Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

The primary use case is for on-premise storage.

I have personally used this solution for 15 years, and now, four years with my current company.

It's a product that we hardly ever call tech support for, because it just works. The performance and ease of use are all there, which is what we were looking for. We don't want to always have to call into tech support for something. It's one of those products where you forget about it because it just works.

It is an easy to use product for all of my team members.

Granular growth of the storage needs improvement. Right now, if I wanted to add storage, I have to buy a whole shelf. It would be nice to just buy a few drives.

I would like to see data tiering to AWS.

We put a lot of stress on it, and it is very stable. We have only had one tech support call in the last four years for a hard drive replacement.

The scalability works. We are using between 30TB to 50TB.

I would evaluate the technical support as good, I have a team who calls in for support, if there an issue. They have not complained to me about any problems.

The configuration was very easy.

The cost of the storage needs improvement.

We also evaluated Dell EMC and locally attached storage. We chose Pure Storage because it had the best performance of all the products that we tested. Also, its virtualization performance is extremely fast, and it has good ease of use.

Definitely test the performance, compression, and deduplication. You are going to get more out of the storage than what you anticipated.

We are a Cohesity customer. We have use cases where we integrated Pure Storage with Cohesity.

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.

It's a high performance storage array. We want some deals regarding replication and stretch cluster. 

In our case, we are not using it for us. So, it helps us to go to customers and provide the full stack solution. So, we provide storage from Pure Storage.

It's very fast, easy to use, and the cloud-based management is good.

The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage.

I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good.

It is quite difficult to read documentation and get documentation. To get some things on the web, it is really easy. However, I would to have some in-depth information about how the product is working.

From an API point of view, it's quite a complex product.

We have it in our labs, so it's not in a production environment.

Scalability is okay. We can scale it quite high if we want. This is what we have seen on some projects, which is good,

To set it up is quite easy. When you know how it works, it's really easy. You can set it yourself without any problems. Plug it in, the software updates, and that's it.

We had a guy from Pure Storage helping us and sharing skill sets. This way, they could know our stuff and we could know their stuff.

Test it, get familiar with it, then decide whether to purchase it.

I don't have any experience with predictive performance analytics yet.

We use it for performance, the capacity of deduplication, and compression of the data.

We are a small cloud service provider. When we put Pure Storage working on the services of our customers, most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services.

The storage is very simple. 

We can use more capacity because of the compression and deduplication.

The predictive performance analytics are good, easy to use, and simple to see. They are simple to understand, not complicated.

Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers. 

The solution is very stable.

Only one disk has a problem. The performance with that problem doesn't create problems for our customers. We are able to maintain the performance of the program.

We have already made upgrades now for two months. We think that the scalability is very good. If you want to go to another array or add more capacity, they will change it, if you have the support. So, we put more capacity on it. There is a simple way to do it which has a protection of investment.

We have only used the remote technical support in the case of the disk. They are very good. They acknowledged the problem quickly, identified it, and are always asking and seeing things, which in some cases, are more difficult for us to see.

Because of our clients, we needed a more structured solution with performance which was stable. So, we tested new storage, and Pure Storage was the one that revealed to be more flexible and simpler. 

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward.

For the integration, we used a reseller. It was so easy to put in place and put it to work. They did a good job, but I think we could also do it.

For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management. The total cost of ownership has been reduced. In the beginning, the investment was greater. Now, it is about a 20% reduction.

Using older techniques, we see that we can offer clients more capacity. The real capacity that we get to customers is six or seven times greater than the capacity that we have in place.

In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify.

It is a very good solution. It responds to all the workload problems that we have. It could be with some different workloads that the solution might not respond the way that it responds to us. Test it. People will be astonished with it performance and simplicity.

We have two arrays in two data centers. Normally, in the arrays, the latency is about 4.3 milliseconds per second, which is very good in all workloads. In terms of reduction, our customers are seeing about a seven to eight plus reduction in the capacity that they have.

The TCO for flash and SSD implementation are comparable.

We are using Pure Storage as an all-flash product. It is a niche product, and only used for high performance data.

With Dell EMC, they have all-flash arrays, but they also have other types of storage. Our client use the solution for DevOps and their high speed databases. 

It reduces space and the the polar consumption. It also accelerates the applications.

The VME feature is interesting. Additionally, I like the way they went to market with their All Green Program.

The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so.

The scalability is good. 

I have 19 years experience with Dell EMC products, and almost two years of experience with Pure Storage. The main difference between Dell EMC All Flash and Pure Storage FlashArray is that the Dell EMC product is building on a traditional architecture. You have more functionalities and more connecting possibilities with Dell EMC at this moment. Of course, Pure Storage FlashArray is on a quick road to closing the gap.

It is easy to install. It took us only a half an hour to deploy. If you have a complex environment with a lot of servers, it may take a bit more. I would say the average setup time is one to two hours. 

It is key for a customer to consider the ROI of the product. One has to consider the price, and the architecture of the product. 

The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities. 

When comparing Pure Storage and Dell EMC, I think that Dell EMC has to improve its real performance. Also, Pure Storage is a lot easier to install than the Dell EMC product. 

The primary use case is storage for payment platforms.

We don't have anymore performance issues, which is good. 

The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage.

Performance and support quality.

We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions.

We have seen through time that it is perfectly stable. It has aged well. We were an early adopter in our company.

The scalability is very modular. When you need more storage or power, you change one brick, and you don't have to go through a long process.

Pure Storage has proven to be proactive with support. Even when we have small problems, they open a support case before we even notify them that there has been an actual issue.

We receive good quality of support from the first line of support, so we don't need to escalate or wait through a long process.

We clearly have seen the difference between having storage on Dell EMC or NetApp versus what we have now on Pure Storage. The investment was a clear win for us.

The initial setup was very simple. It's basically a few cables with two plugs. Plug it in, and it is that easy.

We did the installation in-house.

We have seen reduction in total cost of ownership.

We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products.

If you have doubts, do a proof of concept. Pure Storage is very happy to provide you with storage ahead of time that you can test for a couple of months. This way, you can test the performance and bugs, which makes it easier to sell to your company.

Everything is embedded that is something managed from end-to-end by Pure Storage. This is something really easy for us. We don't have to work with integration and the different subcomponent of the storage that we would have to use if it was SSD.

We are at about 3.0 to 4.0 in terms of data reduction.

We have workloads that demand high IOPS, so a lot of speed, fast access, time, and overall high performance.

Its ease of use is a very big thing for our customers. It's easy to set up and easy to maintain. The support is automated, which is very good. 

• Performance
• Deduplication
• They work well with Oracle and other database workloads.

They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about.

It is very stable.

It is easy to scale.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward from what I heard.

The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive.

NetApp is the biggest competitor, then SolidFire, and not so much Dell EMC anymore.

When our customers are deciding on a storage solution, we talk about their needs and what they need as an outcome for their business. We usually show them how easy Pure Storage works and how fast it. These are strong points for most customers.

Try to get a demo, then test it.

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.