Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

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 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.

• Resiliency
• Speed: It's fast. It's like I don't notice anything. 
• It's very easy to use. The GUI is simplistic, which can be nice.

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.

It does everything they say it will do:

• It's very cost-effective compared to other big players.
• Adding storage to it after we bought it was not a shocking cost surprise.
• It integrates very well with VMware as we're using Site Recovery Manager from VMware.
• It's also tiny, it doesn't consume very much space. We're saving power and space in the data center. 
• It's really easy for us to manage.

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.

There are two real use cases. 

1. General purpose infrastructure for VMs. 
2. Business technical applications, such as Oracle DB or MS SQL DB. 

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.

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.

Since we're a database shop, we primarily do databases on Pure. Everything else follows from that.

We are doing a project in tandem with Boeing to develop a security solution for their Oracle databases. We've been doing it in the VMware virtual solutions lab, which is back-ended by Pure Storage. It's a very complex project. Pure made it fast enough that we could cycle through the things that we needed to cycle through to get it exactly right. We were able to do so a lot of times, to rev it enough to get it refined to where the process was exactly right every time. There's no way we would have had time to rev it that much had it been on anything slower.

It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues. As long as you don't max out the bandwidth of your connectivity, your Fibre Channel, then it doesn't matter. That has pushed the bottleneck down to the connectivity to the storage, as opposed to the different spindle groups on your storage. That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit.

We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure Storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates. Not only that, it helps dramatically speed the read coming back in, because you don't have to read it 400 times. Actually, the write doesn't hurt anything either because the write goes in once and then it gets deduplicated and that's that. It does help speed I/O because then everything is coming right off the front end of cache. Certainly, in terms of space, it's probably the most helpful.

1. It's really fast
2. It's fall-off-the-log easy to use. 

That is the strongest selling point. The ease of use is really nice.

In terms of the Predictive Performance Analytics, it certainly contributes to better overall performance and I'm a total fan of that. I've worked with some other flash storage vendors and the one that has the best overall offering, certainly, is Pure, the Analytics is part of it, whereas some of the other storage vendors haven't had as strong an offering in predictive analytics.

The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless. 

I'm assuming that the VVol implementation got fixed in the last little while. We ran into that last February, so it's been about eight months. I suspect that they probably have it resolved by now. Other than that, it's bulletproof.

We have never, ever run up against a bottleneck. It's a piece of cake to scale it. You plug in more and you keep going until you max out your bandwidth and then you put another storage controller in, a Fibre Channel controller, and go some more.

The guys in technical support are great. They're on the money. Our client, Chapman University, is on a first-name basis with the Pure support guys. You get really good interactive support from the Pure team.

I think our client, Chapman University, was on Dell EMC before they went to Pure. What I'm about to say are some of my impressions, I don't know that I know all the details that went into the decision. I think that they were just done with Dell EMC and that Dell EMC's all-flash solution was an afterthought, where Pure's was engineered from the ground up to be all-flash, as opposed to bolted on after the fact.

From what I saw at Chapman University, they wanted the increase in performance plus the decrease in power utilization and space and cooling in their data center. That dramatically mitigated a whole bunch of data center issues they had before. It didn't take nearly as much power to power it or to cool it and they reduced their footprint significantly.

I saw a little bit of the initial setup at Chapman University, and it didn't look all that complicated. It appeared to be pretty straightforward.

There Is ROI has come in saving personnel time, a lot of time. That pushes into the DBA staff, the DevTest staff, and the production folks, because we got their stuff to run 50 percent faster. We took it off the old physical hardware and virtualized it and got it to go 50 percent faster than the physical hardware running against Pure Storage.

That made it easy to rapidly provision DevTest environments. Things like that, that used to take hours and hours and hours, can now be automated down to one click of the button by the requester and another one or two by the approver. Then it just runs in the background and it's done in a couple of minutes.

It's hard to quantify the reduction in the total cost of ownership, but it's there, absolutely, particularly in the VS lab context and the channel context as well. It's so much faster, that not only has it eliminated the time that DBAs would have spent otherwise, doing tasks that take a long time to do - things like backup and the like - but it has also helped on the front end because you can do development and DevTest provisioning so much more quickly. It's hard to roll that into traditional TCO, but it's certainly part of it when you look at the entire organization.

Regarding finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations, I'm not sure I could quantify that.

Do it. I have zero reservations about recommending Pure to anyone who is looking for some really good all-flash. Pure is the way to go, for sure.

All-flash is great whenever you can get it but I really like the Pure offering. It's very robust. I heard the "chief scientist," the brains of the deal, explain how some of that stuff works at the bit and byte level and, being a computer science major, I thought that was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Pure works pretty well as is. I've been so busy using all the good stuff that it already does. I'm sure it can be improved, but we haven't got that far yet. We've been milking what it already does.

I hesitate to give it a ten out of ten because I'm sure it can be improved somehow. In terms of how it could be improved, I don't know. I'm pretty happy with it as it stands. Pure is the best thing that I have seen in that space so far, hands-down, bar none.