Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for Rack Database Storage and Virtualized Server Storage.

I used to have to manually sync storage from server to server, for multiple clusters and database storage for disaster recovery but now, that's all automated. I set it up once, and it was done on the very first day we implemented bolts. Storage arrays were set up on the very same day and by that afternoon all of the replication was configured and I haven't had to touch it since.

Has also helped simplify storage for us. It had taken the original person we used a full week to implement. With this solution, we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations.

We have seen TCO of flash be lower than SSD implementations. We're faster which is part of the equation too. We're paying for speed and if we would have had to buy other solutions, then that would have cost us on the morale side and on the user satisfaction side.

Another way that it has helped my organization is that now we are seeing 3.6 to 1 on Oracle Databases. Our goal was 3, we had to have 3, so we got 3.6 to 1.

The most valuable features for us would be the ease of implementation and box-to-box replication.

I would like to see box-to-box encryption on replication included in the next release. 

We've had zero drive failures and zero problems with it. We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted.

Scalability appears to be easy but we haven't had to use it. 

We had to open a ticket with their technical support. We needed to get NIST certified and we had some of our storage on that PRA and we had to be done at the end of the year 2017 so we were in constant contact with support to ensure that we were going to meet all the requirements. In the end, we did hit that date.

We knew that we needed to switch solutions because we were using very old Dell EMC hardware. It was painful, we had weekly drive failures. Every single week one of the key drives failed. It was old, it was out of support, we were losing support, we were paying for extended support, we knew that we had to have this solution. It was all spinning discs, there were a couple SSDs on there but for the most part, it was all spinning discs. We saw some major improvements.

The initial setup was straightforward. The other guy we used took a week to set up and there are still issues. Here we had two arrays set up within four hours with a thirty minute drive time.

We used a reseller called Sirius for the implementation. They were good, we didn't have any complaints. 

We looked at Hitachi which we did put in place for some of our dev environments. We also spoke to IBM. We used to use Texas Memory Systems which was bought out by IBM and we reached out to them to see if there was an equivalent and there wasn't. 

I would rate this solution a ten. 

We use this solution for everything. We have a mixed storage use. 

This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes, now, it takes thirty seconds. 

It has helped simplify storage. I don't have to go to the management counsel anymore. Everything else is taken care of by support teams in the background which is very good. 

The most valuable feature for us would be its speed. 

The data reduction is working well for the expected usage of VMs and other stuff like that. I do see it's not working very well for already compressed data which is expected. I know this solution is true to the expectation and how it's advertised.

I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works.

Stability is very good. I've only had two big problems with it in the last five years. 

Scalability is good. It's fairly easy for me to add capacity. 

I haven't had to use their technical support much. The few times I had to call them, they were very responsive. I was happy with them. 

We knew we needed to switch solutions because our last storage unit was running out of support so we needed a new one. We chose Pure Storage because we've been using it for a while back and knew that it's a good product. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

We used a reseller for the deployment. They were good, I didn't have any issues with them. 

It's expensive but compared to other solutions, you get what you pay for. 

If you're looking into this solution I would tell you that it's a product that's good for almost every scenario. If you have enough money, get Pure Storage. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for the fast storage and database. 

This solution has improved the way our organization functions through its reliability and consistent platform for storage. Has helped up to simplify storage because the management tools make everything a lot easier. 

Performance and scalability are the most valuable features for us. 

Very stable. 

It scales well. 

We knew we needed to switch because the older solution we were using was at its end of life. 

The initial setup was straightforward in the way that it was a database vacuum storage.

We used a reseller for the integration and we had a good experience with them. 

We also looked at Dell EMC and NetApp but Pure Storage performed better. 

I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for the uses that we needed. 

If you're considering this solution, I would tell you to try it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for the production storage, development, and DR storage. 

We run a lot of Oracle workloads and we need a lot of development environments and this solution allows us to snapshot those environments. It releases those to new teams within minutes at a very small storage cost amount. 

It really helps simplify storage. It's very, very simple to use. The web interface is also very easy to use. The bureau's EOS is just perfect, there's nothing really complicated about it. With the help of the array, it's very easy to navigate. We can see the volumes and our protection groups. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the Legacy storage that we were using.

Ease of use is the most valuable feature for us. It just does what it says. It's very efficient, really quick, and replication is great.

Predictive performance analytics are also good. The compression and the predictive analytics tell us how much storage we're using and how much longer we have before it runs out. The compression algorithms are perfect.

The new features that they are coming out with are very compelling for us, especially now that they have a partnership with AWS it will get some traction in the coming year. We will certainly be going with VMC on AWS. It's very compelling for us now that it's working with VMware.

There's nothing that they could improve on. They've been brilliant all the way through. We've had no downtime, no problems, easy installation; it just works.

There have been no problems whatsoever with stability. We do purity upgrades during the daytime and we don't lose any workloads and we don't have any outages. The support of Pure Storage is just absolutely brilliant. We've had no outages whatsoever with it.

We scaled up when we bought new arrays where we get the snapshot replaced and upgraded for no extra costs. During the workloads and while the upgrade was taking place there were no outages, none whatsoever.

We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten. 

We were getting rid of Dell EMC because they were awful and they cost a fortune. vSAN was also an option because we use a lot of VMware but we stuck with Pure Storage. It was a solution that we'd put in a few years ago and we didn't have any problems with it so we wanted to continue using it. We have a good working relationship with the account managers in Scotland. They're really good.

The set up was very easy. The hardest part was getting it out of the box and into our tack. 

We used an integrator called ProMax. We did 50/50 with them. We got ProMax to come in and start the process and then we finished off the work. This was the first time that we worked with them and we had no problems with them. I would rate them a ten out of ten. The engineer was helpful the whole way through. He helped me unbox the solution, get it into the racks, build it, cable it up, and get it into production. 

We've seen data reduction figures in the amount of storage that we're using. We've seen cost savings compared to Dell EMC. We've seen the performance of the array. We don't have any real figures, but I'm 100% sure that it's faster than the Legacy storage that we were using.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

If you're considering this solution I would advise you to do a Pure Storage demo and have them put an array in to try. 

We're providing some ESXi solutions to our customers with high performance.

We working now with VM Analytics to provide our customers some strategies about their VMs directly.

Asynchronous and synchronous replication between two data centers. Our platform is housed in two centers, and we're using Pure Storage for their replication.

We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform.

The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job.

They could improve the price.

It is very stable.

We did some add-ons months ago without any downtime.

Technical support is good. They are proactive about the upgrades and reactive when we have any issues.

Before working with Pure Storage, we were working with an SP and multi-tier solution. Most of our customers were looking for performance. So, we made the choice to have an all-flash platform with replication. At the time, Pure Storage was the only one to be able to provide some all-flash storage with replication, and replication was mandatory for our customers.

It is quite easy to set up.

We have seen a reduction in TCO.

We use it for VDI.

We used to run VDI under other storage. The performance wasn't great, but when we moved to Pure we got less than a few microseconds in performance. Latency is the most important aspect for us.

The performance.

We would always like to see higher performance, and lower pricing is always better. In general, they're going in the right direction.

It's very stable and it's very fast. In general, a lot of times VDI with our older system was up and down. Sometimes we ran into performance bottlenecks. Pure helps stabilize things, at least from a storage perspective, to stabilize the I/O performance.

We haven't reached the stage yet, specifically on VDI, where we have to scale.

Technical support is great. They make it simple.

Our previous solution was slow. We ran into a lot of I/O bottlenecks. I had wanted to get Pure into our environment for a few years. They lowered the price to the point that the price-to-performance fit our budget.

The initial setup was straightforward, very fast. We had done a PoC before.

We used a reseller, ePlus. They worked closely with Pure, with their engineers.

When users don't call wanting to kill me, that's ROI. The internal VDI performance was bad and, from an IT perspective, we had unsatisfied customers. Our ROI is that we don't get angry customers calling to say the solution doesn't work.

The price-to-performance is good. I looked at Pure about three to four years back, but the price-to-performance wasn't right for us. Now, it's right.

Try a PoC. Work up a PoC and you will really see a performance improvement.

For our purposes, Pure doesn't really simplify storage. We just needed the performance for VDI. Our enterprise system is on another storage system.

Overall, I would rate Pure at nine out of ten. I'm leaving them room for improvement but, so far, we are satisfied with Pure Storage.

Since we're a database shop, we primarily do databases on Pure. Everything else follows from that.

We are doing a project in tandem with Boeing to develop a security solution for their Oracle databases. We've been doing it in the VMware virtual solutions lab, which is back-ended by Pure Storage. It's a very complex project. Pure made it fast enough that we could cycle through the things that we needed to cycle through to get it exactly right. We were able to do so a lot of times, to rev it enough to get it refined to where the process was exactly right every time. There's no way we would have had time to rev it that much had it been on anything slower.

It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues. As long as you don't max out the bandwidth of your connectivity, your Fibre Channel, then it doesn't matter. That has pushed the bottleneck down to the connectivity to the storage, as opposed to the different spindle groups on your storage. That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit.

We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure Storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates. Not only that, it helps dramatically speed the read coming back in, because you don't have to read it 400 times. Actually, the write doesn't hurt anything either because the write goes in once and then it gets deduplicated and that's that. It does help speed I/O because then everything is coming right off the front end of cache. Certainly, in terms of space, it's probably the most helpful.

1. It's really fast
2. It's fall-off-the-log easy to use. 

That is the strongest selling point. The ease of use is really nice.

In terms of the Predictive Performance Analytics, it certainly contributes to better overall performance and I'm a total fan of that. I've worked with some other flash storage vendors and the one that has the best overall offering, certainly, is Pure, the Analytics is part of it, whereas some of the other storage vendors haven't had as strong an offering in predictive analytics.

The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless. 

I'm assuming that the VVol implementation got fixed in the last little while. We ran into that last February, so it's been about eight months. I suspect that they probably have it resolved by now. Other than that, it's bulletproof.

We have never, ever run up against a bottleneck. It's a piece of cake to scale it. You plug in more and you keep going until you max out your bandwidth and then you put another storage controller in, a Fibre Channel controller, and go some more.

The guys in technical support are great. They're on the money. Our client, Chapman University, is on a first-name basis with the Pure support guys. You get really good interactive support from the Pure team.

I think our client, Chapman University, was on Dell EMC before they went to Pure. What I'm about to say are some of my impressions, I don't know that I know all the details that went into the decision. I think that they were just done with Dell EMC and that Dell EMC's all-flash solution was an afterthought, where Pure's was engineered from the ground up to be all-flash, as opposed to bolted on after the fact.

From what I saw at Chapman University, they wanted the increase in performance plus the decrease in power utilization and space and cooling in their data center. That dramatically mitigated a whole bunch of data center issues they had before. It didn't take nearly as much power to power it or to cool it and they reduced their footprint significantly.

I saw a little bit of the initial setup at Chapman University, and it didn't look all that complicated. It appeared to be pretty straightforward.

There Is ROI has come in saving personnel time, a lot of time. That pushes into the DBA staff, the DevTest staff, and the production folks, because we got their stuff to run 50 percent faster. We took it off the old physical hardware and virtualized it and got it to go 50 percent faster than the physical hardware running against Pure Storage.

That made it easy to rapidly provision DevTest environments. Things like that, that used to take hours and hours and hours, can now be automated down to one click of the button by the requester and another one or two by the approver. Then it just runs in the background and it's done in a couple of minutes.

It's hard to quantify the reduction in the total cost of ownership, but it's there, absolutely, particularly in the VS lab context and the channel context as well. It's so much faster, that not only has it eliminated the time that DBAs would have spent otherwise, doing tasks that take a long time to do - things like backup and the like - but it has also helped on the front end because you can do development and DevTest provisioning so much more quickly. It's hard to roll that into traditional TCO, but it's certainly part of it when you look at the entire organization.

Regarding finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations, I'm not sure I could quantify that.

Do it. I have zero reservations about recommending Pure to anyone who is looking for some really good all-flash. Pure is the way to go, for sure.

All-flash is great whenever you can get it but I really like the Pure offering. It's very robust. I heard the "chief scientist," the brains of the deal, explain how some of that stuff works at the bit and byte level and, being a computer science major, I thought that was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Pure works pretty well as is. I've been so busy using all the good stuff that it already does. I'm sure it can be improved, but we haven't got that far yet. We've been milking what it already does.

I hesitate to give it a ten out of ten because I'm sure it can be improved somehow. In terms of how it could be improved, I don't know. I'm pretty happy with it as it stands. Pure is the best thing that I have seen in that space so far, hands-down, bar none.

Pure has become the main storage solution for our customers. It is mainly used for our customers' Oracle databases.

We are a Pure partner. What Pure has brought to us is a solution that our customers see has a lot of value. For the last ten years, there hasn't been a lot of differentiation between storage brands. We also deal with other products, other manufacturers, which are good products, but Pure is a different solution. It has allowed us to go with a different approach for our customers. When compared to different providers - I won't name them - there are other great companies out there, but Pure has managed to have a very different product with a differentiation that customers value.

Also, the guys who normally spend hours, or days, or weeks working with storage, trying to get something done, can do it in minutes with Pure. They save a lot of time, and they can do other stuff instead of managing storage.

The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure.

Also, performance. The box gives them extreme performance, but ease of use is the main reason they love Pure.

Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged. That's one thing they might have to look at because, if you are looking for storage, Pure is the player and the winner. But, if you are looking at HCI, Pure does not play in that area and that may prevent them from getting some deals.

With the customers that we have, and the references we have read from them, the stability is great. I have only seen 100 percent. I haven't had any failures, none of my customers has had any problem with the platform. So far, it's great. 

Technology, in general, is very good now, you don't have a lot of problems. But Pure is even better.

So far, the scalability is great. As a partner, what we want is to keep selling more and more products to our customers. One feature that Pure has is that it gives you even more storage as the company develops new functionality or does software upgrades. Even though it doesn't allow us to sell as much as we would like, our customers appreciate that. They have more capacity without investing any money. So the scalability is great.

Compared with other products, Pure's technical support is as good as anyone's, probably better. They have tools where the customer can see for themselves the performance and the statistics from the solution, so support is first-class. There are some third-party companies, that evaluate the technical support of different companies, and Pure ranks number one.

The initial setup is very simple. As a partner, we like to have products that need a lot of service because we make more money on the service than on the hardware. But with Pure being so simple, there is not a lot of consulting that is needed. That's one of the reasons why customers would rather buy Pure than other brands. While Pure does not allow us to make a lot of money on consulting, it is a very simple and easy sell to customers.

It's so simple that there is not much that an integrator or a partner needs to do on the Pure platform.

Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants. I don't have the exact figures, but roughly, in a five-year span, you would save at least 20 to 25 percent, especially on labor, on specialized people and training.

As to whether the TCO of flash is lower than SSD implementations, I don't have any specific metrics, but again, the implementation of Pure is, by far, simpler than other technologies. I wouldn't say we have lower implementation costs because of flash or because of SSDs, rather it's because of the software and technology of Pure.

Normally, when we go to compete for a customer, they are looking at all the most important brands. Dell EMC is part of most storage bids. There is NetApp and sometimes we face IBM. In our territory there is Hitachi, which is a great product, but usually it's not on the shortlist. Finally there is HPE. Those are the brands that we normally find we're competing with when we offer Pure.

In the end, so far, haven't lost one deal where we involved Pure. We have won deals against NetApp, which is a great product, we have won deals against Dell EMC - and that is the brand to beat. But when customers compare Dell EMC with Pure, there is no competition. Pure is, by far, better.

My advice is to buy Pure. I am very excited about this product. I would recommend that anybody who is looking at storage should really look at and consider Pure, and they will probably buy Pure.

The performance is great. In terms of latency, you can have failures in the system, and the system can keep performing as if nothing happened. It is a great product with great performance. For me, right now, it is the best storage solution in the market, by far.

I would rate Pure a ten out of ten and even 11. I have been in the business for 31 years. In the technology sector, most products are the same, they offer the same functionalities. Maybe 30 years ago, when EMC came out with their storage solution, it was something very different, but in the end, everybody offers the same thing. If you look at a Dell EMC box, or you look at HPE, or you look at Hitachi, they offer a SAN with certain performance, they have replication, they have Snapshots. Everybody has more or less the same thing. Pure has a different offer, because of the simplicity, the performance, and all the functionality that Pure is offering. It's a very simple package, it's what makes Pure different. That's why most customers choose Pure.