Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

Our primary use case of this solution is for the production storage, development, and DR storage. 

We run a lot of Oracle workloads and we need a lot of development environments and this solution allows us to snapshot those environments. It releases those to new teams within minutes at a very small storage cost amount. 

It really helps simplify storage. It's very, very simple to use. The web interface is also very easy to use. The bureau's EOS is just perfect, there's nothing really complicated about it. With the help of the array, it's very easy to navigate. We can see the volumes and our protection groups. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the Legacy storage that we were using.

Ease of use is the most valuable feature for us. It just does what it says. It's very efficient, really quick, and replication is great.

Predictive performance analytics are also good. The compression and the predictive analytics tell us how much storage we're using and how much longer we have before it runs out. The compression algorithms are perfect.

The new features that they are coming out with are very compelling for us, especially now that they have a partnership with AWS it will get some traction in the coming year. We will certainly be going with VMC on AWS. It's very compelling for us now that it's working with VMware.

There's nothing that they could improve on. They've been brilliant all the way through. We've had no downtime, no problems, easy installation; it just works.

There have been no problems whatsoever with stability. We do purity upgrades during the daytime and we don't lose any workloads and we don't have any outages. The support of Pure Storage is just absolutely brilliant. We've had no outages whatsoever with it.

We scaled up when we bought new arrays where we get the snapshot replaced and upgraded for no extra costs. During the workloads and while the upgrade was taking place there were no outages, none whatsoever.

We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten. 

We were getting rid of Dell EMC because they were awful and they cost a fortune. vSAN was also an option because we use a lot of VMware but we stuck with Pure Storage. It was a solution that we'd put in a few years ago and we didn't have any problems with it so we wanted to continue using it. We have a good working relationship with the account managers in Scotland. They're really good.

The set up was very easy. The hardest part was getting it out of the box and into our tack. 

We used an integrator called ProMax. We did 50/50 with them. We got ProMax to come in and start the process and then we finished off the work. This was the first time that we worked with them and we had no problems with them. I would rate them a ten out of ten. The engineer was helpful the whole way through. He helped me unbox the solution, get it into the racks, build it, cable it up, and get it into production. 

We've seen data reduction figures in the amount of storage that we're using. We've seen cost savings compared to Dell EMC. We've seen the performance of the array. We don't have any real figures, but I'm 100% sure that it's faster than the Legacy storage that we were using.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

If you're considering this solution I would advise you to do a Pure Storage demo and have them put an array in to try. 

Our VDI with VMware Horizon include 100 VM for office and graphics desktop with nVidia GRID, the low latency and the high deduplication permit to reduce storage footprint, power consumption and to increase the consolidation on few VMware Host.

We have consolidated all the VSI (55 VM) and VDI (100 VM) in the same storage, improving performance and overall virtual desktop acceptance.

The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression.

We liked the non-disruptive downgrade from FA-420 (POC) to FA-405 in production and the non-disruptive upgrade from FA-405 to M20.

Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved. The VVol support is just released in GA.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

There were no stability issues. It is always on from the first LUN deployment to VSphere.

There were no scalability issues. NDU and NDD were very simple, without interruption or performance decrease for its cluster nature, active/passive.

Customer Service:

I would rate the customer service as very high.

Technical Support:

They are all skilled. They upgraded the storage firmware from remote every time we asked via a phone appointment.

We have used 3PAR for VDI and NetApp for VSI. The new solution has a very low price/performance ratio. With the price of the SSD upgrade of our NetApp FA3220 and the one year maintenance of the old 3PAR, we bought Pure Storage with a three-year support agreement.

The initial setup was very simple. In two hours, we started to use Storage vMotion.

The product was implemented directly by the vendor’s team and they are very skilled.

In two years, we will start to save. With their Evergreen Storage subscription, we can enjoy protection of our investment.

Everything is included, so there is very simple licensing. F

We evaluated EMC XtremIO and NetApp FAS.

Test it in your environment in a PoC or in a Try-and-Buy to check your deduplication and compression ratios.

Pure has global deduplication and the reports (Analysis tab - Capacity) are not clear, you don’t know how much Shared Space is used by each LUN but only the “Unique“ Space and the Snapshot Space.

I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information.

IPv6 is now fully supported, Windows Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) is added in the latest firmware as supports for Docker APKG 1.0.1 and Dynamic Volume in the Purity Container Engine.

SAN solution for Tier 1 storage for VMware, Exchange, SQL, and physical servers; trying to fit as much production load as possible on them.

The speed to deploy or move VMs is ridiculous. By migrating our important systems to the Pure arrays, we have removed any storage issues and questions when there is a problem of "is it the storage?"

The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive. The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size.

• Ease of setup
• Migration to it
• Upgrading
• Support responsiveness
• Kick-butt mobile app
• On box analytics and vCenter plug-in
• The ease of creating a snapshot for testing or recovery.

I cannot stress enough the stability, speed, and awesome deduplication and compression rates. The amount of data we have moved to it has allowed us to remove units four times the size. The mobile app is kick-butt and support has been topnotch.

Mainly, just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI.

None.

No issues.

It has been great; easy to work with to resolve cases or perform upgrades.

Yes, plainly put, it sucked and we wanted to get to a solution that was fast, easy to maintain, and reliable.

We had issues with it not handling the load and could never trust that it was serving data fast enough to not be causing issues.

Easy as pie.

In-house.

• Speed
• Time saved in management
• Availability
• No fingers pointing at storage as an issue.

It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for. I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue.

We looked at Nimble and EMC.

I never have to worry about its performance impacting the firm. It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.

I had high expectations and they have met or exceeded each one of them. It was an exciting day when I finally got them up and running.

It's a very simple tool to use with extremely low latency and high performance.

Pure Storage FlashArray has improved the performance of applications.

Feature-wise, the solution provides direct flash storage.

Improvement-wise, Pure Storage FlashArray must support real-time incidents. I think that Pure Storage should improve its pricing.

Currently, the solution fails to support file screening. I want to see the solution supporting file screening in the future.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for four years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. Presently, five people in my company use the tool.

I rate the solution's technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process was straightforward.

My company saw a return on investment using the solution as it helped us reduce the time it took to access applications and reduced the space required in our data center.

Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive.

When considering the use of this solution, I suggest evaluating the price and taking into account its performance and potential to reduce the space in the data center. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

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.

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.