Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

VMware is currently our main use case because it dedupes really well.

Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles. 

Firstly, dedupe is the most valuable feature. Hands down. Simplifying storage is also a big win overall. As far as the monitoring with the latency goes, we're not monitoring the apps to see how they're doing at different periods, which saves us time. We're just setting thresholds, walking away, and waiting for emails if they're broken.

The big thing would be to simplify the compatibility to Openstack. The Openstack going into Nova works really well, but if Pure had a few more of those features that would be my win.

It's been rock solid.

So far it seems good.

We've used them a few times, mainly with upgrades. They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good.

They gave us the rundown and was simpler than expected. They gave us the sheet and sent us off saying, "Hey, if you need us, give us a call." We just plugged it in and up it came.

We used a reseller, but then we did our own deploy along with their help. They came in and gave us a training course so that we could maintain it ourselves.

There are a lot of companies that give a solid performance and a lot of places you can get flash. The pricing wasn't that much different, It's really the simplicity that makes a difference. If the data starts flowing too fast, it slows things down and does it later. Those features are the winners for us.

We're constantly on the hunt, and we always keep three to four vendors in. Usually, it's been the bigger players, the IBM's, the EMC's. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but we were looking for something a little different this time around.

We're a service provider, so it's the primary storage for hosting our customers.

Pure Storage is easy to use it has helped simplify our storage. 

vSphere integration and DevOps are our most valuable features. 

Also, one of our customers used to have a rates run that ran for eight hours, and when we migrated them across to Pure that went down to under two hours.

Still implementing.

The stability of Pure Storage is very very good.

Good to very good.

Excellent.

We switched to Pure Storage mainly because of the frustration of dealing with performance on the old platforms that we used to use.

The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it.

The biggest return on investment for us is not having to do a swap out of the arrays every five years. We've been through three Evergreen refreshes now of arrays already deployed, and that's working out really well. 

The main solutions on our shortlist at the end of the process were NetApp, EMC, and Pure Storage. We ended up buying both NetApp and Pure Storage because we always like to have at least two different vendors involved in our data centers. The decision not to go with EMC was because of the design that they'd done for an all-flash storage solution. It didn't fit with what we were trying to do.

I find that the total cost of ownership to actually be lower than the fee implementation. We record and meter everything; electricity consumption and staff time spent looking after the arrays. Our figures put it somewhere between 40% and 50%, depending on how long we run the rates for.

The data reduction rates vary for us. Anything from 6 to 1 down to 2 to 1, because it depends on our workload. Latency is always good and it's generally less than a millisecond across all the arrays we run.

Our primary use case of this solution is for Microsoft SQL. 

This solution was installed at my organization before I got there but having worked with it in the past, I would say that the responsiveness with any SQL applications has remarkably improved.

It has simplified our storage. It's a "set it and forget it."

It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive. It's hard to monetize the difference in performance that we're seeing, but it's obviously there and measurable.

Performance is the most valuable feature. 

Very stable. I'd give it a ten out of ten. 

We've got two arrays. Capacity-wise, we've over-subscribed on storage, so we haven't had to expand them at this point. 

Technical support is very responsive. We had an SSD fail and they replaced it within 24 hours.

Previously, we were on Dell EMC. We went with HyperFlex in a hyper-converged environment. We switched because we really wanted our SQL on SSD.

It's expensive, but it's worth it.

I would rate this solution a nine because I've worked with NetApp in the past, and other vendors as well in storage. I didn't find the content quite as intuitive as what I got in NetApp but in terms of hardware and all that, it's a 10. It's just that one little issue. 

I would advise someone considering Cloud flash storage that it's the way to go, with SQL. Definitely, Pure Storage is at the top of the game for that. 

Our primary use of Pure Storage was for a data virtualization project using Belfrics. We needed the latency that would be required for the project.

The analytics that we gather is used for just one environment (which is big in the banking industry). Production wise, it's running Oracle. Performance wise, it's basically running enterprise applications.

Once the project was enabled with data persuasion and we had Pure Storage behind it, there was a lot of saving storage. Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes. 

Infrastructure as a base is important, but the end game is to have the DevOps pipeline, which is the most valuable feature. 

A three wave application or multi-wave application synchronization would be an improvement. 

The company started off with a small chunk of the product. Now they have moved up to where Pure Storage became the direct responder in our Australian office, they said it was very stable on their end.

We have a capital of storage with EMC, our previous solution. The fact that Pure has a petabyte of storage means that Pure Storage will become a de-facto standard in all the global organizations.

We don't use the tech support, but we have an in-house engineer in one of our offices.

The initial setup was really straight forward.

We needed to choose a new investment because our solution couldn't do data provisioning very quickly. The main solution that the bank normally had was EMC. We looked into HP, IBM, and Pure Storage. But, cost, rate per terabyte, and speed is why we chose Pure Storage. It was a no brainer.

Latency defines everything.

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.

We use Pure Storage on our databases. We have massive SQL databases, four-node clusters and we present a LUN directly to them. Then we have Fusion-io cards as a backup. We also use Pure in our data centers to replicate our databases for our DR center so that we can be secure. 

Pure Storage has helped improve our organization because before them we had a 3PAR of a giant V400 and every day we would lose a disc or a magazine. We had to call out a guy to come onsite. It was a massive three-rack thing. Pure Storage, it's really modular, we're maxing out shelves where we can, and it doesn't take up as much space, it's not as hot, its a lot better than 3PAR.

Replication is the main reason we have it. It has helped to simplify our storage in the way that it just simplifies and there's nothing to really set up. Once we have them linked we ship them over and we sit our RTOs and our RPOs.

As dedupe and compression go up and we get more out of it, then we do see reduction in total cost of ownership. We're also throwing more and more on than we ever had before, so it's hard to tell, but we're getting more data on a smaller array than we ever had before.

The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go.

In terms of performance metrics, depending on what we have on it, some of our databases will get 4.8:1. When we do a big release our SQL tables change values so we'll see that reduced and we'll go up to sometimes 110% utilization. We're working with Pure Storage to try to fix that and see what we're changing so much. We also mistakenly had a 10pb on Pure so that data churn really reduced our usable storage. We're learning how to use Pure properly.

The magic that the storage does would be the most valuable feature for us. Deduping on the fly is really cool to us because some of our stuff we get around seven to one, which is amazing. I definitely like the new redesign of the UI that was done. We just had to do a DR test, and we had to make snapshots and copy them over, and it was a lot easier to use I think with this new UI than the old stuff.

Stability is good, we haven't had any issues. The only thing is that we've had to upgrade controllers a few times because we ended up wanting to use more stuff on here. At first, just our databases, then we moved our VMs to it. We really haven't had any issues except just needing to upgrade to bigger controllers.

We stream into StatsD from Pure Storage, LogicMoniter, and a few others so we don't use the UI performance manager as much because we like a single pane of glass but it's got everything I need. When we do see latency or we have issues it's usually really clear from the graphs.

In terms of scalability, we buy new controllers or we build new shelves and we're able to scale out pretty much whenever we want, as long as we have the money to spend.

We will usually hit up technical support for something that's not too major. We've never had a SEV1 outage with Pure but we've enabled remote support. They log in and they're good to go.

We switched because we were running out of support with 3PAR and they wouldn't renew our support unless we got a new array which was a lot of money. We had some of those SSD arrays, we didn't want to put all our eggs in one basket so we spread the vendors by having an SSD array from HPE and Pure. Once we solved the data reduction and what Pure does we were hooked. 

The initial setup was very easy. 

We did the implementation and worked with professional services. For the most part, our main guy in the compute team has had experience and it was pretty simple. We didn't need a forklift like we needed for the HPE. Just rack and sack and ready to go.

We have seen ROI just from being able to move our databases around, because we have different pods, quickly and specifically. With 3PAR we'd have a lot of remote copy failures, and that doesn't look good for an audit or for a DR test. We haven't had any of those problems with Pure, so we spend less time troubleshooting.

We have a bunch of different storage, like Isilon from Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE 3PAR, Cohesity, and Pure Storage. They're all different functions, and Pure is our warrior, if we need something really fast, really low latency.

I would rate this solution a nine.

If someone was considering this solution I'd definitely ask them what their use case for was. If they had a high workload, like for example, I have a buddy who works in the entertainment industry, and they need to edit 4K video, so they need something like Pure that's really fast. I love the support and I love just what Pure does in general, so I'd definitely suggest it.

We use it for nearline storage.

Right now, we just have lab equipment that we test them on and we try to compare them with other solutions.

The thickness and the sizing for when we put it in the data center. Also, the performance and price.

It has good stability for our company.

It's granular.

The support is good.

Our storage is old, so we were searching for what would be the next good solution for us. We had an integrated solution with a supplier, so we were looking to get rid of this kind of model. 

The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple.

We used a retailer to buy it and it was easy.

Compuverde. But, we like to have data sheets and a more traditional storage than a complex unit.

I would rate this a seven out of ten because it's a good performance storage, but the price is a little bit high. Our predicted performance analytics is also going really well, so if you need faster storage and a good product, this is the one you should go ahead with.

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.