Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

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. 

We use it for storage of critical data, and for storage of replicated backups.

We use Zerto Virtual Replication software. We write all of those backups to Pure, then we use those in our disaster recovery scenarios. 

It has simplified our storage. We use it for a pretty specific use case of replicating between sites. I have two data centers, a primary data center and a secondary data center, with a Pure Storage device in each location. We do backups of critical data in both locations, then replicate them back and forth between the sites. 

The value for the storage, in the way it stores the data, but also the robustness of the product, it's very stable. And then the support that we get when we have an issue.

One to three years.

The stability is very high with almost no problems. 

Excellent. Best of any of the vendors we work with.

Everything with Pure Storage is so straightforward. It was an easy setup, and we were storing data almost immediately.

We used a third party for deployment. When we bought it, we built-in some professional services who did great work. 

We actually originally went with a competitor's product, and after about eight months, a lot of wrangling, had them buy it back from us. And then we bought similar Pure Storage product, and it's just been great.

We've been using this solution for four years. We are on-prem with Pure and we are not using any of Pure's off-prem product. We do have experience with a variety of storage in AWS. For us, it's still two very different things, we like Pure Storage because our key business systems are still on-prem. It's been extremely reliable and gets the job done. 

Our primary use case is for Oracle databases, data warehouses, and mission critical apps. 

This solution has improved my organization because we can easily snapshot and share the same storage platform for non-production production and so we've been able to get very high performance from non-production environments as well. 

The ability to seamlessly and easily upgrade storage capacity and upgrade to a completely new generation of the array are the most valuable features. 

There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there. 

In the early days, we had issues with stability right up to an actual crash during an upgrade. That was three and a half years ago and since then there's been a dramatic improvement. We've found the product to be extremely reliable. 

Scalability is near excellent. In terms of provision capacity, a total footprint is over 400 terabytes provisioned out to systems in my organization. 

Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk. 

We considered different products from Dell EMC and NetApp. We didn't choose Dell EMC because it was a cost issue. For NetApp, there was an ease of use difference and we felt that Pure Storage was an easier product for our team to use. We chose Pure Storage primarily because of its combination of performance and ease of use. 

I would rate this solution as a nine because of the scalability and upgrade flexibility. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to take the opportunity to take a look at the product. Take a demo and actually run through day to day operations and see how easy and reliable it is. 

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.

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 have bare-metal boxes now so we are thinking of going Cloud. We have to have a hybrid solution because we're closer to the financial industry and we have regulations that require us to have on-premise systems. In that case, we would go with Pure Storage.

Now we can store more for a cheaper price as opposed to paying for larger devices and larger rack spaces which get outdated sooner and which we'd have to change every two years. It simplifies storage for us. 

There has been a reduction in the total cost of ownership. We did a cost analysis before buying Pure Storage. Now with Pure Storage, our developers work a lot faster and more efficiently which has definitely improved our productivity.

The most valuable features are the speed, cost, and that we get the best value for the money. 

It is stable. 

We switched solutions because we were looking to expand our storage and we looked at various options. We were having an issue with our previous solution in that we had to continuously upgrade solutions and had restrictions of creations of new environments. 

We used an integrator for the deployment.

Dell EMC was another vendor we looked at. 

I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper. We want to restrict the data set that's required to be on-premise to be kept on-premise and the rest to be moved to the cloud so that we just pay for what we use. 

If you're looking into Pure Storage I would definitely recommend Pure Storage if you have a need of having something on-premise. 

We use this solution for our database, log store, and for the file system.

It has improved my organization in the way that now we have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time. 

Compared to VMware, it has two to three times better performance. 

In terms of stability, we have had two outages. Pure Storage helped up resolved it quickly. Since then we haven't had any issues. 

Their technical support is good. We had issues that they resolved quickly. 

We switched because we had a lot of issues with our previous storage solution. 

This initial setup was straightforward. After we launched it, it was very simple to move the old to the new. It didn't take much time. 

I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time.