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Pure Storage FlashArray

Pure Storage FlashArray

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Pure Storage FlashArray has been widely used across various industries and organizations to address a multitude of storage needs. Users …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

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  • Flash Array Performance (154)
    10.0
    100%
  • Simplicity (154)
    10.0
    100%
  • Non-Intrusive Upgrades (148)
    9.9
    99%
  • Data Compression (153)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Product Demos

Pure Storage Demo in 8 Minutes

YouTube

Demo of Pure Storage UCS Director Adapter for Creating LUNs on Pure Storage FlashArray

YouTube
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Features

Enterprise Flash Array Storage

All-flash array storage is a solid state, high performance storage option.

9.3
Avg 9.1
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Product Details

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:

  • 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 Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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 Simplicity highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Pure Storage FlashArray are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(355)

Community Insights

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!

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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 49)
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Bagit Airlangga | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Pure Storage FlashArray for virtualization and for main datastore, and I think it is perfect for our environment that needs to process multiple real time transactions because it has super fast all-flash SSD NVMe disk. This is a huge improvement for us who previously only used hybrid disk. One of the important features that we use every day is storage snapshot which is equipped with ant-ransomware.
  • Anti-ransomware
  • Right-sized Guarantee
  • Very fast SSD NVMe
  • Snapshot Restore procedure needs to be improved
  • Multifactor authentication
  • Certification for user
In our opinion, the anti-ransomware feature is very good. It is also equipped with backup and restore features so that we no longer need to use third-party backup software to back up virtual machines every day. We have experienced data loss, and we were quickly able to recover the lost data. However, the drawback is that the restore process is too difficult so an expert must do it.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We purchased Pure Storage FlashArray's to replace aging Dell Equallogic SANs that were going end of support. We had had the Dell SANs for over 10 years and our replacement cycle for our Storage is a long term investment. We were looking to go all flash to get ahead of the technlogy and in the end did not even consider a hybrid solution due to the performance increases we obtained when doing a proof of concept with Pure. We deploy Pure FlashArrays and FlashBlades in all of our datacenters located across the city.
  • Speed - our VM's boot up in less then 10 seconds compared to about 90 seconds on the previous spinning disk arrays
  • Support - we have had great response / automated ticket creation for issues the may pop up
  • Up time - we have done numerous software upgrades and even hardware updates with ZERO down time in our virtual environments. We never could of done this with our previous Dell SANs
  • None that I can think of
If you are looking for speed, reliability and 100% uptime, Pure is the way to go!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pure as our primary storage array. This has been an outstanding investment and the performance has been a huge improvement. The box has done everything we asked it to do! We are nearly out of storage capacity on our EMC and when we saw Pure as an option we jumped at the opportunity.
  • Deduplication.
  • Processing speed.
  • Price is high.
While expensive, Pure Storage is by far the best experience we have had with a storage array. It is strong in all categories and delivers outstanding performance. It is a great product to work with. My team is also very happy with it and they have high expectations of systems, just like I do.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have an ever expanding database for our main ERP, and PURE Storage helps cut processing and transaction times down to 1/8 of what they were on spinning drive arrays.
  • Fast - very fast.
  • We found our main IT vendor is no longer a partner with Pure Storage :(
Our D3 system requires a lot of disk power, and Pure Storage FlashArray has a proven track record with excellent uptime.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pure Storage is used in all of our data centers across the Pacific Northwest, including in our Candian operations as well. Since moving from traditional RAID, disk-based arrays (EMC, HP/LeftHand) we have left behind the 'old ways' of storage implementations. Implementation, provisioning, and management of storage with Array has been greatly simplified. We have undergone multiple Array upgrades from one model to the next, non-disruptively, 100% as advertised. We have even seen the new controllers upon renewal of support at the end of year 3, as well. Support costs remained relatively stable and predictable based on capacity and since moving to Pure we have not had to migrate all our data to a new SAN because it was cheaper to buy a new array than to continue support on the existing. All of these benefits have revolutionized our data center management strategy, all the while giving us amazing performance for our virtual workloads.
  • Performance: heads and tails above and beyond what a traditional array ever brought to the table.
  • Manageability: 8 hour, overnight upgrades are a thing of the past. Open a case with Pure's Support Team, give them an operating window for the upgrade and then they do the upgrades remotely, generally within an hour.
  • Deduplication: because of the 4:1 deduplication ratios that we are seeing in our environments, we reduced from a full rack of EMC VNX hardware, to 5RU of Rackspace in one of our data centers, while the rest of our arrays are sitting in a single 3RU chassis, providing all the storage we need for 100s of Windows Server and Desktop VMs.
  • I really cannot think of anything that Pure needs to do differently. They are constantly innovating their Pure1 SaaS interface with more benefits and providing on-array software updates that provide value to our IT Team.
FlashArray is well suited to general virtual workloads, especially where there are low latency and high I/O requirements. We run all kinds of virtualized SQL workloads without issue and we run our VMware Horizon VDI deployment right alongside the virtual server infrastructure without any performance problems. If you have a lot of test/dev environments, it is a great solution as well because of the deduplication technologies built into Array.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Pure Storage is used to provide storage as a service (STaaS) to our cloud and managed services customers. Pure is also leveraged in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for our virtualized environments to provide customers with dedicated compute and storage. In today's world where rapid response is required, ease of management, availability, low latency, and high throughput are key metrics for a business. Pure Storage enables us to meet these tight SLAs.
  • Ease of operational management and provisions
  • Performance: low latency and high throughput
  • Ease of scale: online and non-disruptive
  • Ease of upgrades: online and non-disruptive
  • Better integration for CIFS/NFS services out of the box built into the array.
  • Better integration with VMWare VCD
Pure is suited for these requirements:
  • High performance (low latency and high throughput)
  • Small data center footprint
  • Low power (as opposed to an equivalent array sized with disk platers.)
  • Ease of operational management
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have 3 Pure arrays that are used across the whole organization. We run a VDI environment on it and lots of SQL that benefits from the all flash array. We have an array for development, production, and DR. Using the arrays in these 3 environments ensures that we do not have to sacrifice performance.
  • Pure's dedupe algorithm allows us to save storage space considering we have several stacks running the same software.
  • The evergreen program allows us to upgrade the controllers on our arrays every 3 years so we are always current.
  • Support is amazing, they will work at fixing a problem even if it isn't on their end.
  • There is nothing that I can think of that they could do better.
  • I would like better notifications of new features.
VDI is a great use case for FlashArray. Users benefit from solid state drives that can help drive productivity. Placing fileservers on the array can cause the dedupe ration to drop and there is less benefit to having them on an all flasharray, we moved them off to a hybrid array.
Chris Saenz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Pure Storage FlashArray works extremely well as an on-premise high-performing storage array. It has worked very effectively for us in our virtualization environment, throwing workloads like Oracle, PeopleSoft, OpenShift, VDI, etc. at it. Their APIs and software support makes integrations with hypervisors and hardware very straight forward. If you need low performing disk arrays with simply a lot of storage capacity, this may not be appropriate for your environment - you can definitely get a ton of cheap capacity elsewhere.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It has consistently provided sub one second response times for all of our applications. Pure Storage is being used as the primary storage for our virtualization platforms supporting the entire company.
  • Speed and response time.
  • Ease of management and Powershell support.
  • Replication, Pure Snap independence and offloading are very useful.
  • Add better support for file protocols to directly access the array.
At the price point, it is hard to find somewhere it is not suited to be used.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The FlashArray is used by the front office. Additionally, we use asynchronous replication to our disaster recovery location.
  • Instant snapshots and cloning.
  • Instant recovery from snapshots.
  • Asynchronous replication.
  • Minor - Snapshot creation from VMware takes an unusually long time if the memory snapshot is enabled.
  • Minor - FlashArray software does not currently support a much needed "keep last X snapshots (replicas)" option in protection groups.
Well suited for any applications requiring a high performance/high-reliability storage solution that is100% based on flash.
Dave Hornby | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Suited for any application \ deployment that requires high speed storage
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our Pure M10 array supports a corporate vSphere environment, and is the primary storage for approximately 50 virtual machines. The workloads vary from file shares to SQL databases.
  • Management is dead simple. Spinning up a new datastore is simple and straightforward.
  • Data compression and deduplication are amazing. We're seeing 5-7:1 compression ratios without a performance hit.
  • The Evergreen model Pure uses make updates/upgrades easy to do, and requires no downtime.
  • Since data reduction is used to achieve more storage than is represented by the raw numbers, I'd like to see this figure more prominently in the user interface. Sometimes it's hard to know if you're making a good choice when you're used to dealing with legacy storage numbers.
Frankly, I haven't found a workload that creates challenges for this hardware. I no longer worry about IOPS in my planning, because with fiber backing it's just not a bottleneck anymore. We've seen some great performance improvements in Exchange (on-prem) and SQL workloads as well. Backups are no longer a disruptive feature of our environment because the snapshots are managed so well.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pure Storage has replaced our entire NetApp Storage Infrastructure. We have used Pure Storage in all of our use case scenarios. VMware, SQL, Oracle, and even file servers. This storage expands across our whole organization and it satisfies all of our previous issues we used to have such as IO issues and also encryption. Pure Storage is encrypted by default at rest and this was a huge benefit for all the audits we go through.
  • Ease of installation – The Pure system was by far 10x easier to setup/configure and begin to use than our NetApp devices were
  • Simplicity – The GUI of PureStorage is by far the simplest storage solution I have had to manage in my 10 years of IT. This makes is really simple to create and provision storage to any host.
  • Better Data Reduction – Compared to our NetApp it uses 4k block sizes, while our Pure implements a variable block size for data reductions, yielding better results. With the combination of deduplication and compression we are currently getting a 4.3 to 1 ratio with our data! This is compared to our NetApp which we were only able to get about 1.5 data reduction ratio since It wasn’t recommended to do both deduplication and compression with the NetApp due to overhead on the controllers. We have provisioned 18 TB of data on our Pure storage and are only using 3.20 TB with the rates were getting with Pure. This is amazing and we are only at 50% disk utilization.
  • Upgrades – When updating the software with NetApp it is a pain staking process since you have several components to update (Controllers, Hard Drives, RLM, Shelves, etc.). During the upgrades you also have to bring your CPU and disk utilization down to 50% before you can perform the upgrades. This forces us to shut down servers to decrease the utilization. The Pure makes it so simple since the technical support teams schedule the upgrades with us and then do them for us! This requires no shutting down of servers and also we will never lose any performance on the controllers during an upgrade.
  • Performance – This is the key to the Pure storage since they offer 100,000 IOPS as opposed to our NetApp which was barely getting a maximum of 7,000 IOPS. Also NetApp was unable to retain performance during an upgrade or failure of a drive compared to Pure which retains performance period!
  • Customer Support – During the times that I have had to call support they have responded and resolved things very quickly compared to NetApp.
  • Evergreen Model – This was a huge sales point and a great advantage to our team since we normally always refresh our systems every 3 to 4 years. The Evergreen model now makes this process painless to our department.
  • Security – Pure offers us by default an encrypted “at rest” volume compared to NetApp which has no such feature. This was huge for us to meet certain security requirements for compliance.
  • Rack Space – This Pure storage solution is a no brainer when it comes to rack space. We will be saving almost a full rack of space once we have fully migrated over to our new M-series which will save us money!
  • Metrics – Pure has built in to the console analysis metrics that you can obtain quickly to monitor and troubleshoot compared to NetApp which you have to build a separate server to configure and license! It’s a no brainer!
  • I honestly can't think of anything. I love Pure Storage!
Pure Storage shines in the area of virtualization. An all-flash array helps database servers perform at a very high rate and if you deploy Pure Storage in a VMware environment, you can expect to see the deduplication and compression ratios off the charts! Many of us run hundreds of VMs with the same OS and due to this, the ratio of space that you save becomes worth it.

An example where you probably would not want to implement Pure Storage FlashArray is in an unstructured data environment. For this, you would use another product they have called Flash Blade.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We are using and testing on the SAN capabilities of the array. So far, it's a very good system overall. We haven't extensively tested the NAS side of things. That doesn't mean it doesn't perform well - only that I have no overview on it
James Kelly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chapman University owns two M20 FlashArrays. One provides primary high-speed storage for our production Oracle ERP database and middleware environments, for our highest-performance-tier VMWare clusters, and for our MS SQLServer-based university data warehouse. The second M20 provides ultra-high-speed shared scratch storage for our primary High-Performance Computing (HPC) computational-research supercomputing cluster. Our entire campus community, faculty, staff, students, researchers, use the resources hosted on these arrays every day. The applications, databases, and research workloads running on these arrays are literally how the university does its work.
  • Our FlashArrays have been 100% reliable. In the four-years-plus we have been relying on them, we have not experienced a single moment of unplanned downtime due to these arrays. Their hardware design is solid-state and fault-tolerant, redundant everywhere. This allows zero-downtime upgrades for all of their OS, management, and driver software. We've been through numerous (10+) software upgrades on two arrays and have never experienced any interruption in service or data loss.
  • Pure Storage's FlashArray support, phone-home, monitoring, and analytics services through their centralized Pure1 web portal have been head-and-shoulders above every other storage vendor we've worked with. Their tools allow their staff to be expert, professional, confident, and, best of all, proactive. Their platform allows them to know far more about the array than we do, and in real time.
  • Our FlashArrays have been blazingly fast. When we copied our production Oracle databases over to the first array for the first time, the databases immediately benchmarked out 2.5 to 3 times faster, with no other changes. Every one of the workloads we migrated to our FlashArrays experienced similar speed increases.
  • Compared to legacy hybrid or spinning-disk storage-array administration, managing our FlashArrays is extremely simple. No more external spreadsheets tracking raid categories, LUN sizes, or storage pools built on different underlying types and arrangements of disks. Allocate a volume, give it a name, hook it up to a host or a cluster. Rescan the storage, and start using it.
  • Pure's implementation of data reduction/data deduplification has been amazing for us. Absolutely a game-changer. It has allowed our arrays to function like arrays five or even ten times their actual size. It works especially well (really, really, really well) with large database and database-development environments, where dev/test/qa databases are close copies of production databases. You basically get all of the copies for free, storage-wise. Something very similar happens with array storage for VMWare VM's, also. Copies of VM's are basically free.
  • In our environment, Pure could provide additional network interconnect technologies. HPC is not that common a market niche, though. Pure could at least test and validate limited compatibility with third-party hardware, even if they then needed to limit their support or warranty if customers chose to implement it.
  • Pure provides a lot of API support for building your own integration solutions for things like VMWare administration, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud environments. They do seem to be investing in these technologies, but full-featured, pre-packaged, tested and supported solutions would be a lot better. Most enterprises don't want to build their own automation and integration, they want things to just work, out of the box.
All-flash storage is expensive, and full-featured all-flash, like the FlashArray, is even more expensive. You need to have a need for it. If you use virtual desktops in your environment, or if you have performance-sensitive databases or database-integrated applications, or if you are doing any sort of significant machine-learning, deep-learning, or data analytics, these are all workloads that will benefit from FlashArray storage. Anyone of those, much less all of them, would easily rationalize spending the extra money to get the benefits of a FlashArray.
Ben Moore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The FlashArray is being utilized by our entire organization. We currently have 2 arrays. The first was specifically bought to correct storage performance issues that we were encountering in our VDI environment with a prior storage vendor. We were so impressed with that array that the following year we secured a second array to migrate our entire server workload to.
  • Deduplication and compression
  • PERFORMANCE!
  • Support
  • I honestly can't think of anything.
PureStorage is well suited for any situation where performance is the top requirement. Since implementation, we have not been able to throw anything at it that has caused any latency above 1ms. It would not be well suited as a backup endpoint, or NAS type storage simply due to the cost and available performance.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pure Storage FlashArray is used as a tier 1 storage for production applications. It is being used by multiple departments in our organization. The main requirement was to provide maximum performance for multiple databases in our environment.
  • Ease of manageability.
  • Great support.
  • Online hardware and software updates.
  • A costly solution, but worth every penny.
I think Pure Storage is a good fit for any environment. We have DELL/EMC flash in our environment, but we see better latency and better data compression from Pure Storage.
Omar Khalid | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I believe if the budget allows that a Pure Array or multiple arrays can be used in any configuration or any density regardless of how much data needs to be stored or how much performance is required.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our two Flash Array SANs are used by the whole organization to house the Databases and Virtual Environments. It solves problems we were having with batch job performance. Job performance went from hours to minutes. Time saved allowed us to create more jobs to increased productivity. This showed up on ROI and the bottom line.
  • Sub-millisecond response times
  • Increased IOPS
  • Data snapshots natively
  • It hard to think of new ways to do something Pure Storage does so well already.
Just everything is faster, better and taking less space with Pure. The support is superb. The performance is great. Our physical storage footprint is smaller. Our administrators are happier. Support for ESXi is better. I can't say enough about how happy we are to have made the switch to Pure Storage.
September 27, 2019

Why we switched to Pure

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We have only one scenario where Pure is not the answer; backups and archives. For all other scenarios, we have been very happy with the FlashArrays. We are investigating FlashBlades for a couple of specialized deployments, where they may be better suited but we will stay with Pure for all solutions not involving backups.
Don Howard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Any block storage load, except perhaps mainframe, should feel right at home on a FlashArray. It doesn't depend on proprietary agents or multi-path software to get performance. We use it on physical systems and virtual systems alike. Our system administrators are amazed with how quickly we can respond to their needs with Pure Storage. Plus we get storage-level duplication and compression to lower our overall footprint.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our Pure Storage FlashArray is used for our general virtualization environment. We have application and database servers running on it. The business problem we're trying to address is latency.
  • Software upgrades are done flawlessly by remote technicians. The techs are very prompt and you do not have to have a major lead time to get this accomplished.
  • Support is stellar. Timely updates and resolutions.
  • This storage array does not have a bunch of custom tuning. It is tuned for the best performance possible which gives it more predictable results.
  • The GUI could be more intuitive. It takes a little getting used to if you're coming from other vendors.
  • More performance statistics could be made customer-facing. Something simple like CPU utilization is not even available.
  • Asynchronous replication could use improvement. Instead of sending the replication on a time schedule, just asynchronously replicate when possible.
Pure Storage FlashArray is all around a good fit for any workload given that it is all-flash storage. Be a bit cautious about putting too many high performing applications on it as you'll run out of CPU resources well before you overrun the SSD/NVMe modules. Although this storage has the ability to attach more shelves of modules to it, you definitely want to do analysis on whether the CPU can handle it or not.
Michele Gottardi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The final configuration involves the installation and configuration of a high-reliability infrastructure to provide a redundant system that can be resistant to possible blockage of one of the two site production sites. Network connectivity is provided via four 10Gb network cards and two 1Gb network cards for the management interface.

The SAN Pure Storage M20 enables the active/active HA functionality. The storage is composed of a Pure Storage m20 5TB containing 20 256GB SSD disks bundled with 2 for each disk slot. The total usable net of RAID3D used by the system is 2.7TB which, thanks to the deduplication tool, will provide between 6 and 10 TB usable space.

  • It offers shared, accelerated storage with a data-centric architecture.
  • It is always active. Never interrupted, even with software or patch updates.
  • Prices that for the Italian market are a bit too high.
Suited for all the scenarios in which business continuity is a priority for the project. Optimize the infrastructure with a density that supports Direct Flash. Place all company workloads on flash. Pure's data reduction, QoS and availability make secure and cost-effective consolidation possible. Save not only racks but also data center space rows.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
FlashArray works extremely well on virtual environments. Stay away from using it for your multimedia files since you wouldn't be fully utilizing the dedupe and compression functionalities.
September 18, 2019

Pure Storage Review

David Gates | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pure Storage is being used across our whole organization providing storage for 4 locations up/down the eastern seaboard. Through deduplication, it helps in saving considerable storage space, and through IOPS, it increases productivity of virtualized servers & applications. Using Flash has also reduced heat associated with moving parts replacing an HP SAN on lefthand network technology.
  • Pure reduces storage space via deduplication, particularly when the same OS is used across the board.
  • Flash storage's speed has increased productivity by increasing the speed of server performance.
  • Over the coarse of one year, only one maintenance issue needed addressed. It requires little to no maintenance to operate.
  • It is monitored 24/7 by the vendor remotely. Any issues that do come up, will be known by the vendor at essentially the same time the company will.
  • Training courses for managing and creation of storage, CLI usage, etc.
Pure Storage seems well suited for virtual environments running VMware vSphere products where vmotion, vmfs volumes, and HP server hosts where the innate performance of flash technology promotes a smooth, fast operation. Snapshots are less impactful when the data reduction ratios of anywhere from 3.3 to 6.6 to 1 figure in.
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