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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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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- 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
(1-25 of 37)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We use Pure Storage FlashArray across the whole organization. It is our primary enterprise storage for general purposes from database to virtualization data. So far we have had an excellent return of investment with high performance and low latency. Pre-sales and after-sales support have been very positive.
- Simple management
- High performance
- Excellent support
- Quick installation and setup
- Trend line in local management
- Performance analysis for more concurrent disks
- More accurate data reduction information by volume.
March 30, 2021
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.
Currently, we use Pure Storage FlashArray for array-based replication. The organisation is using it to develop software to work on top of the infrastructure, and they are testing how the array performs under different test cases (light and heavy workloads, different types of failures etc). These arrays are quite nimble and at times too easy to work with. I'm used to working with big enterprise arrays and most of the time these arrays are as simple to use as a home NAS but at the same time provide the same amount of analytics and performance as the big enterprise arrays.
- Probably the best support that I've ever seen
- Designed to be all-flash from the very beginning
- Very, very, very easy to use
- Easy to deploy
- During our initial deployment, there are things that should be automated (I think they may already be automated with the current versions) like IP address assignment and finalising the configuration.
- Although documentation is plentiful and very well written, at times one might feel lost searching for a specific document. A "beginner section" in the portal would be very helpful for new users.
- More descriptive error messages would be very helpful.
May 22, 2020
Happy with Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray is being used by the whole organization. It provides high speed, reliable block storage for performance-sensitive OLTP workloads. It provides snapshots, redundancy at a network level, at a node/rack level, and provides for snapshots. It is easy to manage and has a relatively easy to use management user interface. We've never had it fail, and Pure support always contacted us for repairs and upgrades. These were easy, usually with me approving work over email, clicking on "Remote Assist", and letting engineers do all the work remotely. The array was moved from two separate physical locations and continues to operate normally.
- Reliable
- Fast
- Easy to use
- Better interface for metrics reporting
- More details on the Pure CLI
- More details on storage, compression/dedup, and background jobs to better explain when volume size is actually reclaimed after deletes/trims
Our Flash array houses all virtual machines for all departments across our city. The performance improvement was immense over our previous IBM SAN. We recently renewed our Forever Flash support which means we will never need to buy a new flash array.
- The latency and IOPS on our Pure SAN are incredible. After moving over VMs the performance improvement was noticed immediately.
- Pure support is fantastic. They are constantly modifying the firmware to improve compression performance.
- The Pure array is very pricey.
- Deduplication and compression were oversold pre-purchase.
May 20, 2020
Pure Storage: Feel the Speed
Pure Storage FlashArray is used throughout the organization, its use is for storage of the entire data store, database, and for virtual machines. With Pure Storage FlashArray we were able to reduce the processing times of our ERP reports, which were executed after working hours. On the other hand, our BI can work with real-time information without affecting storage performance.
- Latency reduction
- Speed ​​to obtaining information.
- Ease of equipment administration
- SnapShot Manager
- It would be of great value to be able to receive via email a report with the observations and/or recommendations the Support Team has towards the Pure Storage FlashArray.
- New functionalities or new PlugIns can be received via email or an online review
May 20, 2020
Pure Storage is the best!
It is our main storage for high load hosts. We use it for 2 VMware clusters and 100+ VMs. We use it for the whole organization and it always exceeds our expectations.
- Reliable storage with a high level of performance.
- Service support is good.
- User interface is simple and handy in every day tasks.
- Space reclamation should be on the array side.
- Better deduplication ratio.
- Cloud integration and management
Pure Storage provided a FlashArray AFA for our environment. It is being used by our entire organization here at Ricoh and it solved the immediate storage issues that we had and the bottleneck we were seeing in performance. The snapshot capability also gave us great peace of mind by being able to retain a lot of version at the LUN level on the fly while taking up minimal logical space.
- Ease of Administration: Great web console with the ability to configure everything. Little to minimal console knowledge required.
- Deduplication and Compression: These features work extremely well at ensuring that our data usage remains low on the array even as the business grows.
- Support: Pure's support is quick to respond and able to connect directly to and manage the unit in the case of any issues we encounter.
- Performance: Pure's array is the best performing array according to Gartner's reviews of all-flash arrays (AFA).
- Better connectivity to cloud: While Cloudsnap supports AWS natively, it would be nice to see other vendors and platforms added.
- Better enhancements to reporting: While reporting is good, HPE has the edge when it comes to their Nimble Insights software.
October 04, 2019
Very happy!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 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 27, 2019
Flash our Data
We are currently using Pure Storage FlashArray in a productive environment used to deploy core and customer services. The FlashArray is our main storage where all the time-critical application and secured data are stored. Over this duty, the FlashArray solves the day by day operation of our business bringing fast access & reliability of data.
- FlashArray provides a guaranteed R/W time to data, using the great 3D array functionality.
- FlashArray has an easy and understandable interface to overview performance and usage.
- The compression of data is great for databases and virtual machines.
- There is not much flexibility for upgrade storage capacity, they only offer in standardized sizes.
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 20, 2019
Great Enterprise Storage Solution
It is used as the primary enterprise storage for all tiers of applications. Primarily for databases, VDI, laboratory systems, but also as community storage for ESXi clusters and standalone servers. It is replicated from coast to coast for DR purposes and recently we started to deploy smaller appliances of PureStorage into our Tier 2 data centers and laboratories to support local applications. It is easy to grow and upgrade. Our vendor was extremely quick to master the management and initial setup. Using this storage is giving us great business agility.
- Databases - Extremely low latency
- VDI - Great data reduction rates and response times.
- Community storage - Mixed workloads.
- Never had any production issues
- Excellent support, proactively notifying before we can see any manifestation of the problem.
- For the basic use, the storage is excellent. However, it needs improvement in the replication department. We have difficulties sharing replication circuits between different vendors.
September 18, 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.
September 16, 2019
Experience Pure with a pure sense of humor
To support customer data. With the customer we have, we are managing Pure to be used only for HA type of infrastructure with enhanced performance using it's Flash storage module.
- Performance factor at applications end which are using Pure SAN Infra are running smoothly
- It's very user-friendly to do administrative kind of work. Not too complex to manage the Pure environment when we have a basic understanding of storage engineering.
- Pure1 monitoring tool is a bigger plus point of Pure as it handles multiple things, advance reporting, even migration, prediction, scheduling, high-level planning etc.
- You don't need any third-party software to do and manage multipathing like MPIO for Netapp or PowerPath for EMC in Windows Environment when you have inbuilt Microsoft multipathing software at OS end.
- Should introduce for NAS infra along with SAN infra (ignore if already implemented and useful for NAS infra).
- Must integrate some more features for solid marketing and productivity and competition in today's market. Say, for example, can integrate some backup concepts along with storage structure and check the product cohesion with its hyper-converged cluster style.
September 13, 2019
Pure performance. Pure reliability. Pure.
Our Pure Storage arrays are used at multiple sites globally. They are the backend storage to our VMware and Citrix XenDesktop environments. The Pure systems replaced aging spinning disk systems that were out of support and maintenance. Pure Storage FlashArray systems provide ease of use, high performance, and reliability that our older spinning disk arrays could never match. In addition to those qualities, Pure's support model is wonderful - they contact us about issues before we even notice there's a problem (which has been very rare). Pure also performs all software/firmware upgrades remotely based on our change management schedules; we give them a time and they do all the work, notifying us at the beginning and end of the updates. The updates we've been provided have never caused us an issue, outage, or downtime. Advanced, simple, performant, robust...Pure.
- Performant - the Pure arrays are fast. Even with the workload of 800+ virtual machines, including Oracle and MS SQL, and applications like SAP, we've still not hit a performance boundary with the Pure systems we use.
- Reliability - none of our Pure systems have ever caused us an outage; even during upgrades and maintenance we've never had to shut down the workload they support for any reason. From a storage point of view, they've provided us 100% uptime since we've been using them.
- Ease of support - Pure's remote management and support are like nothing we've seen before. The upgrades and patches provided are installed remotely based on our schedule, by trained, knowledgeable staff. Beyond that, Pure alerts us to failing components before we have any issues and before we have to call them; replacements are scheduled and performed onsite by experienced technicians.
- Reporting - Pure's analytics generate reports that Pure reviews with us on a periodic basis. They explain to us how our systems are performing and if we should consider upgrading if we start pushing the performance of our current system. Upgrades to faster / larger models haven't been needed yet, but with the periodic reviews, we'll know in advance if we are approaching a threshold we need to be concerned with.
- Ease of use - Pure has taken out the difficulties of managing a SAN. We no longer have to think about which disks need to be in what part of the array, or how we should tier the storage, or worry about "hot spots". It's just "the array" that we can carve up how we need. The management interface is simple, and the vSphere plugins make configuration and day to day management straight forward.
- Having used arrays from IBM, EMC, and NetApp, the Pure system is the easiest, simplest system we've ever used. I can't find an area of improvement simply because no one else has had better ideas that surpass Pure's design.
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 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.
August 24, 2019
Pure Storage FlashArray is AWESOME!
We are using the FlashArray for handling our virtualization and SQL database workloads across our whole organization. We have about 400 virtual machines and 4 SQL database clusters. It allows us to not have to worry about performance or constant management. It has reduced our day to day management of storage down to virtually nothing.
- Performs quickly
- Easy to manage
- Provides useful reporting
- OS updates can be slow to resolve problems
- Not all storage protocols are provided
- Replication options could be greater
August 21, 2019
Simplicity!
We use it across all systems and applications.
- It's easy to manage.
- It's easy to implement.
- It has very little physical footprint.
- I can't think of any cons.
July 29, 2019
Facts
It is used for the whole organization.
- Easy to install and to manage.
- Data reduction mechanisms work perfectly.
- Lot of functionalities without additional cost.
- Excellent support structure and well educated experts 24-7.
- Remote Copy also via Fibre Channel (SAN), not only via Ethernet (LAN/WAN).
- Better reports/inside look in case of problem determination.
April 19, 2019
A flash travel to the future
Pure Storage is used by the whole organization. We have consolidated all the VSI (55 VM) and VDI (100 VM) into the same storage, improving performance and overall virtual desktop acceptance. Our VDI with VMware Horizon includes 100 VM for office and graphics desktop with nVidia GRID, the low latency and the high deduplication permit us to reduce the storage footprint and power consumption, and to increase the consolidation on fewer VMware Hosts.
- The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression. We have consolidated all of the SAN into the same box.
- I liked the non-disruptive downgrade from FA-420 (POC) to FA-405 in production and the non-disruptive upgrade from FA-405 to M20. This is a great plus for the business.
- Reports of performance and LUN utilization/deduplication could be improved. I’d love to view the average, minimum, and maximum performance in the reports but it is only graphics and you need to export the data into a CSV to find this information.
March 06, 2019
Pure Storage review
Used as our main storage in the datacenter for all of our VM's. We switched to flash from non-flash to provide growth ability of speed, size of unit, data reduction ability, and reliability.
- Fast, this thing is really fast.
- Size - what took most of a cabinet before is 4U in size. Meaning less cooling, less power, and less cost of housing it.
- Reliability - This thing is a tank.
- This storage is storage on child mode. It is simple and easy. Coming from NetApp where you may have needed a wiki to know all the commands you could at least get some info out of the unit (example how long it has been online) where now I need to call or open a ticket to get that info.
- I would like to see on the reporting the max let's use iOS as the example...if I'm sitting at X used on average out of Y max clocked for this unit to determine how much growth room I have before I should consider upgrading...that would be nice?
February 20, 2019
The Greatest Storage Buy Ever
We use Pure Storage as our Tier one storage connected to VMware environment via Fiber Channel. It hosts an array of critical applications from databases, to web servers and security. It solves the issue of disk and application performance.
- Pure storage is able to be up 99.99 percent of the time
- Upgrades and support are proactive and do not require downtime
- Disk latency, snapshotting with VMware is fantastic
- Make it part of a Hyper-Converged computer environment
- Add the option of tiering data to less expensive disks