrator, Jack Henry, for the deployment.
The cost has room for improvement.
We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, and Dell EMC.
Look into Pure Storage because it seems to be a good solution.
It's the back-end storage for all our virtual environments.
The performance is great.
The predictive performance analytics are good.
It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them.
It has been scalable so far.
We have also used NetApp, but not for all-flash. This is our first all-flash solution.
We were looking for an all-flash solution, and Pure Storage is the best solution right now.
Just give it a try.
In our company, we implemented a Pure Storage FlashArray for our VM virtualized environment.
We do have vCenter integrated with Pure Storage. We use that application to deploy virtual volumes on our Pure Storage solution. We are still in the beginning stages, so we only have four virtual systems running on it. However, in the coming months, we will be migrating the bulk of all of our VMs over to vCenter and Pure Storage.
The inline deduplication and compression have exceeded our expectations. The rep from Pure Storage kept promising us 4:1, and we were very skeptic about getting that. We were anticipating mainly getting 1.5:1. So far, with the VMs, we have been running closer to 5:1 deduplication and compression, which is amazing to us.
It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done. With the old HPE system, there were quite a few more steps to have to deal with. Therefore, it has definitely reduced our management.
The simplicity is the most valuable feature. I do not have to deal with how to provision RAIDs or manage disks. I just plugin my disk groups, and it does it all on the back-end. I just identify the size and volume that I want and the host that I want to deploy it to, then it just shows up and works. It has been incredibly simple to use, and it is incredibly fast.
Simpler is always better in my mind. Just making it quicker and easier to deploy, then also making it so that there is less chance of error.
We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter.
I know that Pure Storage is working on this. They already told us, "Hereon out, we will be developing and only deploying HTML5 plugins." However, it's currently only in beta testing right now from what they've said. Getting that plugin out would definitely help us, because we don't have flash, or use it very actively. If we had that plugin in sooner rather that later, it would be awesome.
We have only had it installed for a few weeks.
To early to comment.
We are hoping that we get to scale up, at some point. My initial impression is that it should be very easy for us to expand just by replacing the disk groups or by adding a shelf. As far as my impressions of being able to scale, I think it will be pretty simple. Until we get to that point, I don't know.
We haven't really seen much on the performance side, because we only have five VMs in there right now. I can definitely say that it is extremely fast. It is much faster than our legacy HPE spinning disks. However, until we get a lot more servers on it, I won't know if we going to hit a bottleneck or cap it out at all. I don't think we will, but until we get more on there, I won't know.
The technical support is very easy to work with.
We are replacing legacy HPE EVA and legacy Hyper-V systems moving to VMware with Pure Storage, as our storage solution.
We have a very old HPE EVA system. We knew that we needed an upgrade, because our system is 10 years old and out of support. We brought in a number of consultants to talk to us about whether we should upgrade our Hyper-V system or move to VMware. Thre or four consultants recommended (almost all of them) moving to all-flash. They highlighted Pure Storage as one of the industry leaders in all-flash storage. That is why we started working with Pure.
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had a Pure Storage Rep onsite to help us install it. They had their installation guide with the steps outlining how to do this and that: x, y, z type steps. It only took us two hours to get it out-of-the-box, in the rack, turned on, added to vCenter, and have our first VM on the system.
We had a Pure Storage rep come onsite and help us install the system. We had it up and running in just two hours. Then, he turned us around and had us enter a ticket to do a firmware upgrade on our system, because it was three versions old.
The technical support was very responsive. They emailed us and scheduled it a couple days out. They talked us through how to enable the Remote Assist tunnel. We had that up and running, then the day came for the upgrade. They emailed us and asked if they could continue. Then 20 minutes later, they emailed saying, "Okay it is done. We will monitor it for 24 hours. Let us know if you have any problems." It was just amazing to me, because I don't have to touch it. I don't have to look at it. We had no downtime nor interruption to service, and yet the upgrade was done.
We have already seen ROI.
We have upgraded our legacy Fibre Channel system from 8 gig up to 32 gig with our Pure Storage. By just copying the first few VMs off to that, I was floored at how fast it would write and read to that system. I am really excited to see once I get more VMs on there how well it will handle all of it.
We just barely bought our Pure Storage, so we haven't been able to use Evergreen Storage subscription at all yet. However, it's a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm doing right now again.
We did evaluate the HPE 3PAR and HPE all-flash systems, because we were a legacy HPE environment, where everything we had was HPE. Beyond that, we didn't really investigate any other vendors. We read some white papers on Dell EMC, but we didn't talk to anybody about them.
Pure was very responsive when we talked to them when we were just investigating on what to buy. They were always the first ones to get back to us and talk to us. They came onsite multiple times to help us with any questions that we had. That level of customer experience was really helpful in making a decision.
We decided to go with Pure Storage more for the Evergreen Storage subscription. With Pure Storage, it was a little bit more to initially get it in, but then you have the Evergreen Storage subscription, which is essentially less than the support on HPE, and that came with the upgrades down the road. HPE subscription support would only cover failures. It didn't have any upgrades built in to it. So, if five years down the road, we went with the HPE system then we would have had to buy whole new storage array to upgrade it. That really played a lot into us wanting to go with Pure Storage. We didn't want to have to do this multiple times.
I have made recommendations to friends who work for other companies that are looking for storage right now to just go ahead and buy Pure Storage. From what I have seen, it will beat out any other storage solution.
From the performance that I've seen, the simplicity of how to use it, the responsiveness, and customer experience, it is one of the best companies that I have worked with so far.
I was actually branded as a SAN environment when we got Pure Storage. For me, it was learning that a SAN environment wasn't necessarily as complex as I thought it was. You have vendors out there, like Pure Storage, who makes things super simple and easy to use.
We use it as reliable storage.
The virtual machines hosted on this storage are much faster. It boots so quickly that it is almost inconvenient.
The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially.
Reliability and performance are its most valuable feature.
Its ability to simplify storage is great.
I look at the performance metrics periodically, which are spectacular.
The stability is tremendous.
The scalability is great.
The technical support is great.
We were previously using a NAS, and it was not performing.
The initial setup was straightforward. I had done the preparation first. I had a good relationship with the presales engineer. It went as expected.
We did use an integrator for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.
We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI.
We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature.
It is an excellent choice, if you can afford it.
We evaluated Tegile, Dell EMC, and Pure Storage. We chose Pure Storage for performance and cost reasons.
We have integrated the solution with VMware and vCenter. It went well.
The solution’s inline deduplication and compression works fine.
I don't have the need for the predictive performance analytics.
The company seems to be engineering oriented, and I appreciate that.
It is for storage.
It gives us capacity planning.
It saves us on administrative work.
The most valuable feature is its speed.
It is easy to use and manage.
The time to value of the solution is pretty quick.
The stability is good.
The scalability is good.
The technical support is great.
The technology that we had was outdated. We were using HPE SAN.
The initial setup was straightforward. We just followed the information on the screen: click, click, click.
The start up process is very easy.
We haven't seen ROI yet.
The licensing is $100,000.
Darktrace, which we are also using.
I would recommend buying it.
As a customer, we use them as our Tier 1 storage arrays. It has been amazing. It's extremely fast, reliable, and resilient.
We have done a lot of different things with Pure Storage. We have included some real-time analytics that we developed for our eCommerce website and run those on FlashBlade. We used FlashBlade as it was the only storage platform fast enough to keep up with that data flow.
We are able monitor I/O, latency, read/write, capacity used, and all the different metrics that the Pure gives us the ability to monitor.
It definitely affected the ability to capacity plan, but in a good way. We have all the visibility into the capacity, forecasting, and all the metrics that the solution provides us with.
It takes drastically less time to manage and administer the solution. We would have about three or four people who were dedicated just to work on storage with only one guy who could actually do the Hitachi replication, because it used old archaic technology called HORCM files. In the Pure Storage realm, this is not true. All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it.
When I was a customer, the most valuable feature is the ease of use.
It is the whole package: The ease of use, cost, and the ability for it to perform at a level that traditional storage arrays just can't compete with.
It simplifies storage. In the old days, you had to go and decide what ports were going to go to what workloads, which was a lot of work. You had to set up replication. Now, everything is just a few clicks away. It is set up exactly like you would want it to be. That is what it does. It simplifies and optimizes the solution.
I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side.
Some of the FlashBlade protocols could use a little love. There are obviously some new enhancements. There is no dedupe on the FlashBlade. It is compression only. There is no replication. So, Pure is going to try to partner that product with ObjectEngine to bring in some of those features, and I'm not sure how all of that will work out. I'm not familiar with ObjectEngine yet, but we'll see how it goes.
The stability is great. We have had no issues. We have never had an issue or outage that has been related to Pure Storage.
We decided how big of a failure domain that we wanted to entertain. We decided to split three into what could have been one single controller interface system. However, at some point, if we lose 500 terabytes, what does that do to our company? Now, we have things like active clusters which mitigate a lot of these issues, but people still need to be wary about how they design their failure domains.
The support is great. The support has been amazing.
We thought we we going to go with the new version of Hitachi, and everything was going to fine: Lift, shift and replace with the new one. What we started doing was exploring the marketplace, then figuring out, "Is this the best option for us? Could it be simpler?" Because the Hitachi was a tank, but it was not simple to use. It performed very well, but it did not perform like an all-flash array does.
The analytics are great. Previously, we had Hitachi solutions, and it was very hard to understand what was happening with the array. One of the great things about the Pure Storage solution is you can instantly know just by logging in or checking Pure1. You can do it on your phone. Hitachi doesn't have anything like that. It's amazing that you can get this type of visibility from your storage array. All the analytics feed up into Pure1, and you can just see them whenever you want.
It used to be that people would buy Pure Storage arrays and they would use it for a single instance application, like an Oracle database. We never did that. We used the product to replace our entire giant Hitachi G1000 storage arrays. Everything that we had went to the Pure Storage arrays. We had three giant M70s that are now X90s which house everything the company was running when I was a customer.
The initial setup was very simple. They came in before lunch, and we had it up after lunch. Then, we were already starting to move workloads to it after that.
We have upgraded firmware controllers and physical controllers. It works exactly like they say it does, which is the best part. You don't even notice. Business runs as usual. You can replace a controller, it fails over to the other controller, and everything runs smooth as butter.
We used Sirius Computer Solutions for the deployment. They have been our partner and VAR for a long time. They know our environment very well and were with us every step of the way.
From a footprint perspective, we used to have big giant racks of storage on both sides of the data center. We would have to plan and have a hole where the future one would go. Now, we don't have to do that at all. They are just sitting in the rack right next to it.
We have a seen a reduction in TCO. It is definitely a cost-effective solution for us. We have seen ROI.
We have an Evergreen Storage subscription. We like it a lot. We recently upgraded from the M-series to the X-series FlashArrays. We used the Evergreen Storage solution and expanded our footprint.
We evaluated Hitachi, who was our current vendor. We evaluated Dell EMC for the VMAX and XtremIO. Then, we evaluated Pure Storage.
We are also a NetApp customer, so we evaluated them. However, we don't run any block storage on NetApp, only files.
Do a fair evaluation. Be objective, look at the different technologies, and use the technologies. See what they look like and what you will to have to deal with when you're using the products. It's easy to make a decision based on bullet points, but it's hard to make a decision on actual use of the actual technology.
We are a Chef shop, so we integrate it into Chef and VMware, vRA, and vRO. We also use all of the plug-ins. The integration is easy, simple, and seamless.
For most of the workloads, the solution’s inline deduplication and compression has performed fine. We had a few workloads that were already precompressed, so when you put those workloads on top of a storage system that does compression and dedupe, they don't compress again. So, they tend to eat up a little storage. Therefore, we specifically targeted some third-party applications, like IDERA SQL Safe, and tried to remove them from the environment. This way Pure Storage could then compress and dedupe those SQL backup files.
We are from Texas. Power is like ten cents a kilowatt. Texans apparently don't care that power is cheap. From a power requirement, it definitely has used less power, but we didn't use that as a metric to look at.
Biggest lesson learned: Why didn't I switch sooner?
It is our core storage.
The manageability: Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators.
It has been nice to be able to see capacity and project usage. That has been helpful.
With the Pure1 analytics, we are able to identify whether the hardware that we are using today will meet our needs for tomorrow. That is probably the biggest thing for us. Also, the analytics has been great.
Manageability is its most valuable feature.
It is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good. We don't have to be experts in managing the storage. We can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product.
It has strong statistics and historical metrics with Pure1. Therefore, it has been everything that we have needed out of a platform.
We have undergone upgrades of controllers with mixed results. Some have gone well, and some have not gone so well.
We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals.
It has been stable. We haven't had any issues with stability. Though, when we have had issues, we have leveraged support and not experienced issues.
It is highly scalable. In particular, with the ability to view analytics and some of capacity planning, that helps us in this regard as well.
The technical support is strong and responsive. I would say response is probably the most important.
The initial setup was straightforward.
We worked with a field engineer on the deployment. Prerequisites and those kinds of things were shared and identified ahead of time. There wasn't a whole lot of guesswork.
The solution has reduced the time involved in managing and administrating our storage, which is one of its primary appeals. We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.
The solution’s inline deduplication and compression work as advertised. I haven't had any issues with them.
We have used the predictive performance analytics. It has worked for us.
Biggest lesson learned: Having a strong support function is critical, especially when you're depending on it on an ongoing basis for maintenance and administration.
The primary use case is for any server and database that has high I/O demands on disk.
It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have.
Our Pure Storage unit is really small, so we just move what we have to it.
We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that. Therefore, we would like to see improvements with the way it integrates with vCenter for picking up dedupe.
The stability is good. It hasn't gone down since we've had it.
From what we've been told, it looks like it would be really scalable if we purchased more. The licensing and scalability patterns are really cost-effective. We don't have to rebuy things in different tiers to just continue on, so we like that.
The technical support is really good. They are really responsive. For the call that we had, we had a call back within 15 to 20 minutes.
We noticed a dramatic increase in application performance when moving it from NetApp to Pure Storage.
Pure Storage seemed more cost-effective than NetApp. When we did our POC, we saw big performance gains between all-flash on NetApp and all-flash on Pure Storage. It was significantly better.
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. They set it all up for us.
They pretty much manage the firmware upgrades for us, and they've gone well so far.
We dealt directly with Pure Storage engineers for the deployment, and our experience was good.
We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership.
It is cheaper than NetApp.
There were several vendors we looked at. We also looked at Nimble, but we did not do at PoC of them.
We just liked the way Pure was pitched to us overall.
Get a PoC and see how it works out for you. See if you see an improvement with your apps and go from there.
We really like it. It is really speedy.
We use virtual servers on there.
We have tons of capacity on it.
It is fast and reliable. It works.
For three years, we haven't had any trouble with it. It is reliable. Once it is installed, off it goes.
The scalability is handy. You can just add more drives. They automatically synchronize. You don't have to do anything but snap them in there. It is pretty easy.
I can't even remember dealing with technical support.
We had tons of old physical servers and needed the storage room. It was more cost-effective to set this solution up for running our VM environment off it.
The solution is bigger and faster than what we had before.
The initial setup was pretty straightforward and simple.
We used Compunet for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.
The solution has reduced our power usage.
The solution could be cheaper.
There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it.
I would recommend to go with this solution.
We have integrated the solution with VMware, and the process was seamless. We've never had any trouble with it.
Flash drives make an amazing difference.
We attach it to a Cisco UCS for VMware.
The product has helped with speed. Previously, on disk, we would see latency issues with our SQL boxes. With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration.
The predictive performance analytics are great. I get everything I need to know: IOPS, latency, etc. The tech support works with me if I have any questions that need to be answered.
The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it.
I would like to have better training. I would like to have an hour class or more online training.
It is very stable.
The only thing that we have ever had an issue with is connecting to the Cloud Mediator. Because we run in an active cluster situation, it has to connect to the cloud. Recently, we lost connection to the cloud, so it sent us alerts, making us all worried that our active clusters would separate. However, when the time came, it worked really well, and we were fine. Then, tech support fixed it, and it was better.
With scalability, you just add more shelves and buy new controllers. If you have the Evergreen Storage subscription, then you get new controllers every year.
I can buy more storage, if needed. However, with the dedupe and compression, it will be a while before I need to.
The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to setup because everything was brand new. We had brand new Cisco UCS servers with the FIs that plugged right in. It was seamless.
We have experienced an upgrade of firmware controllers. The process is very easy.
Before my space was a whole entire rack. Now, it is 4U or 6U. Space has been nice, because now I can put other things in that rack.
The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years.
I would recommend Pure Storage. We have already done the research.
I could plan to do capacity on my Pure1 storage, and the deduplication works very well with it. For VMware, it has been a humongous savings. Once we get our file system onto it, we may see the dedupe work better, but we haven't got that far yet.
We have integrated the solution with VMware, which is great.
Our compression rates are 4:8:1. We are using it for VMware and our Oracle solution. It's a little higher on the Oracle solution. However, it has been great.
For the IOPS, I don't think we ever really hit anywhere near what we thought we were going to hit. You always think you need more than you need.
I have found the whole deduplication and compression process enlightening.
We have all-flash for our SQL environment.
The product added speed to our SQL environment, so we receive a bit better compression. It did give us a little more space when I moved my SQL environment off the competitor onto Pure Storage. Therefore, I obtained a bit of space and saw an increase in performance.
They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth.
I like the five-year controller upgrade, easy-to-use interface, and performance.
They do a good job at ease of use for the interface. I don't have a big team, so its easy user interface has helped us be able to manage our data better.
I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates.
The product has not gone down in a year. So, I would say that it is stable. We haven't seen any high spikes in read/write latency.
Scalability seems pretty simplistic. You just buy more drives and slap them in the box, then tack it onto your current storage pool. It seems like it would be pretty easy to scale out.
However, I don't know about scaling up. I don't think they do extra data shelves, so you would have to buy a whole new unit.
We have only used the technical support for upgrades. They respond very quickly and are efficient at what they do.
A local VAR was talking about our challenges and some different solutions to take care of it. Pure just seemed like it could fit the bill.
We have Tegile and HPE 3PAR in our environment.
The initial setup was very straightforward. We were about to get the installation done within two hours.
We have done a firmware upgrade for the OS. We clicked the button to place the call in with support. They remote in with a time that we agreed upon to upgrade the solution. We have never had any problems with it.
We used the reseller for deployment, who came in and worked with our storage guy to deploy the solution. The reseller company was Sirius Computer Solutions. My local rep and his engineer were the ones who came in to install it, and it was a perfect experience. They are whom we have always bought storage through. We have never had any problems with them.
We watch latency, then our I/Os. We care about how much we're pushing through the box, then what latency the box for read/writes is hitting. I have seen a decrease in read/write latency since moving to Pure Storage by seven milliseconds.
Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year.
We looked into a couple other vendors. I am currently still using one of the vendor. Then, with Pure, we looked into some solutions from Dell EMC or HPE. Pure seemed to be a bit more cost-efficient. It also had better reviews from what we could find online and with references.
Because they do the compression and dedupe on the backside, I have seen better numbers of the Pure Storage box than on the other competitors that I have in my environment.
Ensure you are looking at all aspects of what the device can do, what your company needs are, and try to see how Pure Storage can meet all of your company's current needs.
We have Pure Storage integrated with our vCenter. The integration was very simple and gives us a lot better insight into our virtual environment.
Pure Storage hasn't increased nor decrease our ability to manage storage, because the solution that we are moving from had a very easy to use interface too.
I don't really use the predictive performance analytics.
Biggest lesson learned: Longevity planning. Pure Storage, with their five-year upgrade for controllers, has helped me feel comfortable. Even as the company grows, I will still have a storage solution which will fit the environment.
Our primary use case is SAP.
Its ease of use has allowed us to stand up landscapes faster.
The most valuable feature is its upgradeability.
Pure Storage helps to streamline storage because of its simplicity.
What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it.
We have never had an issue.
We just doubled it in size it was painless.
The technical support is fantastic and proactive.
Our previous platform did not support SAP.
The driver for us to implement Pure Storage in our SAP landscape was that it was SAP certified. Additionally, it had really good numbers and reviews.
We plugged it in, and in an hour, we were using it. It is very straightforward and simple.
We deployed it in-house.
We did not displace any other technology with the Pure Storage purchase so it's doesn't have a traditional dollar ROI. From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things.
Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs.
We looked at Pure Storage, EMC and HPE. We chose Pure Storage because of its innovation.
I would recommend the product.
The primary use case is big data.
SAP is very important for our business. We are running our management system on SAP, so it's very critical. We are running SAP S/4HANA and other ERP modules. We run our config on-premise.
The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data.
The stability is very good.
The scalability is very good.
The technical support is okay, but could be improved.
We switched because the performance was bad with our previous solution, and it was expensive.
The initial setup was straightforward.
We deployed it in-house.
We have seen latency improvements.
We also evaluated EMC and HPE.
We really needed high performance with large amounts of data. We weren't happy with other vendors, and the speed and the volume of data that they could store, handle, and compress.
It has been quite satisfactory in performance and scalability. Since we adopted this only a year ago, we will see what happens in the long term, if they will keep up with their quality.
The primary use case is to run SAP applications on top of the flash solutions.
SAP is very important to our business. It's a key function. We are running ERP and CRM systems. Our systems run on-premise.
Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy.
The most valuable feature is the performance of Pure Storage underneath and that many applications, which are already integrated with it. I can use the system applications, e.g., for backup restore. Therefore, I don't need to buy them in addition to the product, as they are already part of the solution.
It helps to simplify storage, especially because we can do in-place upgrades and can grow on demand. I can pay on demand, so it helps me to simplify the usage of the storage.
It is super stable.
It has even improved the performance of SAP HANA.
The scalability is already there in both directions. You can scale the storage, as well as the compute.
The technical support comes out of one single stop. It is very helpful to have one single number to contact.
The initial setup was straightforward and simple.
Our HANA installation was a greenfield. So, we started the Pure Storage system with HANA.
We used a partner (integrator) for the deployment. We used Tech Data. Everything was based on design guides and reference architecture, our experience was very good.
There is some benefit in regard to total cost of ownership, because it's a condensed system. It saves a lot of space in the data center, saving power.
Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs.
I am pretty happy with the solution, as it is currently.
The primary use case is SAP. It work very well.
SAP is very important to our business. We are running all ERP solutions. Our configurations are run on-premise.
It has easy implementation.
The most valuable feature is its simplicity. It simplifies the administration and backup.
The predictive performance analytics works well.
I would like to have support available in Spanish.
The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond.
The speed is very high on SAP from running it on Pure Storage, and the power on SAP HANA is much faster.
The scalability is good.
I would rate the technical support as a ten out of ten.
The initial setup was straightforward.
We deployed directly with Pure Storage.
The ROI is very positive for the reductions in HANA.
We have seen a 5:1 reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations by 2:1.
It's a simple, robust solution, which is very stable.
Pure Storage is very good and quick for backing up SAP HANA.
All of our production, development, and workloads run on it.
We were previously a legacy storage system. After moving to Pure, the stability and performance both dramatically improved.
We don't have to worry about storage anymore. Previously, we had to babysit our storage system, doing things like managing the volumes, looking at the capacity, predicting when would we run out of space, and replication work. All of those created a lot of challenges with the previous system. Since moving to Pure, we no longer have to worry. We defined the policies once, and things mostly work.
Pure Storage simplifies the management, overall.
Flash is the most valuable feature.
Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular, where you can keep replacing components. That was definitely new several years ago. I would bet competitors are doing it now as well, but when they started, it was an innovation.
The real need that we have is around other backups. Obviously, it has its own snapshot concept but beyond that, having a separate backup system in the Pure ecosystem itself, in that space, would make it all integrated within a single organization and we wouldn't have to deal with multiple companies. That's an area where we thought Flash Blade could serve our needs, but it seems it can't.
Also, for one of our systems, the data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we moved over is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times. Because of that, we now need more storage. We are going to have to use the guaranty that they provide when you purchase: If it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs, then they will provide extra storage.
The stability, in general, has been perfect.
The reason I gave a nine, not a ten, is the upgrades. With most upgrades we have had some kind of problem. They haven't been as smooth as they should have been.
The latest problem with which we are currently dealing, literally today, is that after the latest upgrade, the utilization went up, especially because of the systems space, which is consuming much more than it should. The duplication is not happening on time. Pure acts like it is a bug and that they have a new version with a fix for it. It goes into a cycle often: You keep upgrading and that new upgrade may have some other problem.
That's the primary worry regarding stability. Otherwise, the system works.
Technical support is good, but not as good as we would like. We have to get our Pure account team involved often, and they are stars. That always solves the problem. Support is available 24/7, but sometimes they're not as detail-oriented as we would like in investigating problems.
The setup was pretty straightforward. We recently added two more areas to our ecosystem and the set up was pretty good.
We used a reseller, SHI. Our experience with them was good.
Pure is expensive. But it comes with features so you get what you pay for. It's expensive compared to our old storage systems, but that is balanced by the reduction in the amount of effort human effort involved in& babysitting the storage system. So if you factor in everything, I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us, at least.
You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works. So I would really recommend using Pure Storage.
The primary use case is for on-premise storage.
I have personally used this solution for 15 years, and now, four years with my current company.
It's a product that we hardly ever call tech support for, because it just works. The performance and ease of use are all there, which is what we were looking for. We don't want to always have to call into tech support for something. It's one of those products where you forget about it because it just works.
It is an easy to use product for all of my team members.
Granular growth of the storage needs improvement. Right now, if I wanted to add storage, I have to buy a whole shelf. It would be nice to just buy a few drives.
I would like to see data tiering to AWS.
We put a lot of stress on it, and it is very stable. We have only had one tech support call in the last four years for a hard drive replacement.
The scalability works. We are using between 30TB to 50TB.
I would evaluate the technical support as good, I have a team who calls in for support, if there an issue. They have not complained to me about any problems.
The configuration was very easy.
The cost of the storage needs improvement.
We also evaluated Dell EMC and locally attached storage. We chose Pure Storage because it had the best performance of all the products that we tested. Also, its virtualization performance is extremely fast, and it has good ease of use.
Definitely test the performance, compression, and deduplication. You are going to get more out of the storage than what you anticipated.
We are a Cohesity customer. We have use cases where we integrated Pure Storage with Cohesity.
It does everything they say it will do:
I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason. I have other solutions that work, but I would use it if they had a little bit more fault-tolerance or if somebody explained to me that it's better than I think it is.
It's very stable.
Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems. They helped us figure out how to fix them, helped us coordinate. They did not need to do that. It's just stellar support.
They're taking really good care of us. Their support is on the ball. They're proactive.
We were using HPE 3PAR, which we liked, but this is much more cost-effective.
We own five Pure arrays. The salesperson came in and set it up for us every time. Note that it was the salesperson who was able to set them up for us.
I would definitely recommend this product to a colleague.
It's a high performance storage array. We want some deals regarding replication and stretch cluster.
In our case, we are not using it for us. So, it helps us to go to customers and provide the full stack solution. So, we provide storage from Pure Storage.
It's very fast, easy to use, and the cloud-based management is good.
The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage.
I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good.
It is quite difficult to read documentation and get documentation. To get some things on the web, it is really easy. However, I would to have some in-depth information about how the product is working.
From an API point of view, it's quite a complex product.
We have it in our labs, so it's not in a production environment.
Scalability is okay. We can scale it quite high if we want. This is what we have seen on some projects, which is good,
To set it up is quite easy. When you know how it works, it's really easy. You can set it yourself without any problems. Plug it in, the software updates, and that's it.
We had a guy from Pure Storage helping us and sharing skill sets. This way, they could know our stuff and we could know their stuff.
Test it, get familiar with it, then decide whether to purchase it.
I don't have any experience with predictive performance analytics yet.
We use it for performance, the capacity of deduplication, and compression of the data.
We are a small cloud service provider. When we put Pure Storage working on the services of our customers, most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services.
The storage is very simple.
We can use more capacity because of the compression and deduplication.
The predictive performance analytics are good, easy to use, and simple to see. They are simple to understand, not complicated.
Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers.
The solution is very stable.
Only one disk has a problem. The performance with that problem doesn't create problems for our customers. We are able to maintain the performance of the program.
We have already made upgrades now for two months. We think that the scalability is very good. If you want to go to another array or add more capacity, they will change it, if you have the support. So, we put more capacity on it. There is a simple way to do it which has a protection of investment.
We have only used the remote technical support in the case of the disk. They are very good. They acknowledged the problem quickly, identified it, and are always asking and seeing things, which in some cases, are more difficult for us to see.
Because of our clients, we needed a more structured solution with performance which was stable. So, we tested new storage, and Pure Storage was the one that revealed to be more flexible and simpler.
The initial setup was very simple and straightforward.
For the integration, we used a reseller. It was so easy to put in place and put it to work. They did a good job, but I think we could also do it.
For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management. The total cost of ownership has been reduced. In the beginning, the investment was greater. Now, it is about a 20% reduction.
Using older techniques, we see that we can offer clients more capacity. The real capacity that we get to customers is six or seven times greater than the capacity that we have in place.
In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify.
It is a very good solution. It responds to all the workload problems that we have. It could be with some different workloads that the solution might not respond the way that it responds to us. Test it. People will be astonished with it performance and simplicity.
We have two arrays in two data centers. Normally, in the arrays, the latency is about 4.3 milliseconds per second, which is very good in all workloads. In terms of reduction, our customers are seeing about a seven to eight plus reduction in the capacity that they have.
The TCO for flash and SSD implementation are comparable.
We are using Pure Storage as an all-flash product. It is a niche product, and only used for high performance data.
With Dell EMC, they have all-flash arrays, but they also have other types of storage. Our client use the solution for DevOps and their high speed databases.
It reduces space and the the polar consumption. It also accelerates the applications.
The VME feature is interesting. Additionally, I like the way they went to market with their All Green Program.
The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so.
The scalability is good.
I have 19 years experience with Dell EMC products, and almost two years of experience with Pure Storage. The main difference between Dell EMC All Flash and Pure Storage FlashArray is that the Dell EMC product is building on a traditional architecture. You have more functionalities and more connecting possibilities with Dell EMC at this moment. Of course, Pure Storage FlashArray is on a quick road to closing the gap.
It is easy to install. It took us only a half an hour to deploy. If you have a complex environment with a lot of servers, it may take a bit more. I would say the average setup time is one to two hours.
It is key for a customer to consider the ROI of the product. One has to consider the price, and the architecture of the product.
The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities.
When comparing Pure Storage and Dell EMC, I think that Dell EMC has to improve its real performance. Also, Pure Storage is a lot easier to install than the Dell EMC product.
The primary use case is storage for payment platforms.
We don't have anymore performance issues, which is good.
The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage.
Performance and support quality.
We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions.
We have seen through time that it is perfectly stable. It has aged well. We were an early adopter in our company.
The scalability is very modular. When you need more storage or power, you change one brick, and you don't have to go through a long process.
Pure Storage has proven to be proactive with support. Even when we have small problems, they open a support case before we even notify them that there has been an actual issue.
We receive good quality of support from the first line of support, so we don't need to escalate or wait through a long process.
We clearly have seen the difference between having storage on Dell EMC or NetApp versus what we have now on Pure Storage. The investment was a clear win for us.
The initial setup was very simple. It's basically a few cables with two plugs. Plug it in, and it is that easy.
We did the installation in-house.
We have seen reduction in total cost of ownership.
We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products.
If you have doubts, do a proof of concept. Pure Storage is very happy to provide you with storage ahead of time that you can test for a couple of months. This way, you can test the performance and bugs, which makes it easier to sell to your company.
Everything is embedded that is something managed from end-to-end by Pure Storage. This is something really easy for us. We don't have to work with integration and the different subcomponent of the storage that we would have to use if it was SSD.
We are at about 3.0 to 4.0 in terms of data reduction.
We have workloads that demand high IOPS, so a lot of speed, fast access, time, and overall high performance.
Its ease of use is a very big thing for our customers. It's easy to set up and easy to maintain. The support is automated, which is very good.
They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about.
It is very stable.
It is easy to scale.
The initial setup was relatively straightforward from what I heard.
The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive.
NetApp is the biggest competitor, then SolidFire, and not so much Dell EMC anymore.
When our customers are deciding on a storage solution, we talk about their needs and what they need as an outcome for their business. We usually show them how easy Pure Storage works and how fast it. These are strong points for most customers.
Try to get a demo, then test it.
There are two real use cases.
One customer didn't have the budget to renew all the VM and VDI infrastructure. It was not so huge (approximately 100 VMs). The VMware partner provided the Horizon View solution, suggested to upgrade it to Windows 10 (for example), but the customer didn't want to recreate the infrastructure.
Without touching anything, and integrating from the traditional storage, was a two-tier Dell EMC squared infrastructure toward a flash array. We were able to guarantee the overall performance and consistency for Windows 7 machines without upgrading anything, which was a huge improvement without an additional cost. Then, we added a lot of additional VMs.
It's simple, powerful, and ready to use.
Replace SSDs in the lower-end unit.
Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex.
I has good stability. We have had no issues with upgrading.
We haven't done an upscale of the solution, maybe more in future projects.
It has very good support.
The initial setup is very straightforward. It is clear, simple, and easy. While it's a human interface, there a lot of operations that are automatically done by the unit itself.
Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation.
It's cost-effective when we replace it and has rich improvements with low effort from the customer side.
Our customers will usually also evaluate HPE 3PAR. It is a good competitor because they put emphasis on their infrastructure.
In the end, the customers pick Pure Storage because of me. I don't sell 3PAR because I don't believe in the solution.
It is simple, powerful, and a beautiful solution. It is a nice piece of software, but it also has some nice hardware inside.
The predictive performance analytics are quite good. We have touched a lot of cases where the performance was quite similar, even under big loads, but the compression and duplication numbers can be misleading. Because PDFs are more compressed, the dedupe and compression numbers are being lowered.
It's really fast.
So long as it's powered, it is stable. We had someone drop the power to our Pure Storage array once, then everything went down. However, that wasn't Pure Storage's fault. It was just what happened.
The support has been good.
We moved off of VMAX storage. It wasn't keeping up with the workloads that we had. Pure has done this for us.
From my previous employment, where we used it, everyone thinks about Pure Storage running their EMR or HIMS. One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage. People should think about that with their help record. They don't think about that with something like their messaging platform or their interface engine.
It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.
I recommend the solution to my colleagues.
It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well.
It's stable.
It's scalable to our needs.
The deployment is very easy. It's quick.
All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help.
We always consider other storage options.
I would definitely suggest this solution to a colleague because of the ease of use. Also, the controller upgrades, compared to Pure's competitors, are huge.
We have about 1,000 users using the product in our company.
It's very good storage for what we use it for, very efficient. It's very cost-effective for the amount of data we have when we're crunching the numbers that we're crunching, for our algorithms which use a lot of processing power.
The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware.
We've never had an issue with scale as we've deployed to some of our clients.
Depending on the deployment, the configuration, and the size of the project, and some of our larger machine-learning deployments, where we have to put in an AI-ready infrastructure box, those projects tend to take a little bit longer. It's a newer product and they're still figuring all that out. But it's comparable to any other vendor up there.
ROI depends on what the clients are looking for as the outcome. If the client doesn't know what the questions are that they need to ask in machine-learning, they can spend a lot of money and get really poor outcomes based on the data and what they're trying to get out of it. That isn't really a Pure issue, it's more a business issue in terms of the outcome wanted by the client.
Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors, as we've looked at some of the other competitors on the market. Pure, for the quality of gear we're getting versus the price, is a good value for us.
One of the "buyer beware" issues would be, if you're going to buy a $1.5 million installment of Aries, which is the NVIDIA, it's got a high cost. If you just need a cucumber cart to be pulled on wheels, you don't need to buy a jet plane, although the seller might say, "Hey, this is the best, greatest, and newest." These are some of the things that you'd want to be aware of as someone who is looking to get into AI. Make sure you need that much because you could probably build a scaled-down version at a significantly lower cost.
I rate the solution a nine out of ten. Pure is a partner of ours that we use for a lot of our machine-learning deployments and some of our smart-data applications which we build in Canada. We pursue the same clients together for some of the government contracts, and we use the FlashBlade for some of the storage for our machine-learning algorithms, with the NVIDIA DGX. We're exclusive to Pure, versus the other hardware vendors who are in the same place for flash storage. This is who we use and who we decided to go with, due to some of the innovation that they have within their stack.
In Canada, they've got a very good strategy where they're partnering with some of the good software vendors there, and they're making good relationships on the government side and with some of the VARs. They're doing a good job.
Everything is kosher with the documentation. They've been fantastic, a good partner supporting our pursuits. They have even delivered some prototypes for us, before we started using them, to some of our vendors. That way, we could have a sandbox where we could use some of their storage to create demos and proofs of concept for some of our clients.
I rate the product at ten out of ten because the performance of the storage is just unbelievable.
I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end.
It's extremely stable.
It scales absolutely, to the highest level you can think of.
Pure did help us by coming onsite and deploying it.
We were previously using EMC. The difference is unbelievable. We are buying more.
The initial setup was very easy and straightforward.
Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop.
I would absolutely suggest this solution to a colleague or a friend because of the performance and reliability of the product.
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.
The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte. Then we added another one and I think the total storage is five terabytes now.
The UI is pretty good.
It's absolutely a stable product.
It's scalable. We started with a very small storage array and now we're in a much larger one. I think we're up to 40 terabytes.
We only use tech support infrequently. We don't need to call them. It's easy to use, straightforward. Once it's set up, it does what we need it to do.
Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great. The client environment for a non-profit 501C3 organization makes it much harder for us to come up with the dollars and to cover the increased cost of hardware support, but we do like the way the product runs. It's perfect for us.
I would definitely recommend this product to a colleague because of what it can do. I've already done that. I've already referenced several other nonprofits, human service organizations, and long-term care facilities. We've spoken highly of Pure. For an organization, it can take storage from 40 terabytes down to five terabytes. It's excellent.
Our user base consists of 3,000 people but it takes just one person to manage it - ease of use.
My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value.
There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality. It's just a question of what that will be and what does the future look like?
It's very much a stable product.
It is absolutely scalable to our company's needs.
We've used tech support and we have found it to be very favorable.
The implementation process was seamless. It was very quick. It took less than a week to deploy.
The return on investment is good, very strong.
In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides.
We considered Dell EMC, we looked at Nutanix, Cohesity, IBM, HPE. We ran quite a bit of the gamut.
I would absolutely recommend this product to a colleague. We have no regrets.
We have one person who administers it. We have about 9,000 employees and the IT department has about 300.
We have a lot of MEDITECH electronic health records systems running on it, as well as some other ancillary applications, but it's core hospital EHR, predominantly.
We've seen a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. When we bought this product, the arrays that it replaced were just shy of about $1,000,000 apiece and they were the size of big refrigerators. The product that we replaced them with is a couple of rack units, like the size of a stack of a couple of pizza boxes, consuming way less power. There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself.
Everything could be cheaper. Other areas where we would always like to see improvement with products like this are in compression and deduplication. Increasing the overall storage efficiency of the platform would be great.
One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade. That would be an intriguing and interesting feature for us. Other than that, we've not had any big needs or demands.
It's been a stable product. In six years, we've never had downtime as a result of it. It's been very stable that entire time.
I believe it will scale nicely. We've not had reason to push that limit yet. We just haven't had a need to do that. I believe they've got a very broad portfolio so that we could scale it fairly dramatically beyond where we're at right now.
The approach that Pure takes is what they call it their Evergreen policy, where they will upgrade the brains of the storage array every three years at no additional charge. Many of the competing systems would require big forklift upgrades and fairly significant reinvestment to do the same thing. We are on our third Evergreen lifecycle upgrade so far, and it's been exactly as they advertised.
When we look at return on investment over time, we've not had to replace or upgrade it during the timeframe that we've had it. As long as it's supported under maintenance, that continues to be an Evergreen process.
It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective, but I would say better than many in terms of performance and service.
The product is an easy ten out of ten. We've been very happy with it. We've found them to be a great value. Service and support is phenomenal. It's really hard to find reasonable things for them to actually improve it on.
Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on, and the biggest selling point for me was the replacement of the hardware, the controllers, without any major expense to the clinic.
I don't deal with the day-to-day management of it. I'm sure that, from a technical perspective, the ones who manage it would be able to tell about you something that needs improvement. From my perspective of the acquisition and ongoing support, I don't see any.
It's a stable product.
It's scalable. We've grown the product two or three times since we got it. We've actually purchased two more storage arrays since then that are not used for Epic, so we're expanding it. We'll be using this for many years in the future.
Tech support is helpful when needed.
We had multiple platforms beforehand. We had HPE, IBM.
To me, the installation is easy. I'm not the one who put it together, their techs came out and helped us. I don't remember anything momentous about it.
I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less. That's standard business. It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace. That's huge for me.
I would recommend this product to colleagues in the same field.
It makes life easier for me.
I rate the product at nine out of ten. We're very happy with it. We purchased the product for our Epic implementation. I had such minimal issues with it. Ten out of ten is a stretch, but it's pretty close. We're pretty happy.
It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future.
I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable. Of course, it is, after all, solid-state. It's not the same as "cheap and deep."
It's a very stable product, all self-contained and very well-supported as well.
It's definitely scalable. It can grow with a company's needs.
It's one of the easiest out there, in terms of installation.
It's a great return on investment, based on the mission. When you're interested in high-performance there isn't much else that competes with it.
We looked at everything. In dealing with this, we got mission-specific. It's like different kinds of planes or sailboats: What's the mission? For this high-performance mission, that's what Pure is about.
I would recommend it to colleagues. When performance is important, that's what Pure is all about.
I rate the solution at ten out of ten. Solid-state storage makes a lot of sense, they're 100 percent solid-state when you need that kind of performance. The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money.
The sales and executive support have been outstanding compared to the rest of the market. I replaced another couple of vendors that I had in place for storage, who over-promised and under-delivered on their technical expectations, and who certainly over-promised on their ability to do conversions from one array to another. My upgrade paths have been simple on the Pure.
The documentation has gone along with the idea of "it's simple to use." In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around the movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that.
It wasn't until we got to a point where we had changed out everything front-ending the platform, and got past that conversation and we rose up past helpdesk and fact sheets and documentation, and before we actually got to somebody who knew about it, there was community knowledge within Pure that knew that problem existed. Having that front and center, where we could have searched and looked for that information, would have answered our questions and caused me to rate it as a ten.
I've never had an outage.
It's very scalable. I probably run about 10 million patient visits a year through the system. I've never had a problem. It's back-ending my entire medical record platform. It's a very stable platform.
Prior to Pure, the original implementations that we had for other vendors had been in place for about 15 years. This actually replaces another all-flash array product that had been in place for the three years previous.
From an investment standpoint, the support staff I require for it is greatly reduced, so I don't have the in-depth requirements that I had on other products. The challenges of getting into the product and manage it and moving away from older platforms for systems management disappeared, so that reduced my cost and expense for support. It's a lot simpler to implement and a lot simpler to manage, so I'm able to divert those resources onto other projects, so it's a pretty decent return on investment.
I definitely like the licensing model. It's a lot better than being "piecemealed" as a customer. I've been extremely happy. Cost-wise, it's been very effective. We're a nonprofit-based organization, so pricing is at the forefront of every conversation we have, and it's been a good marriage between the technical capability of the product, the software that we get, the service and support that we get. From a price standpoint, it's been very effective.
I looked at a half a dozen other products and Pure won over across the board.
I would absolutely recommend this product to a colleague. And I have done that already.
We use the space and optimize the makeup of the storage products.
It simplifies the connection between our infrastructure and storage.
The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN.
The product has made our infrastructure more stable and simplified.
I have not had any issues with scalability.
In the past, we had Lenovo. With the Pure Storage, it improved and simplified our connections.
The initial setup was very simple. We put it on the rack, switched it on, and it worked.
We use a reseller for the integration. We had a good experience with them.
We have seen a $15,000 ROI.
The total cost of ownership is not that much lower for flash than SSD.
I would prefer that they lower their pricing.
We only considered Pure Storage.
My company stays focused with one solution (product) for approximately three years. Then, every three years, we make discussion whether to keep the solution or not.
I would recommend Pure Storage, as it is well-established. It also simplifies and optimizes the right space.
The predictive performance analytics are good.
The primary use case is for the data and storage that we utilize in our managed services.
We also use it in the company. We localized it.
Deduplication works faster for our customers using this product.
It simplifies building out the storage.
The most valuable feature is its data reduction.
It is very easy to use.
It needs to improve its price.
The product is stable. It works really well.
I have not used the technical support.
In most cases, we do the implementation because we are the integrator.
We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations.
The price is too high.
Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction.
Go for it. The product is great.
We are a reseller of Pure Storage FlashArray. Our customers use it for virtualization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
It has helped to simplify storage because it has a very easy graphical user interface.
Our clients see a reduction in total cost of ownership by around 40%. We have also found that the total cost of ownership of flash is lower than SSD implementations. I track a whole bunch of business markers on the cost of components. I do a lot of cost analysis for customers and I get pricing from all the component manufacturers; Ingram Micro, Toshiba, Seagate and then I compare the pricing. I do that almost every week. I constantly see that it's cheaper than SSD implementations.
The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward.
The performance analytics are moderate. It's not the best performance platform out there but it's the easiest to operate.
They need to find another way of doing data protection, RAID is not working very well. It takes performance away from the SSD.
I would like to have multi-cloud integration.
Latency needs a bit of work. It's pretty good but it needs to get below 300 microseconds. Then the data reduction would be excellent. On average I see twelve to one data reduction.
It's very stable.
It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that.
I've used their technical support and would say that it's excellent. I would give them a ten out of ten.
My clients know it's time to switch solutions because I run a proof of concepts where I test the manufacturer's equipment. If I find something that is a big difference then I let them know about it. Cost, performance, tools, and ease of use are all factors that we take into consideration when choosing to switch. We also chose this solution because of the Evergreen upgrade and the ease of use.
I also install Pure Storage for my clients. The initial setup is very straightforward and very simple. It takes me an hour to set one up.
My client's return on investment with Pure Storage is in about 7.3 months.
We also looked at Nimble, which is now owned by HPE, and E8, Dell EMC, and NetApp platform.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Not a ten because nobody's a ten. We haven't achieved perfection yet.
I would advise someone considering this or a similar solution to push Pure Storage for multi-cloud integration.
The primary use case is block storage for retro machines running on VMware ESXi and Red Hat with Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs).
We have perfect run through times and latency. We have a cluster system using two machines on Active-Active with a synchronized mirror.
The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements.
The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser. Hopefully, in the next release, this will be fixed.
We are not using it at the moment in production. Therefore, I can't talk about the stability of the system. The PoC and tests indicate that the stability is okay.
At the moment, we have one data pack. We think that we may buy another data pack this year to scale the system up.
I have used the technical support through the phone and online tool. I used them to upgrade the software, which work okay (as it was designed).
The technical support team provided the help that we needed.
We have been using another solution, IBM XYZ. We plan to migrate away from the IBM system to Pure Storage. We are planning to switch because of cost and performance. Also, the Pure Storage FlashArray is an upgrade in technology. All-flash storage arrays will be the future.
The setup is straightforward, not complex.
It has a very simple installation. Installation took about three hours, not one or two hours, but three hours. We had an issue with our network during the first installation, but now it is up and running.
We used a consultant from Pure Storage.
We did not evaluate other solutions since our partners were using Pure Storage, so we decided to move forward with Pure Storage.
We are not using predictive performance analytics at the moment.
We use it for VMware virtualization.
We have VDIs, virtual desktops, which users log into every day. On the old storage, they would sometimes have three, four, or five-minute delays; it just because useless for five minutes. They couldn't do anything when they were logged in, because of the slowness. Now, with Pure Storage, we have totally eliminated that problem. This was the primary reason we purchased it and it has performed very well. We're very pleased.
It has helped simplify our storage. It's small, it's fast, and it's very simple to manage.
In one of our arrays we had a 35-to-1 data reduction, which is very outstanding. Not many places have that kind of benefit.
We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency.
We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power.
Finally, we love the predictive performance analytics. It's an excellent tool. It's something we were asking for in the past. When they rolled it out, it made a difference.
We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array.
Both the stability and scalability are excellent. It's a very stable environment.
You can scale easily. You can extend it online, change controllers online. Scalability gets five out five stars.
Technical support is very good. We are very pleased with support. We think that it's probably one of the best vendors we work with, as far as support goes; compared to NetApp, for example. Pure storage support people are very responsive and knowledgeable.
The old systems we had were just not doing the job, so we knew we had to change.
It was very easy to set it up. No complexity at all.
We deployed it ourselves.
We haven't analyzed it in terms of numbers, but we have definitely seen a very good ROI. There has been a reduction in our total cost of ownership.
We looked at Pure Storage vs Dell EMC, but we thought Pure Storage has newer, better technology developed from the ground up, whereas Dell EMC is a patchwork solution. In addition, the price was more favorable.
Give it a try. Get a system in on a trial basis, make a deal, and try it to see if it's something you can use.
I rate Pure Storage at ten out of ten. We're very satisfied with Pure Storage. They are a very good company, doing very good things.
We use Pure Storage on our databases. We have massive SQL databases, four-node clusters and we present a LUN directly to them. Then we have Fusion-io cards as a backup. We also use Pure in our data centers to replicate our databases for our DR center so that we can be secure.
Pure Storage has helped improve our organization because before them we had a 3PAR of a giant V400 and every day we would lose a disc or a magazine. We had to call out a guy to come onsite. It was a massive three-rack thing. Pure Storage, it's really modular, we're maxing out shelves where we can, and it doesn't take up as much space, it's not as hot, its a lot better than 3PAR.
Replication is the main reason we have it. It has helped to simplify our storage in the way that it just simplifies and there's nothing to really set up. Once we have them linked we ship them over and we sit our RTOs and our RPOs.
As dedupe and compression go up and we get more out of it, then we do see reduction in total cost of ownership. We're also throwing more and more on than we ever had before, so it's hard to tell, but we're getting more data on a smaller array than we ever had before.
The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go.
In terms of performance metrics, depending on what we have on it, some of our databases will get 4.8:1. When we do a big release our SQL tables change values so we'll see that reduced and we'll go up to sometimes 110% utilization. We're working with Pure Storage to try to fix that and see what we're changing so much. We also mistakenly had a 10pb on Pure so that data churn really reduced our usable storage. We're learning how to use Pure properly.
The magic that the storage does would be the most valuable feature for us. Deduping on the fly is really cool to us because some of our stuff we get around seven to one, which is amazing. I definitely like the new redesign of the UI that was done. We just had to do a DR test, and we had to make snapshots and copy them over, and it was a lot easier to use I think with this new UI than the old stuff.
Stability is good, we haven't had any issues. The only thing is that we've had to upgrade controllers a few times because we ended up wanting to use more stuff on here. At first, just our databases, then we moved our VMs to it. We really haven't had any issues except just needing to upgrade to bigger controllers.
We stream into StatsD from Pure Storage, LogicMoniter, and a few others so we don't use the UI performance manager as much because we like a single pane of glass but it's got everything I need. When we do see latency or we have issues it's usually really clear from the graphs.
In terms of scalability, we buy new controllers or we build new shelves and we're able to scale out pretty much whenever we want, as long as we have the money to spend.
We will usually hit up technical support for something that's not too major. We've never had a SEV1 outage with Pure but we've enabled remote support. They log in and they're good to go.
We switched because we were running out of support with 3PAR and they wouldn't renew our support unless we got a new array which was a lot of money. We had some of those SSD arrays, we didn't want to put all our eggs in one basket so we spread the vendors by having an SSD array from HPE and Pure. Once we solved the data reduction and what Pure does we were hooked.
The initial setup was very easy.
We did the implementation and worked with professional services. For the most part, our main guy in the compute team has had experience and it was pretty simple. We didn't need a forklift like we needed for the HPE. Just rack and sack and ready to go.
We have seen ROI just from being able to move our databases around, because we have different pods, quickly and specifically. With 3PAR we'd have a lot of remote copy failures, and that doesn't look good for an audit or for a DR test. We haven't had any of those problems with Pure, so we spend less time troubleshooting.
We have a bunch of different storage, like Isilon from Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE 3PAR, Cohesity, and Pure Storage. They're all different functions, and Pure is our warrior, if we need something really fast, really low latency.
I would rate this solution a nine.
If someone was considering this solution I'd definitely ask them what their use case for was. If they had a high workload, like for example, I have a buddy who works in the entertainment industry, and they need to edit 4K video, so they need something like Pure that's really fast. I love the support and I love just what Pure does in general, so I'd definitely suggest it.
We're a service provider, so it's the primary storage for hosting our customers.
Pure Storage is easy to use it has helped simplify our storage.
vSphere integration and DevOps are our most valuable features.
Also, one of our customers used to have a rates run that ran for eight hours, and when we migrated them across to Pure that went down to under two hours.
Still implementing.
The stability of Pure Storage is very very good.
Good to very good.
Excellent.
We switched to Pure Storage mainly because of the frustration of dealing with performance on the old platforms that we used to use.
The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it.
The biggest return on investment for us is not having to do a swap out of the arrays every five years. We've been through three Evergreen refreshes now of arrays already deployed, and that's working out really well.
The main solutions on our shortlist at the end of the process were NetApp, EMC, and Pure Storage. We ended up buying both NetApp and Pure Storage because we always like to have at least two different vendors involved in our data centers. The decision not to go with EMC was because of the design that they'd done for an all-flash storage solution. It didn't fit with what we were trying to do.
I find that the total cost of ownership to actually be lower than the fee implementation. We record and meter everything; electricity consumption and staff time spent looking after the arrays. Our figures put it somewhere between 40% and 50%, depending on how long we run the rates for.
The data reduction rates vary for us. Anything from 6 to 1 down to 2 to 1, because it depends on our workload. Latency is always good and it's generally less than a millisecond across all the arrays we run.
Our primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the project.
The analytics that we gather is used for just one environment (which is big in the banking industry). Production wise, it's running Oracle. Performance wise, it's basically running enterprise applications.
Once the project was enabled with data persuasion and we had Pure Storage behind it, there was a lot of saving storage. Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes.
Infrastructure as a base is important, but the end game is to have the DevOps pipeline, which is the most valuable feature.
A three wave application or multi-wave application synchronization would be an improvement.
The company started off with a small chunk of the product. Now they have moved up to where Pure Storage became the direct responder in our Australian office, they said it was very stable on their end.
We have a capital of storage with EMC, our previous solution. The fact that Pure has a petabyte of storage means that Pure Storage will become a de-facto standard in all the global organizations.
We don't use the tech support, but we have an in-house engineer in one of our offices.
The initial setup was really straight forward.
We needed to choose a new investment because our solution couldn't do data provisioning very quickly. The main solution that the bank normally had was EMC. We looked into HP, IBM, and Pure Storage. But, cost, rate per terabyte, and speed is why we chose Pure Storage. It was a no brainer.
Latency defines everything.
Our primary use case of this solution is for Microsoft SQL.
This solution was installed at my organization before I got there but having worked with it in the past, I would say that the responsiveness with any SQL applications has remarkably improved.
It has simplified our storage. It's a "set it and forget it."
It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive. It's hard to monetize the difference in performance that we're seeing, but it's obviously there and measurable.
Performance is the most valuable feature.
Very stable. I'd give it a ten out of ten.
We've got two arrays. Capacity-wise, we've over-subscribed on storage, so we haven't had to expand them at this point.
Technical support is very responsive. We had an SSD fail and they replaced it within 24 hours.
Previously, we were on Dell EMC. We went with HyperFlex in a hyper-converged environment. We switched because we really wanted our SQL on SSD.
It's expensive, but it's worth it.
I would rate this solution a nine because I've worked with NetApp in the past, and other vendors as well in storage. I didn't find the content quite as intuitive as what I got in NetApp but in terms of hardware and all that, it's a 10. It's just that one little issue.
I would advise someone considering Cloud flash storage that it's the way to go, with SQL. Definitely, Pure Storage is at the top of the game for that.
The primary use case is virtual machines.
We can now quickly roll out multiple instances of virtual machines or FlashArray storage, more than we could before.
Speed: Things function pretty quickly for our SAN management team. We have seen a good reduction in the amount of total storage space that we're using because of the deduplication.
It runs fast and is easy to use, and our SAN manager likes it.
The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing.
I rated the solution as a nine out of ten because I knew about a disk failure. Other than that, it would probably be a ten. Disk failures are out of anybody's control.
The stability is good.
It seems highly scalable.
From what I have heard, the technical support has been good.
We went with Dell EMC first. When we had a ton of trouble with it, we dumped it for Pure Storage.
We are fairly new to using it, so we'll have to wait to see what our data usage is over the next year or so.
The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments.
It simplifies storage. Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth.
We run our production Oracle workload on it.
We have been able to scale it to ten terabytes. Whereas, before we were stuck.
The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes.
I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product.
Stability has been really solid.
The technical support has been fantastic.
We were previously using Dell EMC.
We used an integrator for the deployment.
We have seen ROI. Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks.
It makes things ten times easier.
VMware is currently our main use case because it dedupes really well.
Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles.
Firstly, dedupe is the most valuable feature. Hands down. Simplifying storage is also a big win overall. As far as the monitoring with the latency goes, we're not monitoring the apps to see how they're doing at different periods, which saves us time. We're just setting thresholds, walking away, and waiting for emails if they're broken.
The big thing would be to simplify the compatibility to Openstack. The Openstack going into Nova works really well, but if Pure had a few more of those features that would be my win.
It's been rock solid.
So far it seems good.
We've used them a few times, mainly with upgrades. They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good.
They gave us the rundown and was simpler than expected. They gave us the sheet and sent us off saying, "Hey, if you need us, give us a call." We just plugged it in and up it came.
We used a reseller, but then we did our own deploy along with their help. They came in and gave us a training course so that we could maintain it ourselves.
There are a lot of companies that give a solid performance and a lot of places you can get flash. The pricing wasn't that much different, It's really the simplicity that makes a difference. If the data starts flowing too fast, it slows things down and does it later. Those features are the winners for us.
We're constantly on the hunt, and we always keep three to four vendors in. Usually, it's been the bigger players, the IBM's, the EMC's. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but we were looking for something a little different this time around.
The primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the product.
We are moving into a DevOps environment and CI/CD. Their departmentalization was an enabler because database is a service in the pipeline where the underlying risk factor has to be correct, especially the storage. This primarily applies to the driver and the infrastructure as a base, but the end game is to have a DevOps pipeline.
We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, e.g., our database team used to spend 93 days backing up and restoring databases. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us.
Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products.
If Pure Storage had its features at parity with its competitors, it could move ahead.
One to three years.
It is very stable.
It scales well, around a petabyte.
We have an in-house engineer in one of our onsite offices.
The initial setup was straightforward. We started with about 60TB and have grown from there.
We have seen ROI.
We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space.
We did a vendor search, which included a big payments project across Asia-Pacific for a company that could do data provisioning very quickly. Then, Pure Storage was chosen.
We also considered Dell EMC, HPE, and IBM. We picked Pure Storage because of its ratio per terabyte and speed.
Pure Storage is now our de facto standard product to use.
The analytics were gathered for this environment, and the environment is big. Production-wise, it is running Oracle, and performance-wise, it is running enterprise applications.
We use it for nearline storage.
Right now, we just have lab equipment that we test them on and we try to compare them with other solutions.
The thickness and the sizing for when we put it in the data center. Also, the performance and price.
It has good stability for our company.
It's granular.
The support is good.
Our storage is old, so we were searching for what would be the next good solution for us. We had an integrated solution with a supplier, so we were looking to get rid of this kind of model.
The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple.
We used a retailer to buy it and it was easy.
Compuverde. But, we like to have data sheets and a more traditional storage than a complex unit.
I would rate this a seven out of ten because it's a good performance storage, but the price is a little bit high. Our predicted performance analytics is also going really well, so if you need faster storage and a good product, this is the one you should go ahead with.
It is the SAN backbone for our company. We have multiple SANs, all Pure at this point. It runs everything from tasks to business intelligence to enterprise applications.
Snapshot recovery has been very helpful. When there have been snapshots that we've had to restore it's been easy for our SAN team to make those available for our server team.
There are a couple of things we really like: the flash storage, the deduplication, and IO times are very good. The snapshots are also fairly useful.
The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN. There was a situation where all of our LUN were essentially made illegitimate. They were corrupted by a redactor. We have snapshots enabled on the majority of our SANS and that was great, we were able to snapshot and restore. There was one data center that our SAN admins had not intentionally gone in and checked the box to allow for replicas to be created. Because of that, we lost that whole data center and everything that was on it. If there had been a checkbox that had been checked by default to have the snapshotting, they wouldn't have gone in and unchecked it and we would still have our data. It generated a lot more work on the server side to rebuild everything that was corrupted.
Also, an additional feature would be replication from our on-premise to AWS that could then be used directly with the cloud. The way the VMware cloud is engineered is we have to have hosts up the entire time to run beats and to have HCX replicating things over to it. If we were able to have replication from Pure over S3 buckets, so that we only had to spin up the VMware host on demand, that would be a tremendous cost saving to us as Pure customers.
We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us.
We have around 5 Pure Storage SANs and several of them are maxed out on trays.
We are currently having a situation where one of our VMware hosts is not being detected. It has been told to us that it has been presented to Pure, but the VMware host is not capable of seeing it. The support has been working with us, although it's not an instant fix.
It was cheaper to purchase Pure than it was to stay with the SAN we had because of the support costs.
Pure Storage is a good price and it's a solid product for the price point. Only two or three times over the last 5 years have we had Pure flash drives die to a point where they had to be replaced, so the reliability is also very good.
In the past we've considered EMC, Dell Compellent (Dell EMC), NetApp and of course Pure Storage. We had Dell Compellent in the past and there were some issues with the implication and the way that it used storage. We had firmware trouble with it, which drove us away to seriously consider other brands offerings. We considered EMC, except EMC was expensive. Pure came in at a better price point than EMC and performed better than Compellent.
When we do a mass migration of data to the Pure SAN, it along with any other SAN out there still has to deduplicate that. So, it arrives in a large chunk before it can finally shrink it down to what Pure is capable of reducing it to through deduplication. Now that we have streamlined our environment on the VMware side, we're able to dump stuff in a large amount. However, for those dumpings we have to wait for Pure to sit and chew on it and then de-duplicate it before we could move the next large amount over there.
We've been using this solution for four years. We are on-prem with Pure and we are not using any of Pure's off-prem product. We do have experience with a variety of storage in AWS. For us, it's still two very different things, we like Pure Storage because our key business systems are still on-prem. It's been extremely reliable and gets the job done.
Our primary use case is for Oracle databases, data warehouses, and mission critical apps.
This solution has improved my organization because we can easily snapshot and share the same storage platform for non-production production and so we've been able to get very high performance from non-production environments as well.
The ability to seamlessly and easily upgrade storage capacity and upgrade to a completely new generation of the array are the most valuable features.
There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there.
In the early days, we had issues with stability right up to an actual crash during an upgrade. That was three and a half years ago and since then there's been a dramatic improvement. We've found the product to be extremely reliable.
Scalability is near excellent. In terms of provision capacity, a total footprint is over 400 terabytes provisioned out to systems in my organization.
Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk.
We considered different products from Dell EMC and NetApp. We didn't choose Dell EMC because it was a cost issue. For NetApp, there was an ease of use difference and we felt that Pure Storage was an easier product for our team to use. We chose Pure Storage primarily because of its combination of performance and ease of use.
I would rate this solution as a nine because of the scalability and upgrade flexibility.
I would advise someone considering this solution to take the opportunity to take a look at the product. Take a demo and actually run through day to day operations and see how easy and reliable it is.
This solution has improved my organization because it has good performance. The interface is simple. Its ease of use has simplified storage for us.
The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free.
I would like to see more cloud integration.
Scalability is great.
We used a Pure Storage engineer for deployment. He came on site and did the setup.
We also looked at NetApp. We chose Pure Storage because we did research and heard good things.
I would rate this solution a ten. It's fast and simple. I would recommend this product to someone considering it. I would advise to look at your budget and use case and decide from there.
We use this solution for storage of critical data and for storage of replicated backups. We use Zerto replication software. We write all of those backups to Pure Storage and then we use those in our disaster recovery scenarios.
It helps us simplify our storage because we use it for a specific use case of replication between sites. We have two data centers: a primary data center and a secondary data center. We got a Pure Storage device in each location and we do backups of critical data in both locations and then replicate them back and forth between the sites. This is the biggest thing it does for us.
We have seen a reduction in total costs of ownership. Most of the data that's on the Pure came off of Dell EMC VNX. The money I saved by not renewing maintenance on the Dell EMC devices paid for the Pure Storage devices. I've saved a lot of money and gotten better-performing storage.
With every update we get, we get a reduction in the space used which has been pretty dramatic with each one of the upgrades that we've gone through.
The value of the storage in the way that it stores the data is a very valuable feature for us. We also like that it's robust and stable and that we get good support from them when we have an issue.
We put very high stress on this solution and we've almost never had any problems with it. We originally went with a competitor's product and after about eight months and a lot of wrangling, we had them buy it back from us. Then we bought a similar Pure Storage product, and it's been great.
Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with.
We decided it was time to switch because the other solution was terrible. We were using Dell EMC Unity and it never worked properly and was full of software bugs. Dell EMC couldn't fix it and they had no intention of fixing it.
The initial setup was easy and we were able to sort data almost immediately. The time from racking to being in production was very short and very simple.
We used a third-party for the implementation. We bought it and we built in some professional services. They were great. Everything with Pure Storage is straightforward.
The cost of implementing Pure Storage was less than the cost of continuing to maintain the Dell EMC solutions which is ROI for us. In addition to that, the more data we store, the more compression we get, the better it looks.
We initially looked at Pure Storage and Dell EMC Unity. We made the poor decision of going with Unity and eight months later we went with Pure Storage.
I would rate this solution a ten because of the way the product works. It never blinks. Also because of the progressive support that we get from Pure Storage with updates and opening tickets on the device before we even knew that there was a problem happening. The entire experience of working with them has been great.
I would advise somebody considering this solution to buy it.
We use it for storage of critical data, and for storage of replicated backups.
We use Zerto Virtual Replication software. We write all of those backups to Pure, then we use those in our disaster recovery scenarios.
It has simplified our storage. We use it for a pretty specific use case of replicating between sites. I have two data centers, a primary data center and a secondary data center, with a Pure Storage device in each location. We do backups of critical data in both locations, then replicate them back and forth between the sites.
The value for the storage, in the way it stores the data, but also the robustness of the product, it's very stable. And then the support that we get when we have an issue.
One to three years.
The stability is very high with almost no problems.
Excellent. Best of any of the vendors we work with.
Everything with Pure Storage is so straightforward. It was an easy setup, and we were storing data almost immediately.
We used a third party for deployment. When we bought it, we built-in some professional services who did great work.
We actually originally went with a competitor's product, and after about eight months, a lot of wrangling, had them buy it back from us. And then we bought similar Pure Storage product, and it's just been great.
Our primary use case is a big bucket of storage for VMware. We run our virtual machines mostly to make sure that we have our SQL databases sitting on Pure Storage, because it's the fastest storage which we have available.
It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive.
I like the fact that, by default, we encrypt at REST. So, with database encryption, we no longer have to layer it using Transparent Data Encryption, we can use the native storage. This helps lessen the performance impact and simplify configuration.
It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us.
We are going to start using it as a filer. In January, we're going to migrate away from NetApp and use Pure Storage as file service.
What is interesting, because we're moving mostly to the cloud, Pure Storage may be the one storage appliance which will stay after we are done with our migration.
Stability has been great. We just put in a new data pack recently. One drive failed, but other than that, it was very stable. I haven't seen a whole lot of problems. Also, when it comes to upgrading shelves and the evacuation process, which sound a lot scarier than they are, everything has gone smoothly. I am very happy with how it works.
With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process.
I contact technical support from time to time. They have been pretty good. I have the mobile phone for one of the tech support guys, so I call him. He usually gets the ground troops rallied if need be, so the support has been good.
I wasn't part of the initial setup.
We used a reseller for the deployment: Bridge Data. They provided good expertise and timely services, so we were happy with them.
We get about a 3.3 data reduction, which is good. That is not the total reduction, just dedupe and compression.
I would give Pure Storage a high recommendation. Go with Pure (or a flasher rate which is similar) because of the ease of management and performance. It makes life a lot easier, especially if you're a smaller shop it could be prohibitive to have a storage engineer on staff. So, get a systems engineer who can do storage. This is more common with Pure Storage, then with Dell EMC.
I have not used the predictive performance analytics all that much.
I really like the end-to-end VM monitoring. I will be putting that on pretty soon.
All of our production and development workloads run on Pure Storage.
It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore. The solution mostly works. We used to have to babysit our previous storage system, such as managing the volumes and looking at the capacity to predict when we would we eventually run out of space. All of these things used to be challenges with our previous system. After moving to Pure Storage, we don't have to worry about them too much. We have defined our policies once, then things mostly work.
Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been. The latest problem, which we are currently dealing with as of today, is after the latest upgrade, utilization ran out because of the system's space. It is consuming more than it should. The deduplication and compression are not happening in time. The quality is always behind, and Pure Storage acts like it is a bug, and they have a new version that has a fix for it. So, it often goes into a cycle. Then, you keep upgrading, then the new upgrade may have some other problem.
FlashArray is more geared towards bigger, organic workloads where our real need has been around other backups. While it has its own snapshot concept, it should have a separate backup system similar to what Commvault provides. Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations. This is an area that we have already discussed with our account team.
In general, the stability has been perfect. The primary worry for stability is upgrades. The system works unless you touch it, then there are a ton of upgrades.
We can quickly add more shelves and drives with larger sizes, which is perfect. The whole concept of keeping it all modular is definitely new.
While the technical support is good, they are not as good as we would like them to be. We often have to get our account team involved, who are stars. This always solves the problem. Support is available 24/7, but sometimes not as detail-oriented in investigating problems. E.g., we get our Account Team involved to manage the engineers involved and figure out what the problem was. Support is not perfect.
We were previously on legacy storage systems. After moving to Pure Storage, our stability and performance both drastically improved.
The setup is straightforward. We recently added two more areas to our ecosystem, and the setup was phenomenal.
We used a reseller for the deployment named SHI, and our experience with them was good.
For one of our systems, the data reduction which was initially anticipated when we bought the FlashArray was lower than that expected production when we moved over.
Pure Storage is expensive. It comes with features, so you get what you pay for. It is expensive compared to our old storage systems, but from the amount of human effort that you have to pay to babysit a storage system, it reduces that. I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us.
The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations.
You get what you pay for; it is expensive, but it works. Therefore, I would recommend using Pure Storage.
I don't use the predictive performance analytics too much.
We have bare-metal boxes now so we are thinking of going Cloud. We have to have a hybrid solution because we're closer to the financial industry and we have regulations that require us to have on-premise systems. In that case, we would go with Pure Storage.
Now we can store more for a cheaper price as opposed to paying for larger devices and larger rack spaces which get outdated sooner and which we'd have to change every two years. It simplifies storage for us.
There has been a reduction in the total cost of ownership. We did a cost analysis before buying Pure Storage. Now with Pure Storage, our developers work a lot faster and more efficiently which has definitely improved our productivity.
The most valuable features are the speed, cost, and that we get the best value for the money.
It is stable.
We switched solutions because we were looking to expand our storage and we looked at various options. We were having an issue with our previous solution in that we had to continuously upgrade solutions and had restrictions of creations of new environments.
We used an integrator for the deployment.
Dell EMC was another vendor we looked at.
I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper. We want to restrict the data set that's required to be on-premise to be kept on-premise and the rest to be moved to the cloud so that we just pay for what we use.
If you're looking into Pure Storage I would definitely recommend Pure Storage if you have a need of having something on-premise.
We use this solution for our database, log store, and for the file system.
It has improved my organization in the way that now we have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time.
Compared to VMware, it has two to three times better performance.
In terms of stability, we have had two outages. Pure Storage helped up resolved it quickly. Since then we haven't had any issues.
Their technical support is good. We had issues that they resolved quickly.
We switched because we had a lot of issues with our previous storage solution.
This initial setup was straightforward. After we launched it, it was very simple to move the old to the new. It didn't take much time.
I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time.
The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup. It meets the customer's expectations.
I would like to see them lower the costs. They could also include data mining in their next release.
We have performance monitoring tools and it's hard to integrate them with this solution.
It's very stable, we haven't had any issues with it.
Their technical support is great. We don't have to contact them frequently because we don't have many problems.
We also looked at IBM and Oracle. We did internal evaluations and we decided to go with Pure Storage. We chose Pure Storage because of the processor's performance.
I would rate this solution a nine. It's extremely stable and has good performance. The only issue is the cost. I would definitely recommend this solution to somebody considering it.
Our primary use case of this solution is to keep our production and DR data in this storage.
This solution has improved our organization in the way that we used to see latency but now with this solution we don't. It also has good performance. Latencies have come down for our performance in the SQL databases. We can put a lot more in a lot less in terms of space savings. We also save data center space and have good deduplication.
It has also helped us simplify storage in the way that it's easy to manage. It's the most simple storage solution.
We like that there are good deduplication savings in terms of the usage in the data center and that the product itself works well.
Scalability is good. We can do an upgrade in which both of the controllers will be on which has reduced the downtime. The scalability has definitely improved.
I would like for them to do testing on their upgrades.
This solution is stable. At times their product of grates could get a little tricky which can be problematic, but they quickly address it.
Scalability is going well. We have been expanding it and we have about five customers now.
Technical support is very good. We have a dedicated person who helps us which has been a good experience.
We switched because our old solution wasn't great and we wanted to replace it with a better solution.
The initial setup was straightforward in the way that the configuration was simple. It's simple to manage.
The reseller helps with all of the implementation processes.
We also considered Hitachi and Dell EMC XtremIO. Pure Storage made the cut because of its PoC performance.
I would rate this solution a nine because there's always room for improvement. They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth.
If you're considering this solution, I would tell you to do a PoC and if it meets your requirements, go for it. It's a good product. They're a good company and they have achieved good work.
Our primary use case of this solution is for storage. We use it to ensure better application performance and to improve the user experience of the application. The cross-storage appliance improves the overall application experience. We have been using this solution as an on-premise solution. It has been useful for our critical applications.
This solution has improved our organization in the way that in the past we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain.
We like that there isn't a steep learning curve and it is easy to learn how to navigate. It's also quite scalable and easy to implement.
I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS.
We see a lot of reliability coming from Pure Storage, mainly from the fact that over one and a half years, I haven't seen any disc failure especially compared to NetApp.
We use VMware but we have migrated most of the VM load to AWS. We also have Oracle ERP data warehouse and our internal lifecycle management system that is being stored on their storage. It's able to handle the entire load.
Technical support is good. I get pre-preemptive notices from Pure Storage support. They will notify me to check certain parts because there may be a possibility of an issue arising with those parts. I'll know to take a look at the data center and from there I will be able to tell whether or not it's a false alarm or it's an issue that's about to arise. The pre-emptive warning is helpful for us.
We also considered Hitachi Storage and NetApp. Our decision was ultimately based on two factors: simplicity of the usage and overall performance. We ended up choosing this specific product because we had good support from the application team and we liked the performance coming from the product itself.
I would rate this solution an eight because it is very reliable in the way that it fulfills its key objective of being performance driven.
If you're considering this or a similar product I would advise you to do a PoC to make sure that this solution actually fits into your environment. For us, we go through a cycle of about three months to do the evaluations across our different storage. One of the greatest challenges that our company had was that our company was not using Pure Storage and they were quite skeptical of the solution. With the results of the PoC, we proved to them that it is something that is going to be very useful for our business.
Our primary use case of this solution is for Rack Database Storage and Virtualized Server Storage.
I used to have to manually sync storage from server to server, for multiple clusters and database storage for disaster recovery but now, that's all automated. I set it up once, and it was done on the very first day we implemented bolts. Storage arrays were set up on the very same day and by that afternoon all of the replication was configured and I haven't had to touch it since.
Has also helped simplify storage for us. It had taken the original person we used a full week to implement. With this solution, we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations.
We have seen TCO of flash be lower than SSD implementations. We're faster which is part of the equation too. We're paying for speed and if we would have had to buy other solutions, then that would have cost us on the morale side and on the user satisfaction side.
Another way that it has helped my organization is that now we are seeing 3.6 to 1 on Oracle Databases. Our goal was 3, we had to have 3, so we got 3.6 to 1.
The most valuable features for us would be the ease of implementation and box-to-box replication.
I would like to see box-to-box encryption on replication included in the next release.
We've had zero drive failures and zero problems with it. We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted.
Scalability appears to be easy but we haven't had to use it.
We had to open a ticket with their technical support. We needed to get NIST certified and we had some of our storage on that PRA and we had to be done at the end of the year 2017 so we were in constant contact with support to ensure that we were going to meet all the requirements. In the end, we did hit that date.
We knew that we needed to switch solutions because we were using very old Dell EMC hardware. It was painful, we had weekly drive failures. Every single week one of the key drives failed. It was old, it was out of support, we were losing support, we were paying for extended support, we knew that we had to have this solution. It was all spinning discs, there were a couple SSDs on there but for the most part, it was all spinning discs. We saw some major improvements.
The initial setup was straightforward. The other guy we used took a week to set up and there are still issues. Here we had two arrays set up within four hours with a thirty minute drive time.
We used a reseller called Sirius for the implementation. They were good, we didn't have any complaints.
We looked at Hitachi which we did put in place for some of our dev environments. We also spoke to IBM. We used to use Texas Memory Systems which was bought out by IBM and we reached out to them to see if there was an equivalent and there wasn't.
I would rate this solution a ten.
We use this solution for everything. We have a mixed storage use.
This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes, now, it takes thirty seconds.
It has helped simplify storage. I don't have to go to the management counsel anymore. Everything else is taken care of by support teams in the background which is very good.
The most valuable feature for us would be its speed.
The data reduction is working well for the expected usage of VMs and other stuff like that. I do see it's not working very well for already compressed data which is expected. I know this solution is true to the expectation and how it's advertised.
I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works.
Stability is very good. I've only had two big problems with it in the last five years.
Scalability is good. It's fairly easy for me to add capacity.
I haven't had to use their technical support much. The few times I had to call them, they were very responsive. I was happy with them.
We knew we needed to switch solutions because our last storage unit was running out of support so we needed a new one. We chose Pure Storage because we've been using it for a while back and knew that it's a good product.
The initial setup was very straightforward.
We used a reseller for the deployment. They were good, I didn't have any issues with them.
It's expensive but compared to other solutions, you get what you pay for.
If you're looking into this solution I would tell you that it's a product that's good for almost every scenario. If you have enough money, get Pure Storage.
Our primary use case of this solution is for the fast storage and database.
This solution has improved the way our organization functions through its reliability and consistent platform for storage. Has helped up to simplify storage because the management tools make everything a lot easier.
Performance and scalability are the most valuable features for us.
Very stable.
It scales well.
We knew we needed to switch because the older solution we were using was at its end of life.
The initial setup was straightforward in the way that it was a database vacuum storage.
We used a reseller for the integration and we had a good experience with them.
We also looked at Dell EMC and NetApp but Pure Storage performed better.
I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for the uses that we needed.
If you're considering this solution, I would tell you to try it.
Rujuswami, solid review! It's good to hear somebody at least talk about TCO over the life of an investment and when you mention how your upfront CAPEX expense is "balanced by the reduction in the amount of effort human effort involved in babysitting the storage system" it must be nice to experience that reality and more enjoyable work environment. You mentioned Pure being expensive and that you have been a customer for 3-5 years. I'd love to hear your feedback added to this review if you've kept track of other components of TCO. The first one I'd be curious about that you don't mention is energy costs of the Pure system vs your old legacy infrastructure. The second would be your experience with "forklift upgrades" during that 3rd/4th year that is almost inevitable with legacy storage vendors and how that high cost factors into the overall TCO and ownership costs. The third would be having all Purity software and features included from day one AND IN THE FUTURE. So any features that come out you will have for nothing. I'd be curious how that stacks up to your experience of buying SW features over the life of legacy systems and adding that to overall cost (SW purchase + add'l maintenance) over the years. Who knows what cool SW features will come out in the storage industry 5 years from now, right? With Pure you'll own it, with others you'll have to buy it. Pure is intended to last forever in your environment with non-disruptive upgrades, no forklift upgrades, no migrations, all with flat & fair maintenance for life and all SW included for life. So 10+ years from initial investment the system only gets better with the Evergreen model both technically and financially, stays modern to fit your needs as you grow, and TCO gets better and better. So I'd love your thoughts there to challenge your comment about Pure being expensive when considering both CAPEX and OPEX. Thanks again!