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%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Junior Manager Data Center
PT Kereta Api Indonesia (Persero) (Transportation/Trucking/Railroad, 10,001+ employees)
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Pure Storage Demo in 8 Minutes
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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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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- 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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Reviews
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January 25, 2019
Pure is purely awesome - Just try it and you will see
Pure Storage is used for our entire VMware environment which consists of ~100 virtual machines including many SQL Server workloads. It is used across the entire staff base running all critical business systems.
Traditional storage was poor performing and expensive to maintain support without ripping and replacing the entire infrastructure while also being difficult to manage and configure. Pure addressed all performance issues and the interface is so easy to use which essentially lowers the administrative burden on the IT infrastructure team.
- Performance - this is exceptional and better than any other providers I have used, sub-millisecond performance is standard across our SAN.
- Support - Pure support is great and has always been helpful and friendly. Upgrades are a seamless experience and their support fills you with the confidence that it will be done with no issues whatsoever. Response times for support is great.
- Ease of use - The Pure GUI is very easy to use and the most simplest GUI on storage I have ever used by far, so simple in fact that once set you don't have to spend much time working in it until you need to make a change to a volume or hosts.
- Pure Storage is simple to use, I find it really hard to find anything that really needs to be suggested improvement wise. Maybe some more documentation or design templates for stretched cluster might be useful.
January 25, 2019
FlashArray for the Performance Oriented.
We use Pure Storage FlashArray across our entire organization to provide sub-millisecond latency to sensitive databases and applications. Decoupling our servers from local storage allowed us to design a proper HA environment and leverage growth in the compute and network layers without impacting our storage reliability and performance. Data Encryption at Rest also enabled us to guarantee full data encryption without the costly CPU overhead of a local solution.
- Data deduplication has saved us many TB of space, as much of our data is copied and reused for QA, staging and testing environments.
- Encryption at Rest allows us to offload the management, overhead and cost of encryption with to a single source.
- Upgradability between models has allowed us to grow fast when needed, and save money when not.
- Pure is still one of the most costly solutions on the market. Though they provide best in class service and equipment - you pay for it.
January 24, 2019
Pure Gold
The deployment replaced an existing mechanical storage SAN array. The main requirements were to avoid another forklift upgrade for storage, improve environmental credentials and lifespan, improve data accessibility, 24/7/365 support options, flexibility for growth and expansion.
- Improves Performance. Older VM guests now run at SSD performance which has positive feedback to our end users.
- Improves Availability. More of our devices have access to data volumes.
- Online hardware and software updates. Saves costs for out-of-hours work.
- Cannot run Active Cluster feature with Purity Run.
January 23, 2019
Don't drink the kool aid
Pure is used throughout the entire organization for VDI and Corporate SAN storage to include Active Cluster.
- It performs well.
- We had two VNX 5600's a vplex dual engine for a stretched VMware cluster between two data centers. We replaced all of that with two M20R2's so it saved a lot of rack space / cooling / electricity / san ports, etc.
- When you put Pure in your data center it becomes a black box. Issues will happen with the Pure and you will receive no notifications from it. We've had controller failures, which you would think you'd want to be notified of, but you don't get those notifications. We've had numerous issues where we aren't made aware of issues with Pure. You just don't have the visibility into what's going on with a Pure that you would have with say an EMC array where you can look at every possible metric. Pure deems what the customer should be notified of and what performance metrics they can see which is not that detailed. We have discussed this with Pure and they indicate we are one of the only customers that would like to see this which seems to me to be a little odd. Who would not want to know what is going on with there storage environment?
- Support does not communicate that well and they come out with code updates way to frequently. You can subscribe to their feed that lets you know when a code upgrade comes out. The release notes for the code upgrade will be very generic and you have no idea if they are applicable in your environment so you have no idea the sense of urgency to apply these fixes. They've been coming out pretty frequently also. We'll test an upgrade on one of our arrays for a few weeks to a month and by the time we've finished testing and burning in they will have come out with a newer version. Then you'll contact support to have them apply the version you've been testing on your other arrays and you'll have to be very clear with them on which version and why you want that version applied. There support representatives don't communicate that well either. We experienced a significant issue that caused a significant outage and the support representatives were not involved, even though they were aware of the issue, until we expressed our displeasure with Pure.
- We experienced a significant bug with Active Cluster which brought a large portion of our production environment down. First response from Pure was not very timely nor effective in addressing the issue. Within a couple of weeks we experienced the issue again. At that point we got everything off of Active Cluster. After several weeks of pointing fingers at VMware and our configuration we were able to get more senior people at Pure engaged. It took almost 5 months for the issue to be identified and it was a Pure bug with Active Cluster. We have not put anything back onto Active Cluster as of yet and it's 7 months after the issue. Pure would have not stepped up to help us out without us letting Pure know how we feel about the product.
- They give you great pricing to get in the door, but then when you have to grow you'll get sticker shock.
January 22, 2019
Pure Storage The Best Of The Best
Our Pure Storage array is being used mainly by our SQL software, we provide software as a service to the health club industry. The 3 years that we have been using Pure Storage has taken our month end process from several hours to just a couple. We have been very pleased with the speed and reliability.
- Speed of use compared to traditional drives.
- Easy to provision.
- Very insightful graphs and logistics.
- Because of how fast they have been growing, employees are constantly changing or advancing in the company and you are having to deal with new people all the time.
January 10, 2019
Another happy customer with Pure Storage
Our Pure Storage array hosts the entire VMware workload; we have at multiple sites. We have 2 private clouds (vrealize automation & vcloud director) and 3 vcenters hosting over 5000 vms all on 3 Pure Storage arrays. Since implementing these, latency problems are a thing of the past and both clouds are up to 97-99% successful deployments! This alleviates some load on IT so that we can focus on more important work than managing storage; we never have to worry about our Pure arrays. The arrays were easy to implement and have reduced vApp deployment times by hours even when compared to the hybrid flash arrays we were using previously. I sleep better at night knowing Pure is in our data center and managing our workloads.
- Time of deployment for vm creation is drastically reduced even over hybrid flash arrays.
- Latency has been greatly reduced for vmfs datastores.
- UI is easy to navigate and manage.
- I'd like to see separate arrays be able to manage each other, like a cluster to share a workload so that we could leverage VAAI features across multiple arrays.
- Nothing else, I love it!
January 10, 2019
Flash Array delivers storage space and new opportunities!
Here at the Brazilian Space Agency, we use Pure Storage FlashArray across the whole organization. There were two main problems we accounted for when we decided to purchase an all-flash array solution:
1) We had a great variety of hardware in our storage layer, which in turn was expensive and difficult to manage & maintain.
2) We predicted growth of applications and data from ongoing research projects.
The main features that we looked at were their data reduction algorithm and Pure Storage Orchestrator. We were able to attain a 3:1 reduction ratio. With a much smaller investment, we achieved considerable free storage area without consuming all our datacenter free rack-space. Orchestrator provided an automation layer that provided ways for us to fully use our storage layer directly to applications, through automated provisioning and containers. This sped up development and helped coalesce our newly born DevOps paradigm. When we needed snapshots of backups, Pure and Pure resellers provided precise and fast information.
- Data reduction
- Proactive post-selling support and technical advice
- Provisioning alternatives
- Data replication for highly available environment
- Simple to use and intuitive interface
- Good performance/general information about data usage/access
- Improve with more management features. Today, there is provisioning but limited management. Other features, such as data group protection management through this interface could be a killer feature.
- We had some difficulties integrating flash array with our alarmistic monitoring system. Maybe this could be a little bit easier.
January 08, 2019
Very happy with our FlashArray
We currently use the Pure Storage FlashArray as general use block storage for a VMware environment with around 450 guest VM's for a single department. When we replaced out Vmax array, we were looking for an all-flash solution that was easy to manage and delivered great performance with very high uptime. Pure Storage FlashArray has delivered on all of these.
- Deduplication and compression are a definite strong point for Pure. We see on average 6:1 data reduction across our environment.
- Ease of use. FlashArray is very simple to use. Managing block storage has gone from a full-time job to almost an afterthought for us. There is no more monitoring and tuning on a daily basis for best performance. A simple look at the Pure1 dashboard is all it takes to get a picture of all of our arrays' health. Setting up new volumes and replication is super easy and it takes only a few clicks.
- Hardware and Software upgrades. We have done two controller swaps, one from the FA series to the M series and another from the M series to the X series. Both times were full-time our environment with zero downtime. They also took very little time, ~4 hours to complete. Drive and shelf upgrades are equally as quick, require no downtime and zero configuration. Software updates are performed remotely by Pure are also seamless.
- None
January 08, 2019
Pure is a no-brainer choice for storage.
Our Pure Storage FlashArray is our main storage for our VM ware infrastructure. It has been everything we hoped it would be and more. We made a big decision by going to Pure, and it turned out to be a great decision. All of our programs are running on Pure Storage. It has made a big difference in speed according to our users. It has also made our lives as VMware administrators so much easier.
- Cuts down on the amount of storage you need.
- It has a very small footprint which was great for us.
- We also use Pure Storage to do storage snapshots for backups.
- So far for us, it has been a piece of cake! The integration with Veeam still needs a little work.
January 08, 2019
Pure Storage is a solid performer!
Pure Storage's FlashArray has become the defacto standard for our SAN needs, delivering blisteringly fast performance for our core databases and our virtual environments, and handles our busiest events with ease. It's incredibly powerful as well as being easy to manage, making our day to day support much easier.
- Simple and easy to manage
- Blazingly fast
- Solid performer
- None
January 08, 2019
Love Pure Storage!!
We use PureStorage FlashArray as our production storage for all applications. We have also just purchased another PureStorage SAN for our disaster recovery site. We are extremely happy with the performance and ease of use.
- Reliable performance
- Ease of management, does not rely on Java
- Ease of updates
- None
January 07, 2019
I Love My Pure!!!!!
We have two Pure Storage FlashArrays in our organization, one on each campus. We use our Pure Storage FlashArrays as datastores for VMWare and image stores for Citrix PVS servers.
- No downtime ever. We have updated firmware, hardware and had to restart controllers etc., without any downtime.
- Pure support is awesome. We haven't had to use their support much, but when we have, they fix our issues quickly (and again no downtime). They continually monitor the health of our arrays and notify us if and when any issues / problems are encountered (most of the time before we even know there is a problem).
- Disaster recovery. We snapshot and replicate between campuses every hour. Hurricane Irma disrupted service on our Naples campus and we had to failover to our Fort Myers campus. In less than 20 minutes, all of our Naples servers we up-and-running on our Fort Myers campus (I love my PURE!!!!!).
- Speed. Migrating a VM from one datastore to another takes less than 60 seconds, seriously our average time is 38 seconds.
- With VMs our data reduction 52.4 to 1. With flat files, data reduction is only 1 to 1.
December 27, 2018
Excellent storage solution
We purchased 3 flash arrays from Pure Storage for our production UA and DR environments as well as for development and quality assurance departments. Its lightning-fast performance solves a lot of performance issues of the team, as well as the backup restore process.
- OLTP Database performance
- Backup and restore
- De duplication
- Data compression
- Data at rest encryption
- Replication snapshot
- Continuous data replication and journal
December 14, 2018
Pure from the beginning and for the foreseeable future.
Pure storage is our "Tier 1" storage for in house applications. It is being used across the entire organization for a number of mission critical and time sensitive workloads. The FlashArray has allowed us to reduce processing time in our Data Warehouse as well as increase performance along all analytics and statistical models.
- Non-disruptive upgrades
- Ease of use
- Excellent Customer Support both in sales and technical aspects
- Providing more detailed reporting on data reduction and deduplication
- Lowering cost for barrier of entry
December 12, 2018
Very happy customer - would recommend Pure Storage if needed for high performance applications
The Pure Storage FlashArray is used across the whole organisation. It allows us to have a high performance application running on it and allows us to compress data and obtain additional storage.
- Performance across BI Reporting Tools
- Compression of our ERP system
- Integrates nicely with VMware
- Snap shots of LUNs at storage level
- Price
- More data compression
December 12, 2018
Pure Storage FlashArray - You Can't Go Wrong!
We utilize the Pure Storage FlashArray for a department. The department had a need for an all flash array that provided flexibility with snapshot technology. The Pure array has exceeded the performance and snapshot requirements.
- One of the strengths of the Pure Storage FlashArray is the snapshot technology. We were creating the snapshots on an HDS array which had a parent/child relationship between the source and target. This made expanding the size of the source LUN challenging.
- The snapshot technology with Pure eliminates that relationship making expanding the size of the source LUN very simple.
- The support of the Pure Storage FlashArray is outstanding. Pure has alerted us to issues with our fiber channels that would have gone unnoticed otherwise. They are hands-down the best vendor at proactively notifying us of potential issues.
- The Pure Storage FlashArray meets "the keep it simple" philosophy. From installation to configuration the array has been easy to use and we couldn't be happier.
- At this stage, I can't think of anything that could be improved upon.
December 11, 2018
Quick and easy!
We use it for our most critical database applications. It fixed our latency issues from our services trying to connect to the db servers. It also provides 3 times the amount of data compression than other SAN systems which allowed us to move more mission critical systems onto higher quality storage.
- Excellent throughput.
- Data Compression/Deduplication.
- Management and deployment is relatively easy.
- Volume management can be cumbersome.
- Price can cause some sticker shock.
- Block level storage only.
December 11, 2018
Nothing is more expensive than regret, and you will NOT regret this!
We are using a PUREStorage M50 at our home office supported with an M10 at our co-location. It handles our Production as well as some Test/Dev environments. Coming from a VNX/Unity platform, this is a thing of beauty. It actually works as expected and as described. It has truly been a game changer.
- Compression and Deduplication are incredible. It's like a skinny person at a buffet who just keeps shoveling it down. I'm not sure where its going but they are steady chowing down with no sign of slowing.
- Array Management has been a god sent. Its easy to use and very intuitive. The PURE1 console is fantastic and there is even an APP!
- Fast....Blazing fast doesn't even begin to cover it.
- If there was anything that would make my life easier, it would be some sort of reporting system that puts out some pretty graphs I can show management.
December 11, 2018
Great product, great team - you won't be disappointed.
We use it as our primary storage for all corporate file shares, VM data files, and databases. It is used by the whole organization (although many don know it). We had a huge latency and stability issue with our previous solution. This addressed all of that. It also has much better reporting and diagnostics than our previous solution that helps us keep everything running smoothly.
- Sub millisecond i/o.
- Fantastic metrics and reporting.
- Fast install with hardware.
- Amazing, amazing support.
- Answer A: nothing.
- Answer B: If I haaaaaave to, maybe a bit of a cleaner interface in between the main console, and going into the separate arrays.
December 11, 2018
Great Product and Company!
We use the Pure Flash Array to host our Citrix XenDesktop VDI environment for around 300 users
- High DeDup Rates
- Minimal setup and overhead to maintain
- Extremely good performance
- Could be easier to upgrade
December 07, 2018
It's really as good as they say!
Pure Storage is used at two of our data centers. It is the primary storage at both data centers and is used by all business groups. Pure Storage was implemented to replace aging legacy SANs that were getting to costly to maintain and had significant performance issues.
- Latency is below 1ms 100% of the time
- Storage web interface is intuitive and easy to use
- vCenter plugin works great
- While I can see LUNs easily within the interface, I'd love to see what data is consuming the most space
- The web interface can be a bit too simplistic
- I'd love to know when new controller firmware is released. At the moment, I am relying on my Pure Sales Engineer to tell me.
December 07, 2018
Pure is fantastic enterprise storage.
We use Pure FlashArray to run the majority of our VMWare environment. Pure has been an enormous performance upgrade. The web interface is lightning fast and fantastic. The UI is minimal, logical, and easy to figure out. Incidents caused by storage performance/reliability have entirely stopped. Once I put a VM on Pure, I never hear about it again.
- Great web interface.
- Extremely fast performance
- Excellent vmware documentation and support.
- Pure has trouble with delivering hardware fast.
- Our first one had a DOA slot and the entire m20 had to be replaced which took longer than it should have
- Not particularly compelling as a NAS. Excels mainly at block storage.
December 05, 2018
Pure Storage FlashArray quick review
Pure Storage hosts all mission-critical databases for the whole corporation. It helps to improve the reliability and performance of our database environment.
- The active/active design increase the reliability. If one controller has problem, the other controller is always there to handle the IO. There is NO need to do failover in other active/passive storage which may cause timeout or failure.
- Pure Storage has nvram which increase the performance of write IO. The read performance is also good since the Pure Storage always try to avoid the reading and writing on the same block in the flash disk.
- The active cluster feature provides the redundancy on the storage array level. So our database cluster not only can tolerant the server failure, it can also tolerant the storage array failure.
- The built-in deduplication and compression feature can save lots of storage space.
- Pure Storage is block storage using fiber channel or iSCSI. It doesn't have the NAS ability.
November 30, 2018
Pure Storage Array Review
Our organization uses multiple Pure flash arrays across multiple environments, servicing multiple needs from datastore volumes to SQL clustered disks. The device provide us with fast, reliable storage, and the ability to scale out our environments thanks to the compression and deduplication that Pure Storage provides across the entire array.
- Easy to use and configure GUI interface
- High rate of compression/deduplication allows for lots of storage.
- Great customer and technical support.
- GUI could use some added functionality only found in Pure1 or the CLI
November 28, 2018
Better, Fast and Simple
Our datacenter is 100% virtualized (VMware ESXi) and we upgraded our SAN to Pure Storage over 2 years ago which improved greatly the speed and performance of the servers and applications (especially MS SQL systems).
- SQL queries run faster compared with conventional spin disks SAN.
- VM backups finish faster and restoring the whole VM takes less time.
- Pure Storage has a great de-dupe compression ratio (we are 5.4 to 1)
- It would be nice to have settings like TINTRI where you don't need to create and manage volumes from the SAN, just manage everything from the host servers.