All flash storage for all-round workload
We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for virtualization and for main datastore, and I think it is perfect for our environment that needs …
Overview
What is Pure Storage FlashArray?
Pure Storage in Mountain View, California offers all-flash array data storage promising affordability, high availability, and consistent performance.
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Popular Features
- Flash Array Performance (154)10.0100%
- Simplicity (154)10.0100%
- Non-Intrusive Upgrades (148)10.0100%
- Data Compression (153)8.080%
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Junior Manager Data Center
PT Kereta Api Indonesia (Persero) (Transportation/Trucking/Railroad, 10,001+ employees)
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Demo of Pure Storage UCS Director Adapter for Creating LUNs on Pure Storage FlashArray
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What is Pure Storage FlashArray?
Pure Storage FlashArray is available in tow models: FlashArray//C is an all-QLC flash array thatdelivers the NVMe performance, hyper-consolidation, and simplified management. FlashArray//X is all-flash, 100% software-driven, and 100% NVMe storage optimized for corporate and enterprise environments.
Current available models include:
Current available models include:
- FlashArray//XL - Can be used to run everything from massive databases to cloud-native applications with faster transactions and more responsive customer experiences with enterprise availability and disaster protection. FlashArray//XL is designed to give businesses the freedom to innovate without storage as a constraint.
- FlashArray//X - Unified block and file storage designed to be easy to use but also powerful. Used to accelerate everything from Tier 1 databases to large-scale virtualized and cloud-native apps, with a non-disruptive upgrade path.
- FlashArray//C - Designed to provide a home to business-critical workloads and data, with 99.9999% availability, non-disruptive upgrades, and consistent single-millisecond latency.
- FlashArray//E - Designed to deliver simplicity and efficiency of flash for all file and block data repositories, from content libraries to backup sets to active archives. Released in June of 2023, FlashArray//E are offered to expand customers’ options to tackle data growth down to 1PB without the need for frustrating offline archives or expanding expensive disk systems.
Pure Storage FlashArray Videos
FlashArray Architecture Overview
FlashArray//X: The Next Gen All-Flash Array
FlashArray Architecture Deep Dive Highlights
Pure Storage FlashArray Integrations
Pure Storage FlashArray Competitors
Pure Storage FlashArray Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Pure Storage in Mountain View, California offers all-flash array data storage promising affordability, high availability, and consistent performance.
Dell PowerMax NVMe, NetApp AFF A-Series, and HPE Nimble Storage are common alternatives for Pure Storage FlashArray.
Reviewers rate Flash Array Performance and Non-Intrusive Upgrades and Simplicity highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Pure Storage FlashArray are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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- Business Problems Solved
Pure Storage FlashArray has been widely used across various industries and organizations to address a multitude of storage needs. Users have experienced a significant increase in speed and improved data handling by replacing their existing storage with Pure Storage FlashArray. With its high-speed, reliable block storage capabilities, the array has been effective in supporting performance-sensitive workloads and unifying different storage technologies and manufacturers. Organizations have utilized Pure Storage FlashArray to house virtual infrastructure environments, resulting in great compression rates and easy setup of replications. It has also served as a primary SAN for virtualized environments, improving performance and supporting various departments. Furthermore, the array has proven effective in handling batch job performance, reducing job times from hours to minutes and increasing overall productivity. In addition, by running mission-critical applications on Pure Storage FlashArray, users have experienced noticeable performance increases. The array's ability to handle thousands of VMs while providing primary storage and data protection through replication has made it a valuable asset in large-scale environments. Pure Storage FlashArray has also been deployed across multiple data centers to address performance, capacity, and data security needs. Its simplicity of administration, patching, and upgrading processes has earned user satisfaction. Overall, Pure Storage FlashArray has addressed crucial storage challenges for organizations by providing high-speed storage, easy management, scalability, and improved performance for a wide range of workloads.
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September 10, 2019
Where 911 calls when they need help.
We use the Pure Storage FlashArray X50 as our main central storage for our VMware environment and SQL database storage. The main problem in our industry is speed. In the 911 world "Seconds Count," so we needed the fastest and most reliable storage array possible.
- Speed. During testing, we could push the array to about 400,000 iops.
- Failover. The two controllers can failover to each other with only about 1-2 second blip.
- Size. The chassis is only 3 rack units, which is much smaller than the 10 rack units of a previous array.
- Cost. Pure Storage is pretty expensive.
- Upgrade options. You can only upgrade in certain "data pack" sizes, which are pretty big leaps when you only need a small upgrade.
September 09, 2019
Pure Storage - the best storage ever
Pure Storage is being used across our data centers supporting over 3,000 VMs running enterprise 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.
- Ease of management, deployment (API), seamless capacity expansions and even array upgrades with zero downtime.
- Support. Knowledgable engineers that will ' stay with you' till the issue is resolved and provide assistance even when the root cause is.
- Data reduction. We are seeing 5.x in Production and 6.x in non-prod environments.
- Slightly higher cost than their competitors
September 09, 2019
Pure... What else!
Pure Storage FlashArray is our SAN storage array worldwide for all the sites inside the company. It solves many issues and the main one is the OpEx link to storage management. This is so easy that we prefer to have it everywhere rather than any other boxes for our sites, even the smallest.
- Monitoring with Pure1
- Upgrades are belonging to the past
- Performance is insane
- Very easy setup
- Very difficult to find bad points since this product is so good... Nope, I have no Cons, can't find any! Sorry!
September 09, 2019
I like Pure Storage way too much
Flasharray backs most of our VMware datastores. It also is the backend to our Linux-HA implementation running SMB and NFS.
- It's fast with low latency under load.
- It is supported by an evergreen support policy.
- Purestorage sees the under-the-hood issues on it before they become problems. They contact us and schedule maintenance to provide fixes and upgrades.
- The thing just works. We spend almost no time on it and it's in use for most of our production environments.
- There's very little improvement to be made. They even have a load prediction engine now that allows you to predict what will happen if you scale up one of your load types (choose a volume and tell it you're going to make ten more of them and see what it predicts).
September 09, 2019
Low latency, High Availability and High Speed Storage Solution
The main problem we had was latency based. Pure has taken care of the latency issues. The immense dedup results we have seen have made this a good per usable TB purchase.
- Low latency storage serving
- Deduplication
- Backup license consolidation with CommVault
- It would be nice if there where more network-based services available, for example, NetApp
- K8S integration works but is not as clean as I would like to see it. Setting user limits would be nice, albeit a bit hard.
September 09, 2019
Pure Storage as your enterprise storage solution
We are using Pure Storage FlashArray on our production system to replace a legacy storage system that is obsolete and costly to maintain. We managed to decrease operation expenditure by 20 percent and double our capacity with less server footprint in terms of rack space and power consumption.
- Compression, and de-duplication. It is doing this really well. We have an average of a one fourth compression ratio of our file storage system. Not to mention inline de-duplication.
- Longevity. We can upgrade the management blade should we have additional processing and capacity and support has been awesome.
- It has usage analytics and a great partner ecosystem.
- User events and I hope that you can manage your partner to keep giving us on the latest storage services support.
September 07, 2019
More Power with Pure Storage
Pure Storage has been in use as an active cluster for almost a year. We are very happy with it and have no problems.
- Easy to install
- Easy to use
- Very good support department
- Implementation of cheaper storage with the same simplicity
September 07, 2019
Great all-flash storage appliance
Pure Array was used as a storage platform for all our infrastructure.
- Performance
- Active support
- Non-disruptive maintenance
- Could improve Pure1 app on mobile
September 07, 2019
Pure Storage provides an all-around positive experience!
We utilize two Pure Storage FlashArrays, with one in each of our main datacenters. It's the only primary storage solution we use, and the entire organization runs on Pure. Technologies running on the FlashArrays include SAP, Citrix, VMware, Docker, Exchange, and SQL. The arrays replaced multiple legacy spinning disk arrays and we were able to consolidate workloads onto a single array in each datacenter.
- Simplified Management - Command line access is available, but everything you need to do can be done through the GUI.
- Excellent support - Proactive, very responsive and capable.
- Metrics - Right there on the homepage of the GUI, you can see what's going on with the array.
- Updates to the GUI - It takes a while to get used to where things are, and they could be better organized.
- Alerting - Often support gets notified of issues before we know about them. Not necessarily bad, but a heads up would be good.
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
It doesn't get any better than this! Pure Storage rocks!
We are using a pair of FlashArray//m20s (one for replication at our DR site) as our primary storage array; primarily for vSphere running a couple hundred VMs including our ERP system and Student Information System.
- Initial implementation is incredibly easy. After plugging the array in, a few minutes of configuration and you're up and running. Prior storage arrays required weeks of conference calls and planning with the vendor. Pure was up and running in less than an hour, and I took my time.
- Flexibility. Unlike other arrays that require you to select RAID levels, create RAID groups, storage pools, allocate hot spares, etc., this thing just works! No complex planning required, no long-term decisions to make. Want more capacity? Plug in more disks! Done!
- No forklift upgrades. Every component in the array (controllers and disks) can be upgraded and migrated on-line with no loss in performance. You can purchase a Pure array today and keep it current over many generations without having to migrate data between arrays.
- Easy management. A simple, modern web GUI makes it very quick and easy to perform all management tasks. No Java, Flash, etc. A CLI, REST API, and PowerShell modules are also included.
- Tech support. In the three years that we've owned the array, I've never had a major issue with it, but the half-dozen or so times I've contact support (mostly for upgrades), the experience has been incredible. Response times are the quickest I've seen and the engineers are knowledgeable. Pure sets the bar here.
- It's expensive. While I'd love to store everything on our FlashArray, we just can't justify the cost. Things like historical logs, software archives, video surveillance footage, etc. are still stored on traditional arrays.
September 06, 2019
Great storage for our requirements
The array is used to provide storage for the private cloud infrastructure used by students in the School of Applied Computer Science and Information Technology for lab work and assignments. The private cloud infrastructure is deployed to allow the school to employ a BYOD environment while providing students with resources required to complete practical study requirements.
- High performance allows great flexibility in the classroom. You can ask an entire class of students to deploy a VM and they are done in seconds rather than minutes.
- Lower long term cost through controller upgrade program. Having a large capital expenditure every five to six years as is typical with storage arrays is very difficult in an educational environment.
- Excellent automation saves hours of time. Each semester, resources are destroyed and reconfigured in the virtual infrastructure for hundreds of students. That requires the destruction and creation of hundreds of volumes. Since that process is completed automated, it only takes a couple of hours time to configure the required data to allow the automation scripts process the required changes.
- I would recommend changing the deployment process schedule that it can be completed without a Pure engineer on site. I thought the process would be much more complex than it was. As it turned out, we could have easily handled the process.
- A very specific feature is the requirement for actual Intel 40Gb optical transceivers. We faced a challenge during deployment that the array would not work with any third party 40Gb optical transceiver that we had, although it would work with a third party 40Gb DAC with no problem. Pure did provide a document stating only Intel optics were supported, but that was provided after purchase. We have the perception that Pure did not have much experience with 40Gb networking.
September 06, 2019
Good performance and simplicity of use.
We have different models of Pure Storage FlashArray, from small to big, with the latest models. It's been used for different platforms and different departments. It is hosting all kind of applications and databases, and they are all performing well, as expected. Pure Storage FlashArray improved system performance dramatically, with some jobs running 10 times faster.
- The first thing is performance. It really performs well compared to our old storage (as expected).
- The second thing is its simplicity. The GUI design is really thoughtful. It takes much fewer click to achieve the same thing that some other products take more steps to do.
- The replication is on network, not on fiber channel. It is a design decision, but personally I feel fiber channel is faster. However, we haven't seen any performance issue on replication.
- Active clusters function well, but there is only one way (network) to prevent split-brain. It might be more solid if there were more ways to prevent it.
September 06, 2019
Pure Storage FlashArray - fast forward mirrored VM Storage
We have replaced an existing Storage used for our VM environment with the Pure Storage. It was easy to replace, easy to install to configure and it is running without any hassle since then.
We could see a huge increase in speed. Also how the data was handled has changed drastically. much better compression and deduplication than with our old storage.
Configuration in the UI is very easy and after it is in place, you almosts have not to touch it anymore.
We could see a huge increase in speed. Also how the data was handled has changed drastically. much better compression and deduplication than with our old storage.
Configuration in the UI is very easy and after it is in place, you almosts have not to touch it anymore.
- Easy to install.
- Easy to configure.
- You don't have to touch it anymore - it's there and it's doing the job.
- The support team does a great job in case you need them.
- Cannot say anything negative.
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.
September 05, 2019
Pure Storage FlashArray - A happy story of a storage admin
Our organization needed a high-performance storage array to meet the growing IOPS demand and we looked at many options before selecting Pure Storage FlashArray. I was very impressed with the data management capabilities especially dedup, compression, and the written guarantee that came along with the product. The per gig price point compared to big-boys all flash arrays (read EMC,HP) was very aggressive and FlashArray is built future ready being NVMe-Ready. It's been a few years since I have deployed Flasharray and I've never had any issue. It's a solid performer.
- Compression
- Very easy-to-use management interface
- High IOPS performance
- Scalability. Would like the ability to add more capacity without swapping the SSDs.
- More integration into cloud/virtualization solutions
September 05, 2019
Pure Storage FlashArray is the best SAN I've ever used!
We use Pure Storage FlashArray for primary storage for all virtualized database servers. Prior to acquiring FlashArray, we struggled with SAN latency on all virtual servers which is an extreme performance killer for database platforms and some applications. Through the implementation of Pure Storage FlashArray and following vendor best practices, we now have 1-2ms latency to our data warehouses and high-transaction database servers.
- Pure Storage FlashArray has the very best implementation of Virtual Volumes (VVols) for VMware.
- Pure Storage has very good documentation for best practices for accommodating different types of workloads and access patterns.
- FlashArray outperformed other all-flash SANs by 35% in our testing.
- FlashArray's integrated VASA provider helps avoid many configuration mistakes with VVols on VMware.
- Pricing is still a little steep (but worth it).
- Could use better training for SAN admins so they can fully utilize its features.
September 05, 2019
Pure Storage is the only way to go.
We use Pure Storage FlashArray as our main storage array for our entire organization. We run all 75 or our virtual servers off of the Pure Array. So, this hosts our Student Information System, our financial data, and all the way down to file-shares.
- We were able to transfer from a 200TB HP 3Par storage system down to a 25 TB Pure Array based off how Pure uses the space and their amount of de-duplication.
- Pure is the absolute easiest tool that I have to manage as it is so simple. In 4 years of using the system we have never had any issues whatsoever other than receiving notifications that they were planning on doing updates to firmware for us and when did we want it scheduled.
- The cost of the system and renewal of maintenance is extremely cheap and easy as well.
- I really have no issues that I can think of at this time.
Our company was in the market for a new array that would require less time to administer and less technical issues. The Pure Storage FlashArray was the clear winner after vetting out several competitors. Over the last couple of years, we have upgraded and purchased another for DR. In my 30+ years in IT, this has been an array that has delivered and been simple to patch and upgrade. We will continue to be a customer for years to come.
- Low amount of hands-on maintenance.
- Replication to another Pure is simple.
- Patching is a non-event.
- High price for extra shelves and storage.
September 05, 2019
Migrating to Pure Storage: Is it worth it?
We use Pure Storage for our production and DR storage for our servers and virtual desktops which addressed issues with boot storms when users log in to their virtual desktops and to improve disk performance to our servers. We also like the footprint that we currently have on the Pure Storage FlashArray, the deduplication that it offers and the upgrade options that were presented to us.
- Deduplication of data in Pure Storage is good. Getting between 4 and 6 to 1 reduction.
- Latency on Pure Storage is good also averaging around 1 ms.
- Virtual desktops and servers have great response time and we have never experienced any performance degradation from the flash array.
- I'd like to see some more details on the NVRAM flash module usage from the console.
- I'd like to see alerts from the console about the version of Purity and the latest stable version we can upgrade to.
- I would like more details on the shared capacity usage.
September 05, 2019
Why we use Pure!
It is being used by an IT department for our ERP application utilized across the whole organization.
- Speed.
- Low latency.
- Slow OS boot up.
- Cost.
September 05, 2019
Pure Arrays and the simplification of SANs
Our Pure array is used across our entire organization. It powers our entire software stack from the app/web/DB layers all the way to back office and end-user solutions.
- An easy to manage interface.
- Very fast performance.
- Cost savings with dedupe and compression.
- Limited native cloud support.
- Limited precise metrics.
- No automated reporting.
September 05, 2019
Pure has changed my life!
We use Pure as our primary storage as well as our DR storage. It is used across the entire organization. The biggest problems it has resolved for us are the following:
1. Ease of Management - Pure FlashArray is so easy to administer, that it has completely eased any lack of storage skill set we may have had.
2. Data reduction - We are seeing reduction rates of over 7:1. This compared to our previous storage solution where are reduction rates were 2.5 to 1. The cost savings have been enormous.
3. Replication to DR - We were having several replication issues to DR, and Pure has completely resolved this for us.
1. Ease of Management - Pure FlashArray is so easy to administer, that it has completely eased any lack of storage skill set we may have had.
2. Data reduction - We are seeing reduction rates of over 7:1. This compared to our previous storage solution where are reduction rates were 2.5 to 1. The cost savings have been enormous.
3. Replication to DR - We were having several replication issues to DR, and Pure has completely resolved this for us.
- Administration
- Replication
- Data reduction
- The Vcenter plugin has had a few bugs that have caused us a few minor issues.
September 05, 2019
Pure Storage FlashArray Review
We use two FlashArray units to run our entire production server and VDI environment and provide a business continuity solution. We have a FlashArray m20 at our main office that provides storage backing several hundred mixed-use VMs - Windows and Linux servers, as well as Windows Desktop VMs for end users. A FlashArray x10r2 at an alternate location houses some redundant VMs for business continuity, as well as near real-time snapshots of all the data stored on the primary unit, giving us a great deal of comfort around our data and business security.
- Ease of use and setup.
- Deduplication/data reduction.
- Cloning data for lab environments/testing scenarios.
- Web UI can be a bit confusing when you're trying to perform an atypical task - it's not always intuitive. Sometimes less is not more.