Pure Storage FlashArray Reviews

We are a reseller of Pure Storage FlashArray. Our customers use it for virtualization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

It has helped to simplify storage because it has a very easy graphical user interface.

Our clients see a reduction in total cost of ownership by around 40%. We have also found that the total cost of ownership of flash is lower than SSD implementations. I track a whole bunch of business markers on the cost of components. I do a lot of cost analysis for customers and I get pricing from all the component manufacturers; Ingram Micro, Toshiba, Seagate and then I compare the pricing. I do that almost every week. I constantly see that it's cheaper than SSD implementations.

The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward.

The performance analytics are moderate. It's not the best performance platform out there but it's the easiest to operate.

They need to find another way of doing data protection, RAID is not working very well. It takes performance away from the SSD.

I would like to have multi-cloud integration.

Latency needs a bit of work. It's pretty good but it needs to get below 300 microseconds. Then the data reduction would be excellent. On average I see twelve to one data reduction.

It's very stable.

It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that. 

I've used their technical support and would say that it's excellent. I would give them a ten out of ten. 

My clients know it's time to switch solutions because I run a proof of concepts where I test the manufacturer's equipment. If I find something that is a big difference then I let them know about it. Cost, performance, tools, and ease of use are all factors that we take into consideration when choosing to switch. We also chose this solution because of the Evergreen upgrade and the ease of use.

I also install Pure Storage for my clients. The initial setup is very straightforward and very simple. It takes me an hour to set one up.

My client's return on investment with Pure Storage is in about 7.3 months.

We also looked at Nimble, which is now owned by HPE, and E8, Dell EMC, and NetApp platform.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Not a ten because nobody's a ten. We haven't achieved perfection yet.

I would advise someone considering this or a similar solution to push Pure Storage for multi-cloud integration.

I use Pure Storage for multiple clients. One is a client related to postal services. We are using a database to manage six petabytes. 

The main benefit of Pure Storage is performance. We have critical applications running on FlashArray without any noticeable impact on performance. I can immediately see the difference between Pure Storage and the other arrays I've used. 

It has optimized the storage footprint, delivering savings to our clients by drastically reducing the cost of infrastructure and maintenance. 

Deduplication is an excellent feature. I also like the NAS and support.

The latest release contains bugs that shouldn't be in a production environment. Two incidents impacted our client, including hardware-related bugs. They need to be more cautious in testing before they release.

We have used Pure Storage for two years.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray nine out of 10. We have reduced downtime by 30 to 50 percent. 

We can upgrade Pure Storage without any latency problems.

I rate Pure Storage support. The response times are good, but they use third-party support. They come and work on hardware issues. Support is available when a client needs it. 

Positive

I have worked with EMC and IBM arrays. Pure Storage is simpler to manage than other arrays. If you already have an array but you don't have the budget for Pure Storage, I wouldn't recommend migrating. 

Pure Storage FlashArray isn't completely flash. It's a semi-hybrid that combines SSDs and SAS disks. IBM's flash array is also good in terms of performance. Pure Storage and IBM have comparable conformance. 

We had some complications configuring the NAS, and some features did not work for our environment. We achieved ready integration in one domain, but we had two domains in NDRRS. The deployment took less than a day, but we had to complete all the prerequisites. If you are using NAS, you must implement many things before configuring it and working with other teams. It takes maybe a week to complete the array configuration and bring it into production. One person is enough, and Pure Storage doesn't require maintenance.

I rate Pure Storage FlashArray nine out of 10. 

The setup was extremely simple. 

The solution offers amazing performance. The speed and reliability of their flash arrays are great. In terms of flash storage, they're on it. The performance is there.

Their evergreen solution is probably the most needed in any industry. Especially today in unprecedented times and supply chain issues, their evergreen solution is amazing. 

Whenever we come out with a new feature for our system, we just swap out the storage controller. We don't change anything on our desk and we get the new features. That evergreen approach in your third year costs you nothing. 

It's a great company, great solution. They're dominating in their space for a good reason.

Even their management, their interface, is just the best in the industry. 

The solution can scale.

They're in a continuous act of improvement with a continuous delivery state. Everybody should be following their model right now. We are so impressed with Pure that even as we are an M&A-based company, if we acquire another company, Pure is automatically selected to be the storage that's going to replace whatever they have if they're not already using it. We have no complaints about how they run things.

I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more. Even so, it's not so expensive. Even at the price point that they have right now, no one's complaining. 

The solution is very stable. Its performance is amazing. There are no bugs or glitches, it does not crash or freeze. 

The scalability is right there if you need it. It's instantaneous. You add another roll of flash right in there. It's literally plug-and-play. That flash becomes online and immediately available. You couldn't ask for a smoother experience. It's just been amazing.

We have 19,000 employees and 3,000 employees from a corporate level. There are about 4,000 different businesses functions that all run their products off of these solutions that we provide from IT.

We've never really had to call tech support for this product as we haven't had any issues. I attribute that to these guys paying attention to everything, every single detail, to make sure that their product is seamless.

We used to use IBM XIV.

We migrated from IBM XIV into Pure Storage FlashArray and we did that migration ourselves. Due to Pure Storage's professional services, we did an entire migration in under 30 days, which was unprecedented for a company this size and we did that without impacting business. 

Nobody was taken down, our stores were still running, our warehouses were still shipping. However, the entire time, this was the equivalent of basically moving the basement from underneath your house, while you are sleeping and replacing it with one we wanted. The process was amazing.

We use one person to handle the maintenance. There's a backup to them if we need to have something covered, however, they've not had to do anything with the storage. One person might look at it one hour out of the week to make sure we're doing fine.

We were able to do our migration due to the brilliant people at Pure Storage. We worked through all of it together. It was an amazing setup experience. 

There are true cost savings with this product. If you're an OPEX-adverse organization the cost per period is just really low. We were paying $90,000 per period with IBM and we have 13 periods. We went to Pure Storage and now we're doing $38,000 per period - and yet we have the highest performance here. Pure Storage will give you savings.

We entered into a partnership with Pure Storage.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

We use Pure Storage FlashArray for storage allocation, DR, replication, and performance. We are migrating both servers and storage to Pure Storage.

It has reduced downtime significantly, and the self-service upgrade feature allows us to handle upgrades smoothly through the console.

It has helped decrease our organization’s storage footprint. There is about 15% reduction.

The snapshot feature is valuable. It protects data based on the policy. We can schedule snapshots and have unalterable data. It reduces management efforts.

Vendor support is good. After raising a case, we get a response within an hour or two.

I have been primarily working with storage and have not fully explored other areas, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to performance reporting.

I have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for one year. I have been using Hitachi Storage and Sun Storage on all legacy devices. We are migrating all these servers and storage to Pure Storage FlashArray.

Our experience with the stability of FlashArray has been excellent. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it an eight.

The scalability of the solution is quite good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

For a P2 issue, the SLA is 4 hours. They were able to resolve the issue within two hours. Just a month ago, we faced an issue, and they were able to resolve that within an hour. We got support immediately.

The technical support provided by Pure Storage is exceptional, and I would rate it a ten out of ten.

Positive

We have been handling all the legacy environments, such as Hitachi USP V/VM, Hitachi AMS, Sun StorageTek, and EMC. They all were at the end of life and out of support. We have more than 1,000 devices and servers. Our servers were also out of service and end of life. We planned to migrate all the servers and data into Pure Storage as single devices. Instead of using multiple storage solutions, we wanted to use a single one and move to Pure Storage. We also had to deal with different vendors for support. We wanted to have a single vendor.

With these legacy devices, we were not getting any support. When we had any hardware failure or some issues, we were not getting a solution. For any hardware failures, we were not getting the parts. That is why we thought of migrating to Pure Storage.

The deployment took about two months, primarily due to planning and the time taken for customer approval processes.

We are primarily using it on-premises, but we have plans to move to the cloud over the next one or two years.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for storing data for applications. 

The user interface is very good. It is easy to navigate. 

The deployment is very easy.

It is scalable.

The solution is very reliable.

Technical support is helpful. 

The pricing could be better. It is a bit expensive. 

I've been using the solution for three or four years. 

It's a stable, reliable product. It isn't buggy or glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. 

It is scalable and easy to extend. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. It's very easy. 

We have about four engineers using the solution. 

We increase the storage capacity, however, it depends on the future application usage. 

Technical support is very good. They are helpful and responsive. 

Positive

I've also worked with Dell, which is a bit harder to set up. 

The setup was very straightforward. It's very easy. We find it even easier to set up than Dell. The deployment takes about a few hours or so. You mount it on the rack and power it up and do some configurations to set it up for storage. 

We were able to handle the setup ourselves with the help of a local partner. 

I haven't looked into ROI. It isn't part of my scope. 

It's a costly solution. It is not cheap. 

There is no subscription fee. There is just one initial fee.

We are using an older version of the solution, not necessarily the latest. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I would recommend the solution for its capabilities, however, the price is too high.

As a customer, we use them as our Tier 1 storage arrays. It has been amazing. It's extremely fast, reliable, and resilient.

We have done a lot of different things with Pure Storage. We have included some real-time analytics that we developed for our eCommerce website and run those on FlashBlade. We used FlashBlade as it was the only storage platform fast enough to keep up with that data flow.

We are able monitor I/O, latency, read/write, capacity used, and all the different metrics that the Pure gives us the ability to monitor.

It definitely affected the ability to capacity plan, but in a good way. We have all the visibility into the capacity, forecasting, and all the metrics that the solution provides us with.

It takes drastically less time to manage and administer the solution. We would have about three or four people who were dedicated just to work on storage with only one guy who could actually do the Hitachi replication, because it used old archaic technology called HORCM files. In the Pure Storage realm, this is not true. All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it.

When I was a customer, the most valuable feature is the ease of use. 

It is the whole package: The ease of use, cost, and the ability for it to perform at a level that traditional storage arrays just can't compete with.

It simplifies storage. In the old days, you had to go and decide what ports were going to go to what workloads, which was a lot of work. You had to set up replication. Now, everything is just a few clicks away. It is set up exactly like you would want it to be. That is what it does. It simplifies and optimizes the solution.

I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side.

Some of the FlashBlade protocols could use a little love. There are obviously some new enhancements. There is no dedupe on the FlashBlade. It is compression only. There is no replication. So, Pure is going to try to partner that product with ObjectEngine to bring in some of those features, and I'm not sure how all of that will work out. I'm not familiar with ObjectEngine yet, but we'll see how it goes.

The stability is great. We have had no issues. We have never had an issue or outage that has been related to Pure Storage.

We decided how big of a failure domain that we wanted to entertain. We decided to split three into what could have been one single controller interface system. However, at some point, if we lose 500 terabytes, what does that do to our company? Now, we have things like active clusters which mitigate a lot of these issues, but people still need to be wary about how they design their failure domains.

The support is great. The support has been amazing.

We thought we we going to go with the new version of Hitachi, and everything was going to fine: Lift, shift and replace with the new one. What we started doing was exploring the marketplace, then figuring out, "Is this the best option for us? Could it be simpler?" Because the Hitachi was a tank, but it was not simple to use. It performed very well, but it did not perform like an all-flash array does.

The analytics are great. Previously, we had Hitachi solutions, and it was very hard to understand what was happening with the array. One of the great things about the Pure Storage solution is you can instantly know just by logging in or checking Pure1. You can do it on your phone. Hitachi doesn't have anything like that. It's amazing that you can get this type of visibility from your storage array. All the analytics feed up into Pure1, and you can just see them whenever you want.

It used to be that people would buy Pure Storage arrays and they would use it for a single instance application, like an Oracle database. We never did that. We used the product to replace our entire giant Hitachi G1000 storage arrays. Everything that we had went to the Pure Storage arrays. We had three giant M70s that are now X90s which house everything the company was running when I was a customer.

The initial setup was very simple. They came in before lunch, and we had it up after lunch. Then, we were already starting to move workloads to it after that.

We have upgraded firmware controllers and physical controllers. It works exactly like they say it does, which is the best part. You don't even notice. Business runs as usual. You can replace a controller, it fails over to the other controller, and everything runs smooth as butter.

We used Sirius Computer Solutions for the deployment. They have been our partner and VAR for a long time. They know our environment very well and were with us every step of the way.

From a footprint perspective, we used to have big giant racks of storage on both sides of the data center. We would have to plan and have a hole where the future one would go. Now, we don't have to do that at all. They are just sitting in the rack right next to it.

We have a seen a reduction in TCO. It is definitely a cost-effective solution for us. We have seen ROI.

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription. We like it a lot. We recently upgraded from the M-series to the X-series FlashArrays. We used the Evergreen Storage solution and expanded our footprint.

We evaluated Hitachi, who was our current vendor. We evaluated Dell EMC for the VMAX and XtremIO. Then, we evaluated Pure Storage. 

We are also a NetApp customer, so we evaluated them. However, we don't run any block storage on NetApp, only files.

Do a fair evaluation. Be objective, look at the different technologies, and use the technologies. See what they look like and what you will to have to deal with when you're using the products. It's easy to make a decision based on bullet points, but it's hard to make a decision on actual use of the actual technology.

We are a Chef shop, so we integrate it into Chef and VMware, vRA, and vRO. We also use all of the plug-ins. The integration is easy, simple, and seamless.

For most of the workloads, the solution’s inline deduplication and compression has performed fine. We had a few workloads that were already precompressed, so when you put those workloads on top of a storage system that does compression and dedupe, they don't compress again. So, they tend to eat up a little storage. Therefore, we specifically targeted some third-party applications, like IDERA SQL Safe, and tried to remove them from the environment. This way Pure Storage could then compress and dedupe those SQL backup files.

We are from Texas. Power is like ten cents a kilowatt. Texans apparently don't care that power is cheap. From a power requirement, it definitely has used less power, but we didn't use that as a metric to look at.

Biggest lesson learned: Why didn't I switch sooner?

Our primary use case is SAP. 

Its ease of use has allowed us to stand up landscapes faster.

The most valuable feature is its upgradeability.

Pure Storage helps to streamline storage because of its simplicity.

What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it. 

We have never had an issue.

We just doubled it in size it was painless.

The technical support is fantastic and proactive.

Our previous platform did not support SAP.

The driver for us to implement Pure Storage in our SAP landscape was that it was SAP certified.  Additionally, it had really good numbers and reviews.

We plugged it in, and in an hour, we were using it. It is very straightforward and simple.

We deployed it in-house.

We did not displace any other technology with the Pure Storage purchase so it's doesn't have a traditional dollar ROI.  From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things.  

Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs.

We looked at Pure Storage, EMC and HPE. We chose Pure Storage because of its innovation.

I would recommend the product.

I'm a pre-sales architect. I architect, and I sell them as a partner with Pure Storage on the VAR side. Our customers use it for storage, mainly block-based storage and virtualization storage. Some solutions have both block and file storage, and some solutions only have file storage from Pure. 

It provides additional protection against ransomware threats. If you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or some kind of malicious attack, you can revert your data back in time to a previous version or snapshot.

One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table.

Scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades are also valuable. They're not using flash just for your tier one storage needs. They're recommending flash for data protection and archive backup, which is the way to go.

If you get the gold support, which is what I sell and recommend for my customers, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades, which is another feather in Pure's cap. They make several claims that once you move to Pure Storage, you can take your team of five dedicated storage admins and trim it down to just one person. Their mantra is getting customers out of the game of managing storage and letting the vendor manage the storage. They want to see their customers just consume storage. They have non-disruptive upgrades. You just set up the software and hardware and just consume the storage. They're continuously looking at the dial-homes, the logs that are automatically sent, and fingerprinting potential issues before they're even a problem. That cuts down on a lot of support tickets the customers have to open up. They'll proactively open up tickets when they see something in their analytics on a particular customer's array and recognize that one of their hosts might have a certain HBA with a fault or a bug. They reach out and open a ticket. So, you get your system upgrade, patched, or whatever is needed to resolve the potential problem.

I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. They can work on the price to make it more competitive.

Its stability is very good. I have not heard any of my customers having issues with FlashArray. It is very solid. They claim 99.9999% availability. I haven't had any problems with outages with my customers. 

They have another product called FlashBlade, which is a different type of storage appliance that Pure does for unstructured files. FlashBlade doesn't rank as high in reliability as their flagship FlashArray product does. The FlashBlade product is a notch below. It is a newer product or code, and I have heard of some issues with it.

Its scalability is very good. It scales up instead of out, which is typical for a block-based appliance. It is very easy to add expansion shelves or disks. You don't need to worry about shuffling drives around and creating RAID groups. This is all legacy stuff. Most vendors are now the same, but I really think that Pure led the effort for non-disruptive upgrades. They coined the term, and other vendors have since followed suit. They're the leader in the industry for that.

Their regular support is good. With gold support, Pure's support personnel takes care of both software and hardware upgrades. The only difference between free support and gold support is that you don't get free hardware upgrades with free support. If I understand the offering correctly, software upgrades are still included. 

If we're just talking about Pure Storage, it is straightforward and simple. You can get it up in minutes as opposed to hours that some of the other solutions take. Compared to its competitive solutions, Pure is very well known for its simplicity and ease of use, especially during setup and initialization.

A single 2U appliance from Pure Storage for block-based workloads, including rack stack and initialization, is ready to be provisioned to your servers in an hour or an hour and a half to the max. It is definitely straightforward.

If you get the gold support, Pure's support personnel will take care of both software and hardware upgrades. So, you don't have to manage storage. Pure takes care of that.

Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing.

They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance.

I would advise others to chose well. Prepare to have extra time on your hands to focus on your business's core needs and outcomes and not having to worry about the day-to-day maintenance of your storage appliance.

All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions. They might ask for customization level, but I think Pure is doing the right thing by its set-it-and-forget-it approach. Most customers don't need to fine-tune and customize their all-flash storage appliances anymore. It is not a legacy spinning disk appliance.

I would rate Pure Storage FlashArray a nine out of 10. Its pricing sometimes plays a big part where customers might go in a different direction, and that's the only reason why I'm not giving it a 10.