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Filter 320 vetted Pure Storage FlashArray reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 199)
October 01, 2019
Pure-ly fast storage!
We are using Pure Storage in our organisation to provide datastores in our production VMware vSphere environment and have found it to be a great replacement for the EMC XtremIO that we previously had. The data reduction is brilliant. The ease of use, clear dashboards, online analytics, and smartphone app are all great additions.
- The Pure Array does data reduction particularly well. We've seen a 7x reduction on some of our volumes.
- It is easy to get used to the system after coming from other storage arrays.
- It has some welcome additions such as a smartphone app that makes it easier to view your cases, etc.
- It would have been good to see vvol support for ESX 6.0.
September 24, 2019
Once you go orange, nothing else is ever good enough!
Pure Storage FlashArray is now our primary platform for block data. All of our production databases and VMware environment live on Pure. This brings us great performance, along with improvements in manageability. We are now positioned for the future and the ability to take advantage of NVMe-oF when it becomes mainstream. No more limiting our options because of the technology already in house. The Evergreen process gets us away from fork-lift storage upgrades, and the support is top notch and fast.
- Support - I've never had a call passed off to a different party that I then have to wait to get back to me. The person responding to my support ticket has been able to help me every time.
- Non-disruptive upgrades. We were able to transition from a SAS based //m series array to a NVMe based //x series array with zero down time. This gave us greater performance and capacity with minimal disruption.
- Simplicity - Pure Storage aims to automate the complicated steps of storage management with superior software. You know they are still happening under the surface, but the administrator does not have to deal with keeping the process just right with a given vendor's command set.
- Licensing - All-in base licensing instead of expensive add-on licenses for additional features. There are very few exceptions to this rule.
- Reporting is too general. Being a tech nerd, I want to be able to see the nitty-gritty details. I also need to be able to define canned sets of reports for problem application systems.
- Pricing is a bit higher then some of their direct competitors .
- Seriously, I have nothing else.
September 24, 2019
Pure Storage FlashArray helps keep the DBA's away
We use Pure Storage FlashArray as our Tier 1 storage platform across our entire organization. We have been using it since 2015 and it has worked out great so far. We don't have to deal with disk slowness complaints from our DBA's anymore.
- Technical support from Pure has been great. They are very proactive and responsive when necessary.
- Pure Storage FlashArray is very easy to install, configure and administer.
- We have been very satisfied with the performance of FlashArray - under 1 millisecond latency.
- Pure Storage FlashArray is not cheap, but you definitely get what you pay for.
- We have seen a few too many necessary firmware updates to fix software bugs in 2019.
- There is a bit of "sticker shock" to see how much usable disk you end up with from the raw TB total.
We are leveraging the FlashArray for our virtual environment, SQL data and WFS. We are also using the FlashArray as warm storage in our Splunk environment. This is accessed by the entire company and has primarily resolved latency issues.
- I'll put NDUs at the top of the Pros list. The ability to upgrade software or hardware with no disruption and completed by support for an entirely hands-off experience is simply beautiful. Just to clarify, I'm referring to in-place upgrades and not migrations that you'll receive from other vendors.
- FlashArray does data reduction extremely well. We receive approximately 4 to 1 on our virtual environment and just over 3 to 1 on our database environments.
- The FlashArray can be expensive if you're a small shop or have a ton of multimedia. It's excellent for virtualization extremely fast.
September 17, 2019
Don't be fooled by their marketing. They aren't BS-ing you, for a change. Try it out and check the TCO for the next decade.
We use Pure Storage Flash Array X and M for our primary and data recovery sites. Pure Storage is our primary storage mechanism for an enterprise workload that has a healthy mix of applications, databases, VMs and file systems. Deploying Pure Storage not only addressed our performance, cost, manageability, flexibility and investment protection (hardware support lifecycle) problems but also has introduced new avenues for us in supporting our business units to make decisions easily about dynamic business plans that explore IT systems' ability to support those plans with not much overhead - both people and money-wise.
- For a change, it's the first storage system I've used in about 20 years that works as it is written on the brochure. In fact, it over delivers. We have had several bad experiences in many ways with storage systems and when you speak about Pure Storage from their datasheets or any other material, it feels like they are going overboard with what they say. But then, only when you deploy it completely would you realize that in fact, at least some of what they mention is underrated and the system is not marketing BS.
- The support is awesome. In addition, we could never imagine upgrading a production storage system during business hours without missing a beat and without dropping any sweat. In fact, you don't need to do anything but log a call with support 2 days in advance and allow them to provide remote assistance. They just do it for you and no downtime or loss in performance. We tried it twice and it still feels unreal.
- In addition, when we didn't get their promised data reduction at our DR site initially, by the time we discussed internally and called them to check what to do, they told us that they had already assessed the situation, made a report for it and submitted it internally for upgrading our disk capacity free of cost. No words. Just great. By the way, funnily enough, after they added capacity, we started getting far more data reduction than they promised. Not sure why it acted up initially.
- Performance. Be it - IOPS, latency, redundancy when disks/controller/network cables fail (yes, we yanked everything to make it fail, and it was fun) it doesn't fail. Even the unreal looking data reduction, they nailed it.
- They said it takes maybe 30 minutes to learn their system and no training is needed. We laughed at them. Not once, but many times. I don't think it took us any more than 30 minutes. This is about the easiest system we manage in our datacenter. Almost zero learning curve.
- There aren't many gaps and they've been closing those few very quickly. An NFS/SMB server without having to worry about MS licenses would be great.
- More VM based usage analytics. We understand the technology limitations in getting the details when using VMFS volumes instead of NFS volumes but it can be slightly better.
January 11, 2020
Pure Storage is the most effective storage I've ever used
Pure Storage is our Tier 1 storage platform for all servers and services hosted in our datacenter. That's dozens of applications, big and small, in a diverse technical environment with lots of different workloads. The workloads on Pure Storage arrays are 99% virtualized. While it was originally brought in to host our largest workloads that require the highest performing IO, it quickly became the standard for storage performance. Any system engineer will tell you that storage performance issues are a pain, and with shared storage, are not easy to manage. Pure Storage has made storage performance issues a thing of the past and high performing storage is the new normal.
- High performing storage IO.
- Simple set-up, configuration, and administration.
- Cost can be relatively high.
- Capacity increases only come in specific sizes (2, 5, 10TB), so upgrades are not very customizable.
September 13, 2019
Storage that I never have to think about.
Our Pure Storage FlashArrays are our businesses primary data storage. Primarily used to host our virtual infrastructure, they provide high bandwidth, low latency storage with in-line dedupe and compression that hugely reduces our raw storage consumption whilst never being the bottleneck in any of hosted systems. Not a single storage failure to date.
- Hugely reliable and with amazing support staff. This is probably the most critical factor for us and makes our PURE arrays my favourite bits of kit in our environment. Many occasions where PURE storage support staff have identified and resolved issues with our virtual platform better than the support staff of the virtual platform (and so far never something that was caused by the PURE storage arrays). Really quick and easy to raise cases through the management web interface and always good quick responses.
- Very high speed (average read and write latencies of between 0.2 and 0.4ms). Never had storage speed being a bottleneck.
- Great dedupe and compression. We can massively over-allocate storage, confident that the PURE storage arrays will crunch it down as much as possible. On average between 4 and 10 times reduction (although of course, it does depend on the data).
- Great extra features at no extra cost, such as Veeam plugins and the amazing Active Cluster synchronous replication.
- The EverGreen option (only if you get 3 years support in one go) has already replaced our FA-420 controllers with the newer FA-m20 controllers at no extra cost. Really good to know that controller upgrades are included in the support costs so we won't fall behind and have to start from scratch again with newer hardware.
- I suppose the only real downside we have seen has been that these are definitely a premium cost item. However, so far they have been worth every penny in reliability, performance and features so until someone finds me something as good for less money then I will keep these, thank you very much.
- Okay, just scraping the barrel for negatives, but these are an expensive way to store media content as it doesn't compress or dedupe well.
The State of Colorado is using the Pure Storage FlashArray as the enterprise storage platform to solve the Storage-As-A-Service problem by consolidating multiple storage arrays into a smaller and faster footprint and bring in new capabilities such as Disaster Recovery by providing the data replication for critical and essential services between multiple sites.
- When we needed to increase our capacity, the Pure FlashArray provided us with the zero downtime scalability for critical and essential systems during critical production workloads.
- Our customer had an aggressive DR site replication requirement which needed to be implemented and tested in one month. With the Pure Storage FlashArray we were able to architect the data repositories, confirm site links, set up and replicate Protection Groups, test the replication process and timing, and successfully deliver a DR solution in the required 1-month window.
- We were having some serious issues with one of the arrays at the beginning, and I wanted to ship the equipment back because I was done with the product and felt like I was about to be let go. The Pure team set up a three-way discussion/troubleshooting session with VMWare and Cisco, and reviewed our existing certified configurations from a prior vendor, and provided a proposal on remediation. Since agreeing and implementing the final proposed configurations, we haven't had an issue since. Pure driving the conversation and giving us a recommendations really showed they cared and wanted their services to shine.
- Our reps have been fantastic! Whenever this is an error/alarm, they're on the situation within minutes. Sometimes they respond before we can show they've acknowledged the issue and that they're ready to review the system when we provide access.
- The Pure Storage FlashArray has given us a much better dedupe and compression ratio/storage utilization than our other storage arrays, allowing us to consolidate from 3 very large arrays to one small footprint.
- We have a very strict password policy, and upon integrating the array to our authentication source, some characters were not supported and I couldn't log in to the array. This was more of an annoyance, and I'd expect the FlashArray to support a larger range of special characters.
- Pure could have been a little more proactive on some of the errors we were seeing and getting back to us that there was a patch that would correct some issues. This really would have helped us in the beginning as we were moving our entire workload to the array.
September 06, 2019
My Pure Storage FlashArray five year (so far) journey
We implemented Pure Storage FlashArrays for our tier 1 storage to meet the high IOPS, low latency demands of our applications. All tier 1 storage resides (currently) on one of three arrays. We have a very bursty workload and Pure Storage is able to handle the workload better than any other storage that we have used.
- Handles bursty (IOPS and bandwidth) workloads very well.
- Has great VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) support/implementation.
- Upgrades are quick and painless.
- Pure 1 site for aggregated telemetry data is very useful.
- Pure Storage is expensive, but worth the premium.
- I would like an easier way to identify a particularly hot (IO) VM on vVols during specific, narrow, user-selected time windows.
- I would like to see an indicator on the support site for a Pure Support recommended code version of the Purity OS to more easily identify what version we should be running.
September 06, 2019
Pure Storage delivers on their promise
The Pure storage is used as our Enterprise block storage capability supporting over 8,000 VMs running enterprise & research workloads. The solution addresses the issue of provisioning & supporting thousands of disparate workloads with various performance characteristic (medium/high IOPs and low latency requirements) cost-effectively with minimal administrative overhead. The Data Reduction in production is over 5x which allows great performance with a compelling value proposition.
- Data reduction, we are seeing 5.x in Production and 6.x in non-prod environments.
- Ease of management, deployment (API), seamless capacity expansions and even array upgrades with zero downtime.
- Support, Pure One Dashboard is dynamically updated with all the relevant performance, capacity, and health on all devices (e.g. IOS). Pure is proactive in addressing issues the moment they are detected and are extremely responsive to any questions or queries.
- Still niche products - would like an expanded portfolio to cover all storage use cases.
- Slightly higher cost than their competitors.
Primary storage for corporate storage needs like virtual machines, collaboration, and ERP. It replaced two HP EVA 6400s with that were not able to keep up with I/O needs, while frequent failing components and the EOL made it a risk to keep them as primary storage. We use the built-in snapshot feature to snapshot 90% of all volumes every 30 minutes and keep them 6 days on the array. This will help us recover in case of ransomware. We have a second PURE X20 in our remote site 300 KM from here and use async replication to sync critical data off-site.
- Easy to manage. When compared to HP EVA the GUI and the available options are logical and easy to understand. Our administrator needed very little to none training to use it.
- Low Latency and high throughput. Normal business operation is around 20K IOPS and < 1 MS.
- Support. Knowledge engineers that will ' stay with you' till the issue is resolved and provide assistance even when the root cause is a, for example, a faulty transceiver in an FC Switch or an MPIO issue on AIX.
- Pure1 portal provides enough information for basic capacity planning and the new VM Topology is helpfull to quickly get information about which VM Vdisk is having latency issues.
- Excellent integration with VEEAM. For example, using the VEEAM console we can restore a file from any of about 130 snapshots that we take on the SAN.
- The portal provides some basic information on the deduplication and compression ratios but is not very helpful when troubleshooting a sudden increase in utilization.
November 11, 2019
Believe what they say...You won't be sorry.
Pure Storage is being used organization-wide. It is the primary storage for our Production virtualization workload.
- Compression/Dedup.
- Simple setup and management.
October 31, 2019
Pure storage, set up in a Flash.
Currently, we use the M 20 Pure FlashArray and I have to say it is pretty great. It took little to no effort to set up so from an engineering standpoint we had very little need to go through in depth training and setup like other storage arrays such as Dell, Hitachi, etc. We use it primarily for our virtual desktops to have redundant fast storage.
- Their support is outstanding, always quick to respond with valid answers each time.
- Updates are completely seamless with never a drop to service for our users which is really helpful with us being a hospital.
- The product just works. The intervention and maintenance in this is slim to none. It makes it really easy to implement and maintain.
- They are still a growing company so there are always some things that you aren't sure if you could meet the actual expectations that they put forward.
- Some of the events I go to are very geared towards sales and making you want to buy the product, not really learning about them as a company.
- More things to add to a storage array that don't include additional costs.
October 04, 2019
Very happy!
We are currently using the FlashArray as backing storage for our virtual server environment, virtual desktop environment, and our high transaction databases. We currently have devices deployed at our major sites and are in the process of deploying to all of our second tier locations. We were struggling with our previous storage providers to deliver the performance, scalability, and cost targets. Pure Storage was able to deliver on all of our key metric areas and continue to work diligently in maintaining the value in our relationship.
- VMWare Integration
- Pro-active support and an active on-going investment in our relationship to maintain outstanding results
- Flawless service delivery
- Straightforward and powerful device management
- turn-key centralized reporting
- I honestly can't think of an area that I am unhappy with
September 30, 2019
Pure Storage is very innovative and simple to manage
We have 2 Pure arrays and use them to serve around 90% of data to our hosts. We use other NVME cards for other applications like IBM Informix and Oracle ODA. We moved everything off of Compellent to Pure Storage. I think our Pure Storage arrays are both very solid and so far I am pleased with the performance and manageability of these arrays.
- IT servers up data with < 1ms
- It is very easy to configure new storage
- Make zoning data and expanding storage sizes very well
- The data can always be faster. We purchased NVME storage as the data was slower than what we were using before.
September 27, 2019
Why we switched to Pure
We are a managed service provider, we use FlashArrays for shared storage for our private cloud customers and as dedicated storage for several of our larger customers. We have been steadily replacing all older spinning disk storage systems with FlashArrays. This has allowed us to greatly increase storage efficiencies and provide outstanding storage performance to all our customers. FlashArrays have solved varying issues for different customers, from database performance to storage efficiency of VDI applications.
- Ease of management - both the local administration and PureOne dashboard allow us to monitor systems as well as provide life-cycle management.
- Storage efficiency - the de-dupe and compression ratios are fantastic. We can provide our customers better cost to usage ratios.
- Service and support - online upgrades for both software and hardware means no downtime for the customers.
- Evergreen controllers - upgrades to the latest hardware as part of the service contract means we don't have any more data lifts when upgrading to the new system.
- Ease of configuration and integration with our hypervisor providers - just another way not to spend all our time managing storage.
- Cost is still a little high, increasing storage is pricey but things are getting better. Aside from cost though, the new features released and the fact there are no extra costs for any of these features can make up for the overall price.
September 26, 2019
Pure Storage is Purely magic
We resell the product - It's used in various use case where clients need to access data without any compromise to speed. It solves space disk problem by showing an amazing deduplication and compression ratio. Also, their business model to refresh controllers every 3 years changes the game since clients will be saving overtime by not doing a forklift upgrade every 3-5 years.
- VDI environment.
- AI environment.
- Opex financial operations.
- Price is high when comparing traditional vendors.
September 25, 2019
Pure Is A Good Solution
Our Pure Storage array is being used as storage for our financial cores and Cisco UCS hosts. Our old platter drive SANs were end of life and we needed modular, expandable storage that would grow with our organization for years to come.
- Storage density. Having over 20TB of space in less than half a 3U shelf is great. When we're ready for our first expansion we won't even need a new shelf.
- Compression. I was skeptical of how much performance would be available since the array compresses all data stored. It's been faster than I thought. Boot times of VMs are very SSD-like.
- Replication. The compressed replication makes synching data between the arrays fast.
- Setting up replication to other arrays. I pretty much blundered into the solution. Documentation was not clear, mostly because the documentation available from Pure wasn't updated for the new Pure user interface yet. Left me hanging.
- Making changes to replication. The way I understand it, if I want to make any kinds of changes to the replication link (like renaming it) I have to destroy it and recreate it. I still haven't figured it out completely.
- Veeam can't look inside replicated volumes. It would be nice if Veeam could see, open, browse, and restore VMs from inside the replicated volumes on the other side of Pure replication. This would solve some big problems for us.
- Need documentation on how to configure/optimize VM OSes to take advantage of the Pure. We're coming from a 1Gb network infrastructure (including all the virtual NICs) moving to a 10Gb infrastructure. Intra-VM file transfers are slow.
- Growing reliability concerns. We've had our Pure arrays for less than 6 months and have had a drive failure in each of our chassis so far. I do like that the Pure array emails statuses immediately. Support from Pure to fix or replace drives has been good.
September 24, 2019
FlashArray Review
Pure Storage FlashArray is CBH Group's primary storage system and hosts all of CBH's system across the board. It enables us to provide excellent storage performance without having to worry about where data has to go for it to perform. Because of this, the day to day management of the storage infrastructure has almost disappeared completely. It also allowed us to consolidate the physical footprint for data center relocation.
- Deduplication and compression - Allows us to have a minimal footprint and power consumption in our datacenters.
- Support - Pure Storage support is better than any I have had to deal with and the included proactive management allows us to essentially set and forget.
- None - Does everything we want it to do.
September 24, 2019
Orange is the new Flash
Our Pure Storage FlashArray is currently being used as our main storage backend for VMWare. The virtual machines hosted on these systems support the entire company.
- Mobile app. Allows quick view of the health of all of your arrays from your mobile device. You can also open a ticket from the app.
- Unbelievable IOPS with the flash storage.
- Extremely easy to install and configure. I installed it into the rack before the Pure engineer got onsite.
- It could be less expensive. Pure storage is not cheap. But, outside of price I cannot thing of a thing it is lacking.
September 24, 2019
Pure Magic
Pure Storage FlashArray provides superior performance at an attractive price point to support our organization's applications. Almost all workloads that we have moved to Pure Storage FlashAray have seen a noticeable improvement in processing times, not just noticed by IT metrics but also by end-users.
- Performance - Workloads moved to the Pure Storage from other mfg arrays saw significant performance improvements.
- Value - For the cost versus performance/capacity gain, Pure Storage FlashArray was an investment that provided great returns.
- Support - A high level of customer support across the board (sales, pre-sales, post-sales, technical). Our reps are always in contact with us to see if we need anything.
- Have not uncovered any yet.
September 24, 2019
Ultra Fast Array with Simple UI
We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for the entire organization to replicate to identical array in our co-lo site. This array is blazing fast and it solved I/O and latency issues we had with our databases. Our VMs are lightning quick on the array making any storage migrations a breeze. Management of the array is also very simple and easy to use. Overall this is a great product!
- Customer service is fantastic. We have not had any issues with the array, but even doing a code upgrade is simple as support is very friendly and quick to respond.
- The array is FAST! Being an all-flash array that is expected, but bundle that with their architecture and this thing is lightning quick in all storage operations.
- We have not yet had the opportunity to take advantage of the Evergreen Model, but are looking forward to a hardware upgrade. This model is great and allows for quick and easy uplift to the newest hardware without replacing the array.
- The array is so simple and easy to use that, we rarely need to manage it or do anything really. It really feels like a set and forget kind of system because it just works.
September 24, 2019
Pure Storage Flash Array
We use the Pure Storage SAN as our primary storage for our entire infrastructure across the whole organisation.
- Easy to configure
- Very fast
- Easy to intergrate
- Great Technical support
- Clearer pricing
September 21, 2019
Fast, reliable and simple. All our wishes are granted!
We deployed two active-active arrays (m50r2) for our group datacenter and all our data workloads are hosted on Pure arrays. We use the Active Cluster feature to build our business continuity plan. Then, this year we have bought an x10 one for a production site (warehouse). Pure Storage FlashArray has solved our storage issues around latency, growth, and protection.
- Data reduction is the best we have ever seen. It is always improved at each release.
- Managing PureStorage FlashArray is very simple and secured, it unloaded the storage from over 80% of charge.
- Support is the most efficient and reliable we have. They are amazingly proactive and reactive in case of failure.
- Design and features are great.
- Growth steps. Increasing arrays is quite expensive because steps between tiers are high.
September 20, 2019
"Flashy" Next Level Deduplication and Performance with the FlashArray
The FlashArray is being used across our entire environment/organization. Internally, and customer clouds as well. Atmosera is a cloud service provider of both Private and public cloud offerings. We utilize the FlashArrays for our private cloud offerings, selling datastore volumes as managed storage. The FlashArray allows us to be scalable in our internal infrastructure, while also offering the huge benefits of Flash storage. The FlashArray fleet we have also given us a single vendor infrastructure, which eases management.
- The Pure Array is scalable (easy to add more storage, easy to split up/provision existing storage).
- The Pure Array handles deduplication and compression better than any storage array I've worked with.
- Pure Support is very knowledgeable and responsive to issues and questions.
- The Pure Web GUI is very intuitive and easy to use.
- VM Analytics is a great and easy to enable feature.
- While the GUI is easy to use, some management features are only available in the CLI.
Pure Storage FlashArray Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage in Mountain View, California offers all-flash array data storage promising affordability, high availability, and consistent performance.
Categories: Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Pure Storage FlashArray Integrations
Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)
Pure Storage FlashArray Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
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| Mobile Application: | No |