Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

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 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. 

The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup. It meets the customer's expectations. 

I would like to see them lower the costs. They could also include data mining in their next release. 

We have performance monitoring tools and it's hard to integrate them with this solution. 

It's very stable, we haven't had any issues with it. 

Their technical support is great. We don't have to contact them frequently because we don't have many problems. 

We also looked at IBM and Oracle. We did internal evaluations and we decided to go with Pure Storage. We chose Pure Storage because of the processor's performance. 

I would rate this solution a nine. It's extremely stable and has good performance. The only issue is the cost. I would definitely recommend this solution to somebody considering it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to keep our production and DR data in this storage.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that we used to see latency but now with this solution we don't. It also has good performance. Latencies have come down for our performance in the SQL databases. We can put a lot more in a lot less in terms of space savings. We also save data center space and have good deduplication. 

It has also helped us simplify storage in the way that it's easy to manage. It's the most simple storage solution. 

We like that there are good deduplication savings in terms of the usage in the data center and that the product itself works well. 

Scalability is good. We can do an upgrade in which both of the controllers will be on which has reduced the downtime. The scalability has definitely improved. 

I would like for them to do testing on their upgrades. 

This solution is stable. At times their product of grates could get a little tricky which can be problematic, but they quickly address it.

Scalability is going well. We have been expanding it and we have about five customers now. 

Technical support is very good. We have a dedicated person who helps us which has been a good experience. 

We switched because our old solution wasn't great and we wanted to replace it with a better solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward in the way that the configuration was simple. It's simple to manage. 

The reseller helps with all of the implementation processes. 

We also considered Hitachi and Dell EMC XtremIO. Pure Storage made the cut because of its PoC performance. 

I would rate this solution a nine because there's always room for improvement. They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth. 

If you're considering this solution, I would tell you to do a PoC and if it meets your requirements, go for it. It's a good product. They're a good company and they have achieved good work. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for storage. We use it to ensure better application performance and to improve the user experience of the application. The cross-storage appliance improves the overall application experience. We have been using this solution as an on-premise solution. It has been useful for our critical applications.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that in the past we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain. 

We like that there isn't a steep learning curve and it is easy to learn how to navigate. It's also quite scalable and easy to implement.

I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS.

We see a lot of reliability coming from Pure Storage, mainly from the fact that over one and a half years, I haven't seen any disc failure especially compared to NetApp.

We use VMware but we have migrated most of the VM load to AWS. We also have Oracle ERP data warehouse and our internal lifecycle management system that is being stored on their storage. It's able to handle the entire load.

Technical support is good. I get pre-preemptive notices from Pure Storage support. They will notify me to check certain parts because there may be a possibility of an issue arising with those parts. I'll know to take a look at the data center and from there I will be able to tell whether or not it's a false alarm or it's an issue that's about to arise. The pre-emptive warning is helpful for us. 

We also considered Hitachi Storage and NetApp. Our decision was ultimately based on two factors: simplicity of the usage and overall performance. We ended up choosing this specific product because we had good support from the application team and we liked the performance coming from the product itself. 

I would rate this solution an eight because it is very reliable in the way that it fulfills its key objective of being performance driven.

If you're considering this or a similar product I would advise you to do a PoC to make sure that this solution actually fits into your environment. For us, we go through a cycle of about three months to do the evaluations across our different storage. One of the greatest challenges that our company had was that our company was not using Pure Storage and they were quite skeptical of the solution. With the results of the PoC, we proved to them that it is something that is going to be very useful for our business.