Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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. 

I work for a company that offers outsourcing services for IT solutions. I work in system support and we are resellers of Pure Storage FlashArray. 

I'm a Pure Storage fan because I think this solution offers great performance. It provides fast access, is user-friendly and it's easy for us to support this product. The product is also very powerful with high-speed duplication which makes it easier to manage things. I understand that there is a new version of system operation that includes a self-protect configuration to avoid getting hacked. It's crucial for us here in Brazil where we need to be safe. 

The only feature the solution lacks is self-backup. If you're working with different processors, you need to install different software tools to back up. But if it were directly available, it would make things very easy. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable, we haven't had any problems in five years. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have a close relationship with customer support and they are good. 

Positive

The initial setup is very easy, there aren't any problems. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

Our customers primarily use Pure Storage for virtualization, whether it is VMware or Hyper-V. They choose Pure Storage for its high-performance, low-latency, and reliable all-flash arrays, which are essential for efficiently running virtualized workloads, including critical applications, databases, and virtual machines.

I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity. I value its simplicity and artificial intelligence monitoring. It also integrates seamlessly with major platforms like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Microsoft SQL, while offering tight integration with backup software for faster restores. This connectivity promotes cyber resilience and can be leveraged for disaster recovery solutions.

I don't see any major issues with Pure Storage, but one thing to note is that Pure Storage can be seen as a premium product, and other vendors are catching up in terms of performance and features. However, overall, the feature set and performance are excellent.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for two and a half years.

It is highly stable, especially if you follow recommended patching and software upgrades. Pure Storage offers an officially published uptime guarantee, ensuring device stability, which is legally binding.

Pure Storage is very scalable. Even the smallest model can be successfully upgraded all the way to the largest model, which is a feature I haven't seen with other solutions.

Pure Storage's tech support is excellent. They use AI effectively, and their support team is highly reliable and responsive. Our customers have experienced no issues with their support.

Setting up Pure Storage is incredibly easy. You just plug it in, connect it to the network, and start building your storage – it is that simple. Deployment takes less than a day. Deployment is straightforward and typically manageable by a single person or resource. However, when lifting heavier equipment, like the larger Pure Storage units, it is recommended to have two people, but the rest of the setup can be accomplished via servers. Maintenance is straightforward. Once it is connected to the internet and secure communication is enabled, it sends monitoring data to Kubernetes and artificial intelligence in the cloud, providing early warnings of potential issues. This cloud-based AI can often assess the health of your device better than you can.

Our customers see a return on investment and value for their money with Pure Storage. They measure it through methods like net present value and comparisons to the weighted accumulated cost of capital, which provide a robust financial assessment.

It has a flexible, pay-as-you-go option.The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations, but this is the only major downside.

My advice for new users is to not be afraid to start using it from day one, but take the time to educate yourself on all the valuable features available to make the most of it. Since it is a significant investment, ensure you manage and protect the asset effectively. Overall, I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray as a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for general block storage. Usually, the storage product owners are the users.

It's just very easy for general block storage. Generally, the ease of use is what customers comment on. It's very user-friendly.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

Scalability is possible. You can expand the solution.

The stability and reliability are great.

Technical support has been helpful in general. 

The solution needs an integrated NAS platform, file platform. The file functionality could be better.

I've been dealing with the solution for a couple of years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

We find the product to be quite scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

The solution is extensively used. Likely usage will increase in the future. 

Technical support is great. They are helpful and responsive. We're quite satisfied with the level of support they offer customers. 

I used to work with Hitachi and switched to this product for ease of use and for performance.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex. 

The actual startup and deployment take about half a day.

From an ROI standpoint, if you consider compression and de-duplication and all that, you get a pretty good ratio.

The pricing of the product is very competitive to others in the market for Flash and NVMe storage. That covers the cost of hardware and support.

I'm a reseller.

I'd advise potential users to try it out and consider it as an option.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten based on the overall performance, scalability, and reliability.

We use FlashArray for proofs of concept and to bring the clients our infrastructure to test them. We have six clients using the solution. Most of them are using the ActiveCluster configuration.

I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities. The performance is extremely good. They have a complete replication set, including near-zero RTO and zero RPO. FlashArray integrates with all the new microservices technologies. It integrates with many products like Oracle, Cisco, Veeam, and Rubrik. 

I've been using FlashArray for four years.

FlashArray is highly stable. We don't have very many tickets in our support system. The non-disruptive upgrade works fine. We did a lot of this work for our clients without any problems. The flash disks are solid. In fact, we have very few issues with this infrastructure. 

Scalability doesn't require much work. The expansions are immediately used. We install more disks, which are automatically assigned to the volumes and the files.

Pure support is very proactive. They monitor our infrastructure in real-time, so they respond before we even open a ticket.

Deploying FlashArray is fast and straightforward. We can deploy the infrastructure in half an hour, but installing all the other things takes about two hours to provide the disk to the host. We don't need any help. We integrate the infrastructure with other vendors like Cisco, Veeam, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc., and it works fine. We only need one engineer to deploy FlashArray, but we have three Pure-certified engineers on our team.

Pure Storage doesn't have licenses. You buy the hardware, and all the software is included. The price of FlashArray is very competitive.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray 10 out of 10. If you are considering FlashArray, you can try and buy. Most clients who try the solution ultimately buy the product. 

We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for all of our data. We use the deduplication feature and it is working well.

The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster.

The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature.

I have been Pure Storage FlashArray for approximately two years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is very stable.

We have not had an issue with the scalability of Pure Storage FlashArray.

We plan to increase the usage of this solution.

The support has been very good from Pure Storage FlashArray.

The solution is simple to implement. It's a new kind of storage, it is very easy to use. It is similar to NetApp, it is straightforward.

We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves.

It is a very good product.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

FlashArray is our main repository for all our VMware.

We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent.

When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller.

I've been using FlashArray for a year and a half.

For our needs, the stability was very good. 

The scalability was also very good.

The installation was pretty straightforward.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray eight out of 10.

The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution.

The price should be lower.

I have been working with Pure Storage FlashArray for one year.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a stable solution.

It is a scalable product, but not for our needs.

This solution is used by 100 people in our organization.

I have not contacted technical support.

My main point of contact has been the reseller.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to install.

The installation takes one or two days.

We have a team of three to maintain this solution.

The reseller was able to assist us.

The pricing is rather costly when compared to similar solutions.

There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray an eight out of ten.