Pure FlashArray X NVMe Reviews

We use Pure FlashArray X NVMe is a premium tier storage offering. It is a dedicated array option that we offer our customers. We are a service provider and deployed it in multiple data centers.

The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use.

Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution.

I have been using Pure FlashArray X NVMe for approximately three years.

Since we have deployed Pure FlashArray X NVMe we have not had any major issues with failures or performance on these arrays.

I rate the stability of Pure FlashArray X NVMe a ten out of ten.

The solution scales well and is easy to do. 

We have approximately 10 dedicated customers and another 10 or 15 in the shared use case. Our customers are our users and they may be a company that runs their own software development and this is only their storage on their cloud offerings that they purchase from us.

We plan to increase our usage.

I rate the scalability of Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten.

Overall the initial setup of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is not difficult. It's simple to deploy, install and get up and running. The full process of deployment which includes installation, setup, and configuration, takes approximately one day.

I rate the initial setup of Pure FlashArray X NVMe an eight out of ten.

A small team is typically required for the implementation, as different teams handle different responsibilities, such as networking, virtualization, and facilities. The installation process also requires a couple of people as different roles such as cable racking, networking configuration, and array configuration have to be handled.

We have a dedicated support team for maintenance available 24/7 across all of our data centers. A small group of individuals is in charge of overseeing the platform, and we also have a standard support team in place.

I highly suggest obtaining the implementation certification for Pure FlashArray X NVMe. It is necessary for deployment and can be a bit frustrating as it requires paying for professional services unless you have the certification. With the certification, you are able to deploy on your own. The process is straightforward and uncomplicated, but you don't have access to all the required information to do the initial setup without the certification. Obtaining the certification is a good idea.

There's training material that's available and it's a normal certification test. That cost approximately $150.

I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten.

They could make it easier to receive information about the solution and the support has been a mix of good and poor experiences.

Currently, it's our tier-one storage. We use it mostly for our Oracle databases.

It has drastically improved the performance of our high-end Oracle databases and allows us the ability to replication to a DR location with ease.

We love the product. Pure Storage works really well. 

The CAT tool and also the ability to upgrade the unit's place grades are great. It allows for in-place control or upgrades.

It's a very simple implementation.

They have a good tool to analyze upgrades.

The stability is good.

Technical support has been excellent. 

I cannot recall coming across areas in need of improvement. 

We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI.

I've used the solution for three years. 

The product is very stable. We've had no issues that are related to the array.

We haven't done much scaling. We're ordering an upgrade this week and therefore we will know soon enough how easy it is to expand. We're upgrading the controllers and the disks this month. Scalability so far seems good.

The users are 90% Oracle admins and then 10% SQL admins.

It's used pretty extensively. It is our top-tiered storage for the entire company in our major data centers. We have two of them and we are upgrading them this month.

Technical support has been very helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We used to use a Dell EMC VMAX. We upgraded from that product due to high costs, and little flexibility. This solution also offers specialized Oracle tools.

The solution is very straightforward to set up. It's easy. It's not difficult. 

Deployment of an array took an hour. Implementation of the product did take a while, due to our complexity, however, it works right now. 

I have one staff member for managing the array and then the database team is about four people and it's a global database.

We handled the initial setup ourselves in-house We did not need outside assistance from consultants or integrators. 

We noted a net ROI in about 11 months.

We only pay the support costs. The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support. There are no additional costs. 

We did evaluate Dell PowerMax and NetApp AFF.

The reason why we picked Pure Storage was that it was reasonably priced and had better upgrade capacity, as well as better scale-out capacity. It also had better Oracle tools, especially the CAT tool.

We're customers and end-users.

We really like the product and their other tools are all great.

I would advise new users to look into it for your higher-end Oracle and SQL needs. It does really well with the database products and with low latency requirements with a lot of transactional data.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. It handles all our needs. The only reason why it didn't get a ten is the fact that the tracking of high CPU and garbage collection is still needed. That's kind of important to us.

FlashArray is used for flash storage for SQL databases, like Oracle or MySQL. Oracle is the best use case for FlashArray.

FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a  compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle. 

Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient.

We've been selling FlashArray for a few years.

FlashArray's performance is quite good. We haven't had that many server or hardware issues with FlashArray X. We lost some drives a couple of times, but we replaced them before we got errors. FlashArray is connected to a cloud system, so it sends some warnings before you lose a component. 

FlashArray's latency is the best on the market. I don't know of another product that has latency this low. Read and write latency averages .5 submillisecond. It's good for online financial transactions using Oracle.

I have no complaints about Pure's customer service and support. I've never had a negative experience with these guys. They're always fast, gentle, and ready to help. They offer ample support, and [inaudible 00:06:16]. If you connect FlashArray X to the cloud, they will inform you about any potential issues before they cause an outage. 

The overall performance is great. The single workload performance available from Pure is higher than the SolidFire can provide. 

It's very simple to deploy and manage. Those are probably the two biggest aspects for us.

Everything has been very easy and very intuitive from a support standpoint and from a deployment standpoint. 

In terms of the upgrade procedure, we've gone through that in the last year and it was very smooth. It met expectations.

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

I've only been using it for about a year now, so I haven't run into any issues.

The biggest thing for me is not so much the Array itself. It's their Pure1 manage solution, which is a centralized monitoring plane that we can register all of our arrays to and monitor from one location. However, the ability to make that more multi-tenant for customer visibility so that we, as a service provider, can monitor all arrays we give customers visibility down to their dedicated environments would be ideal. Seeing VM performance down to the array level, and things like that would be useful. It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking. 

We've only used the solution for a year at this point. It hasn't been very long. 

The solution is reliable and the performance has been great. We haven't had any issues so far. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We haven't deployed anything too large yet. That said, just based on the design, that two-controller design, we're not going to have any of the scale problems that we had with SolidFire. They do scale it differently as it's a two-controller design. However, you can easily upgrade by upgrading your drive sizes due to the fact that it's all NVMe. The performance is top-notch, as it's all NVMe based.

Technical support has been pretty responsive. In our testing in the lab, my main interaction with their support was testing some of the different features on opening tickets and going through the upgrade procedure, and it was all really smooth. I didn't really have any complaints.

I'm familiar with SolidFire.

The initial setup was very smooth and straightforward. We didn't have any issues with it. 

We are currently a customer. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I would definitely recommend it. If a company is looking for an All-Flash Tier and they need extreme performance for individual workloads, Pure's the way to go, over something like a SolidFire.

We primarily use the solution for cluster applications and databases. We use the solution on the DBA and those that use double machines.

Being able to have broken files on-site on the same appliance is quite useful.

The newer version of NVME has a really noticeable difference in quality versus the last generation. It's better in terms of latency. It allows for so much more input.

The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward. 

The stability is quite good.

We've found the scalability to be excellent.

The price of the product isn't too high.

To be able to do the welcome files simultaneously on a lower version would be helpful. 

I general, we don't really have any pain points when dealing with the solution.

The solution should improve its logon requirements.

I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware.

The stability has been very good and very reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance has been good.

The solution can scale if you need it to. It offers good scalability.

We have already expanded capacity and installed additional chokes and it works perfectly, with no downtime and no impact on production.

We do have plans to increase usage in the future. We're looking forward to installing more clusters and extending the offering.

While we have five main users that manage the arrays, we have many, many general users of the product.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's quite simple and very straightforward. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process. 

We pay for licensing on a yearly basis. We're pretty happy with the cost. It's reasonable and not overly expensive.

Before choosing this solution, we evaluated solutions from HP, IBM, and Dell EMC.

We are partners. 

While I would recommend the product to others, I would also advise that they try it out first via a proof of concept if they are not so sure about the solution. It's free and they can experiment with all the features in their own environments.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We are very happy with the product overall.

We needed a flash array to support our core databases for maximum performance. We use SQL. We were using vSAN before, but we were having some problems with it. So, we wanted to isolate the databases with dedicated storage. Rather than using a vSAN solution using servers, we tested a couple of solutions, and we figured out that Pure FlashArray X NVMe was giving us the best performance.

Fundamentally, we have more visibility to what is happening in the storage for the databases. We can determine if the problem is something that is bound by IO or the problem is related to the database structure itself. 

The amount of time that a DBA has to spend figuring out whether it is a physical problem versus a programmatic problem has been reduced significantly. Before moving to this solution, when the database was running slow, we were asked to check our disks, but we had no way of verifying that. It was a nightmare. Now, we have reports that we can send on a daily basis, and they know what their performance is like.

We can now ascertain that it is not the physical problem with the array that is causing the delays on the database. The DBAs can then look at the database and figure out various reasons or solutions for this, such as maybe the tables are value structure, maybe they need to run optimal queries, or maybe they should change the way they are accessing the data. You can pretty much take out of the equation the fact that the hardware is the problem.

It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality.

They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good.

Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. 

The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better.

I have been using this solution for almost a year.

It is stable. It has been almost a year, and we haven't had any problems.

Scalability-wise, it is expensive but good. They love to add boxes, and they did a very good job. You can easily add boxes to the array cells, both disks or controllers. The nice thing about it is that you don't have to change your schema. In other words, you don't have to reprogram or reconfigure anything. You simply add a box, and you have more disk space. Essentially, you can extend a disk to whatever services you are running without having to reconfigure a lot of stuff. That's actually a huge benefit. 

We have 200 employees in our firm, and almost everyone in our firm uses this solution. All the databases in the firm are running off Pure FlashArray X NVMe.

Their technical support is fantastic. They are very good. 

We were using Compellent from Dell. We switched because the Dell technology was at least one generation before in the type of SSD drives that they were using. Pure FlashArray X NVMe had the latest versions of the EV disks, which Dell did not have on their systems. They were about to bring it into the market, but we would have had to wait for another three months, and it would have been a new product that wasn't yet tested. 

The infrastructure or the technology for Pure was built specifically for flash arrays, whereas Dell came from spinning disks and then moved into flash arrays. So, the controllers were not built specifically for SSD drives or flash. Even if you have flash, you still run into delays because the controllers were not designed to run just purely flash, whereas Pure was designed for flash from the beginning. They never had any spinning disks in their boxes, and that makes a huge difference. 

The thing that makes these boxes powerful is the algorithm that they use to decide where to put the data and how often they read it. Because SSD drives have a finite life, if you do the algorithms correctly, you maximize not just the performance but also the longevity. Pure is doing a very good job. I'm not fully a mathematician in the longevity piece of it, but I'm expecting that this box is going to give me three to five years of use with good performance. A Dell box would have to be replaced in three years for sure. 

The initial setup is very easy. Its installation is very simple. The console is fairly intuitive, and I understood more or less what my team was doing.

Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it.

I would absolutely recommend using it. I would also suggest negotiating and testing it. I bought a very small system of 10 terabytes that I put in one of our labs for testing so that my team can learn it, and I could play with it. We tested it, and after we were comfortable with the capabilities of the system and building things in VMware, which is a really critical part of the whole integration, we tested three different solutions from HP, Dell, etc. After the testing, it was clear to us that the Pure FlashArray X NVMe was the easiest to manage and configure and had the best performance that we had seen in all the arrays. We are not testers, but we could tell. We could see the speed at which the databases came up and everything else. After testing, you will be convinced that Pure FlashArray X NVMe is probably the best box or right there in terms of performance. We tested in early 2019. There might be another solution that is doing better today.

I would rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten. The only reason I won't give it a ten is the price. Its feature set is pretty complete. I'm pushing it right now. It is like you buy a sports car and then you complain that you don't have a big trunk to put a lot of luggage. You are complaining about the wrong thing here. You bought the thing because it is fast. Similarly, we bought it because it is fast. From that perspective, whether they can address NAS or other things like that is just icing on the cake for me. Its price is a little high right now. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten.

Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model. 

The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

Pure FlashArray X NVMe is stable and easy to migrate. 

The tool is scalable. 

The tool's deployment is easy and can be completed in an hour. Deployment is plug-and-play. 

I rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe an eight out of ten. 

It has good, reliable, and fast storage. We really like snapshot features and how automatable and programmable it is. It is all managed with ad sport and playbooks.

We have been using Pure FlashArray X NVMe for about a year now.

Scalability has been great. We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly.

I have not had to contact technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy.

I would absolutely recommend Pure FlashArray X NVMe to anyone and rate it an eight out of ten.