Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

The Pure Storage array houses our entire production environment. Production consists of VMware 5.5 on three HPE DL360 G7 hosts.

I don't really need to worry about storage anymore. I can focus on more critical issues. I log into the array interface maybe once every month to see what my deduplication ratio is and that is about it. 

It is difficult to say what features are valuable. It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore. 

I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. Sure, it is great to see usage, trends, latency, and all the common stuff. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware.

Our customers are using Pure Storage to replacing old storage infrastructure.

We have began to sell Pure Storage to our clients recently. A lot of these customers have become return customers because they have understood the model and its ease of use. This applies no matter the company's size, large or small.

• The automation: It allows engineers to focus on other things rather than doing the more manual tasks. It automates tasks, so the ease of use is extreme. It simplifies the storage.
• Their business model: Where you pay for your support, then you can have that support for X number of years. This way you are not worrying about your support going up three to four years down the line and having to change your infrastructure at that time because it becomes obsolete. This is a positive feature that clients are seeing.

Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing.

Stability is good. The feedback that we have received from clients has been great. It is a robust storage infrastructure

The initial setup is straightforward.

Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning. Once a customer gets a demo and starts using Pure Storage, sees it working with its ease of use, stability, and performance, this encourages them into purchasing the product. 

We have received good feedback from customers, in general, using Pure Storage compared to other competitors in this space.

We had an employee who used to work for one of the competitors, Dell EMC. After a year of selling Pure Storage with us, Dell EMC offered him a good job to come back. However, after selling Pure Storage, he was unable to go back to selling Dell EMC knowing what Pure Storage is capable of doing.

Pure Storage has the right business model and will be around for a long time. I wouldn't be selling Pure Storage if I didn't know it would be a success for the customer in the end.

They use an AI to understand what the capacity of the storage will be, how it will be used, and for maintenance detection. E.g., if the maintenance notices something will be going faulty, it uses its AI capabilities to understand what will happen and when it will happen, so you replace it before it happens. Another point a lot of companies is that it doesn't ever go down, because it will know before this happens. Therefore, you can be more proactive.

We do a lot of Oracle implementations and getting Oracle workloads to run faster and better. For a lot of our customers, they are looking at Pure Storage for its underlying storage. It makes everything a lot easier for them in terms of increasing performance, lowering operational costs, and making their day-to-day lives easier.

It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought. They know it works and it performs well. 

1. The performance that you receive and its ease of use. 
2. Being able to get it up and running in a very short order. 
3. Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great.
4. It takes away a lot of issues that customers were dealing with before. E.g., a lot of times, customers are dealing with performance problems when they migrate to Pure Storage that go away, then they don't have to worry about them anymore. Then, they can focus on other things, like automation.

We work with a lot of Oracle customers. We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM.

From our internal usage and our customers, the product is rock solid. We haven't heard of any issues or seen anything ourselves.

The initial setup is very easy. You rack the array, you plug it in, you connect a couple cables, and you can be up and running in under an hour.

Try it out. It is easy to get it up and running, and simple to migrate your Oracle workloads over to run an apples to apples comparison. The performance numbers speak for themselves. If you factor in the ease in terms of operations, as well as the cost of the array compared to other solid state arrays, it becomes a clear positive for Pure Storage.

All of our customers are looking at submillisecond latency, which is the common Pure Storage metric, and we have definitely seen it there. Everything has been great in terms of throughput and availability has been fantastic.

Most of our customers who use Pure Storage have one of two scenarios: 

1. They have production data with high performance requirements running out of Pure Storage, and they want an efficient way to make a copy of that data onto some other storage for backup and DR purposes. For this scenario, we have integration with Pure Storage that allows us to very efficiently leverage their APIs to capture that data without the need to do things like repeated full copies of that data, leverages their snapshot APIs and differential APIs which tell us what's different from one snap to another to another.
2. The customer has their data, maybe it is on Pure Storage or it's on some other array, then they want to use Actifio to get a copy onto a Pure Storage array. 

For example, an Oracle user might need to make a copy of a large Oracle Database. They would want us to spin that database up in one or more lower, testing, or QA environments. These environments sometimes have high performance requirements, which could be met by placing a copy on Pure Storage on them.

Another example is a customer who has Oracle Exadata. Obviously, Oracle engineered systems have very high performance, and they don't want to have all of their test and dev copies in that Exadata platform, because of the cost of the platform. Therefore, Pure Storage, combined with Actifio, captures the data efficiently from the Exadata environment, then stores it on the Pure Storage disk. We then present that data to their test servers, which can be the Exadata Compute Servers or it can be any non-Exadata Linux-based Oracle servers. Then, they can have great performance because of the high speed delivery of data from Pure Storage using Actifio.

1. The performance of the high speed FlashArrays. 
2. They have a good API set. Their flash snapshot technologies are efficient. 
3. The deduplication in the array, which is one of the main reasons that it's a cost effective platform, and combining it with the snap technologies, allows the product to be remotely controlled, manually controlled, or scheduled. It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution.

They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable.

Customers don't talk about problems, outages, or crashes with Pure Storage, while I do hear this with some of the other vendors that I have dealt with. I have nothing but the highest regard for Pure Storage when it comes to stability.

The setup is straightforward. Anyone who is familiar with setting up Pure Storage can set it up with Actifio in the mix. Anyone familiar with Actifio can integrate it with any back-end storage. Actifio runs, in most scenarios, as a virtual machine. We use whatever storage the hypervisor gives us. Setting up Pure Storage to present the storage to a hypervisor, like VMware or Hyper-V, is run of the mill, and the most common use case there is. 

It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point.

If I want a product which has reliability and high speed, and Pure Storage is the first name that comes out of my mouth. I recommend them.

These days, most storage products, with a few exceptions, are simple to operate. The market has made a huge emphasis on simplicity over the last five to seven years. I don't know that Pure Storage is simpler than anybody else's product, but it certainly is in the category of simple and easy to use.

We sell a SaaS offering of the storage to our customers. We use the storage as our main storage and also as our backup storage.

You don't have to go and buy your own storage. You can get your storage access within two minutes, which is great, because it is a lot quicker for our team to get the servers up and running. It provides access to the systems that we want to give access to.

• Cheaper
• Quicker
• Easy to access if we need to obtain backups.
• It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything.

This may be available, but we are not using it. I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used.

I have not had it go down yet, so stability is good.

I have never had a problem getting more storage, so scalability seems pretty good.

The initial setup is straightforward. Though, I have now passed this task onto the tech team to do.

Speak to an account manager and get the right deal.

I would definitely look at Pure Storage. 

We use it for virtualization.

We have complete control over it. 

We partner with Oracle on stuff, so we have support on it. Before, we have had issues with support from our other vendors. It has been a major improvement from a support perspective.

The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. We've run Fibre Channel for our historical storage, and going from Fibre Channel to InfiniBand connected has blown up the amount of traffic that we can do. Now, we can support 40Gs per link, and there are eight links. When we went from being able to support four Fibre Channels at eight gigs a piece. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels.

The most valuable feature is the speed of it. It is much faster than anything that we can get from similar competitors.

The solution helps to simplify storage.

Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics.

The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it.

We haven't scaled yet, but we're planning to. We do upgrades constantly.

It's very scalable and easy to do.

We moved from an infrastructure that was owned by another team, so we needed something to move our own stuff onto. We originally tried some hyperconverged solutions from Dell EMC, but they didn't perform well at all. It took years to get that together and when we ran our benchmarks on them, and we decided they were not good. So, we immediately turned eyes to Oracle who is a big provider for my whole company, not just my team, and talked to them about what they had that was going to suit us, and they pointed us towards Pure Storage. As soon as we had a proof of concept and were testing it, we decided to run with it.

The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case.

We used Oracle.

I would recommend Pure Storage.

We investigated some flash storage implementations for it and based off of the way that the appliance works the added cost of flash doesn't scale with the performance that you get with it, so it hits on our middle ground. It works perfectly for us. We don't need to look at any type of flash storage.

We use Pure Storage for most of our databases, as well as for other application binaries.

Our biggest database is the Oracle ERP. Right now, it is around nine terabytes. It has grown from four terabytes in the last five to six years. Initially, we were worried because most of our functions and processes got slower. We thought we might have to add more  infrastructure and upscale it from a CPU perspective. Then, we moved to Pure Storage, and we suddenly saw some of the processes, which were running slowly, sped up automatically.

We have also seen a reduction in the latency.

The most interesting feature is the speed at which it executes I/O. After moving to Pure Storage, I have noticed that our databases are considerably faster.

Our performance has improved by at least four times.

The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything. We have shared APPL_TOP on our Oracle ERP, which would require an NFS type of storage. So, we had to resort to building our own NFS VM, then attach Pure Storage to it, and have it go through the server. This didn't really serve our purpose, as it's a lot slower because it's now going through a VM installer NFS server.

While we know Pure Storage supports snapshots, we haven't been able to implement databases or replication using them.

It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it.

It looks like it is scaling pretty well.

I have not used the tech support.

We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Use Pure Storage for databases. I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray as the storage for our virtual servers and our reporting databases.

FlashArray has allowed us to go all flash. There is no more worrying about how many IOPS our different storage tiers have and trying to buy more disks just to get higher performance. We simply don't worry about performance.

The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible.

I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity.