Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

It's very good storage for what we use it for, very efficient. It's very cost-effective for the amount of data we have when we're crunching the numbers that we're crunching, for our algorithms which use a lot of processing power.

The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware.

We've never had an issue with scale as we've deployed to some of our clients.

Depending on the deployment, the configuration, and the size of the project, and some of our larger machine-learning deployments, where we have to put in an AI-ready infrastructure box, those projects tend to take a little bit longer. It's a newer product and they're still figuring all that out. But it's comparable to any other vendor up there.

ROI depends on what the clients are looking for as the outcome. If the client doesn't know what the questions are that they need to ask in machine-learning, they can spend a lot of money and get really poor outcomes based on the data and what they're trying to get out of it. That isn't really a Pure issue, it's more a business issue in terms of the outcome wanted by the client.

Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors, as we've looked at some of the other competitors on the market. Pure, for the quality of gear we're getting versus the price, is a good value for us.

One of the "buyer beware" issues would be, if you're going to buy a $1.5 million installment of Aries, which is the NVIDIA, it's got a high cost. If you just need a cucumber cart to be pulled on wheels, you don't need to buy a jet plane, although the seller might say, "Hey, this is the best, greatest, and newest." These are some of the things that you'd want to be aware of as someone who is looking to get into AI. Make sure you need that much because you could probably build a scaled-down version at a significantly lower cost.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. Pure is a partner of ours that we use for a lot of our machine-learning deployments and some of our smart-data applications which we build in Canada. We pursue the same clients together for some of the government contracts, and we use the FlashBlade for some of the storage for our machine-learning algorithms, with the NVIDIA DGX. We're exclusive to Pure, versus the other hardware vendors who are in the same place for flash storage. This is who we use and who we decided to go with, due to some of the innovation that they have within their stack.

In Canada, they've got a very good strategy where they're partnering with some of the good software vendors there, and they're making good relationships on the government side and with some of the VARs. They're doing a good job.

Everything is kosher with the documentation. They've been fantastic, a good partner supporting our pursuits. They have even delivered some prototypes for us, before we started using them, to some of our vendors. That way, we could have a sandbox where we could use some of their storage to create demos and proofs of concept for some of our clients.

I rate the product at ten out of ten because the performance of the storage is just unbelievable.

I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end.

It's extremely stable.

It scales absolutely, to the highest level you can think of.

Pure did help us by coming onsite and deploying it.

We were previously using EMC. The difference is unbelievable. We are buying more.

The initial setup was very easy and straightforward.

Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop.

I would absolutely suggest this solution to a colleague or a friend because of the performance and reliability of the product.

Provides awesome performance, and it's been able to shrink all of our data center from two-and-a-half racks to one rack and give better performance with SSD drives versus spinning disk drives. It has saved overall costs from our heat and power within our data center where we're now just powering up a 3U device.

More than five years.

It's very stable. We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade.

Scalability is great. Pure's model is adding more disk space to it and then getting a better controller to make sure you are going to stay with your performance. It's a wonderful model.

We have our dedicated resources that we have reached out to, but because there have really been no issues with anything, we're not on the phone with them constantly. Whenever we have had an issue or question, someone is always very responsive. They even come onsite for major issues, such as an NOS upgrade, just to hand-walk us through what we're doing.

Deployment was easy. I didn't do it. I am not a technical guy, but my team was able to get it deployed and then connected to our ESX environment within two hours.

Like anything, when you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it. But what you are getting for it, you are definitely seeing a good ROI.

We considered other options. I have used the others, EMC and NetApp, etc. We have looked at all of the platforms, and to see what Pure was able to do within a PoC environment meant that we never turned back our PoC environment. We just bought it and kept running with it. It was an amazing product based on what we had seen out there in the market.

I would definitely recommend it to colleagues. I have not only used it where I am currently at, but I have also used it at other locations before. I have recommended it to partners, and colleagues that I have worked with in the past, across the state of California.

The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte. Then we added another one and I think the total storage is five terabytes now.

The UI is pretty good.

It's absolutely a stable product.

It's scalable. We started with a very small storage array and now we're in a much larger one. I think we're up to 40 terabytes.

We only use tech support infrequently. We don't need to call them. It's easy to use, straightforward. Once it's set up, it does what we need it to do.

Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great. The client environment for a non-profit 501C3 organization makes it much harder for us to come up with the dollars and to cover the increased cost of hardware support, but we do like the way the product runs. It's perfect for us.

I would definitely recommend this product to a colleague because of what it can do. I've already done that. I've already referenced several other nonprofits, human service organizations, and long-term care facilities. We've spoken highly of Pure. For an organization, it can take storage from 40 terabytes down to five terabytes. It's excellent.

Our user base consists of 3,000 people but it takes just one person to manage it - ease of use.

My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value.

There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality. It's just a question of what that will be and what does the future look like?

It's very much a stable product.

It is absolutely scalable to our company's needs.

We've used tech support and we have found it to be very favorable.

The implementation process was seamless. It was very quick. It took less than a week to deploy.

The return on investment is good, very strong.

In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides.

We considered Dell EMC, we looked at Nutanix, Cohesity, IBM, HPE. We ran quite a bit of the gamut.

I would absolutely recommend this product to a colleague. We have no regrets.

We have one person who administers it. We have about 9,000 employees and the IT department has about 300.

We have a lot of MEDITECH electronic health records systems running on it, as well as some other ancillary applications, but it's core hospital EHR, predominantly.

We've seen a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. When we bought this product, the arrays that it replaced were just shy of about $1,000,000 apiece and they were the size of big refrigerators. The product that we replaced them with is a couple of rack units, like the size of a stack of a couple of pizza boxes, consuming way less power. There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself.

Everything could be cheaper. Other areas where we would always like to see improvement with products like this are in compression and deduplication. Increasing the overall storage efficiency of the platform would be great.

One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade. That would be an intriguing and interesting feature for us. Other than that, we've not had any big needs or demands.

It's been a stable product. In six years, we've never had downtime as a result of it. It's been very stable that entire time.

I believe it will scale nicely. We've not had reason to push that limit yet. We just haven't had a need to do that. I believe they've got a very broad portfolio so that we could scale it fairly dramatically beyond where we're at right now.

The approach that Pure takes is what they call it their Evergreen policy, where they will upgrade the brains of the storage array every three years at no additional charge. Many of the competing systems would require big forklift upgrades and fairly significant reinvestment to do the same thing. We are on our third Evergreen lifecycle upgrade so far, and it's been exactly as they advertised. 

When we look at return on investment over time, we've not had to replace or upgrade it during the timeframe that we've had it. As long as it's supported under maintenance, that continues to be an Evergreen process.

It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective, but I would say better than many in terms of performance and service.

The product is an easy ten out of ten. We've been very happy with it. We've found them to be a great value. Service and support is phenomenal. It's really hard to find reasonable things for them to actually improve it on.

Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on, and the biggest selling point for me was the replacement of the hardware, the controllers, without any major expense to the clinic.

I don't deal with the day-to-day management of it. I'm sure that, from a technical perspective, the ones who manage it would be able to tell about you something that needs improvement. From my perspective of the acquisition and ongoing support, I don't see any.

It's a stable product. 

It's scalable. We've grown the product two or three times since we got it. We've actually purchased two more storage arrays since then that are not used for Epic, so we're expanding it. We'll be using this for many years in the future.

Tech support is helpful when needed.

We had multiple platforms beforehand. We had HPE, IBM. 

To me, the installation is easy. I'm not the one who put it together, their techs came out and helped us. I don't remember anything momentous about it.

I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less. That's standard business. It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace. That's huge for me.

I would recommend this product to colleagues in the same field.

It makes life easier for me.

I rate the product at nine out of ten. We're very happy with it. We purchased the product for our Epic implementation. I had such minimal issues with it. Ten out of ten is a stretch, but it's pretty close. We're pretty happy.

It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future.

I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable. Of course, it is, after all, solid-state. It's not the same as "cheap and deep."

It's a very stable product, all self-contained and very well-supported as well.

It's definitely scalable. It can grow with a company's needs.

It's one of the easiest out there, in terms of installation.

It's a great return on investment, based on the mission. When you're interested in high-performance there isn't much else that competes with it.

We looked at everything. In dealing with this, we got mission-specific. It's like different kinds of planes or sailboats: What's the mission? For this high-performance mission, that's what Pure is about.

I would recommend it to colleagues. When performance is important, that's what Pure is all about.

I rate the solution at ten out of ten. Solid-state storage makes a lot of sense, they're 100 percent solid-state when you need that kind of performance. The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money.