Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

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.

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.