Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

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 it for virtualization.

We have complete control over it. 

We partner with Oracle on stuff, so we have support on it. Before, we have had issues with support from our other vendors. It has been a major improvement from a support perspective.

The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. We've run Fibre Channel for our historical storage, and going from Fibre Channel to InfiniBand connected has blown up the amount of traffic that we can do. Now, we can support 40Gs per link, and there are eight links. When we went from being able to support four Fibre Channels at eight gigs a piece. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels.

The most valuable feature is the speed of it. It is much faster than anything that we can get from similar competitors.

The solution helps to simplify storage.

Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics.

The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it.

We haven't scaled yet, but we're planning to. We do upgrades constantly.

It's very scalable and easy to do.

We moved from an infrastructure that was owned by another team, so we needed something to move our own stuff onto. We originally tried some hyperconverged solutions from Dell EMC, but they didn't perform well at all. It took years to get that together and when we ran our benchmarks on them, and we decided they were not good. So, we immediately turned eyes to Oracle who is a big provider for my whole company, not just my team, and talked to them about what they had that was going to suit us, and they pointed us towards Pure Storage. As soon as we had a proof of concept and were testing it, we decided to run with it.

The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case.

We used Oracle.

I would recommend Pure Storage.

We investigated some flash storage implementations for it and based off of the way that the appliance works the added cost of flash doesn't scale with the performance that you get with it, so it hits on our middle ground. It works perfectly for us. We don't need to look at any type of flash 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.

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. 

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.

I help our customers build FlashArray. 

It is always out of the box, and ready to use. 

It is very simple to set up, and very simple to use.

The interface is easy to use.

It is very easy to implement.

It falls far short of protocol support. Our customers frequently ask us how we can use NFS or if we can use it as a copy or something similar. If you have any suggestions, I believe they could use more protocol, and have easier automation.

Automation could be simplified. For example, we can ask the storage to create a folder and then monitor it automatically.

I have been working with Pure Storage FlashArray for three years.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a very stable product.

Pure Storage FlashArray is a scalable solution.

I am also working with Pure FlashArray X series and Pure Storage FlashBlade.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of ten.

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.