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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

View all 6 features
  • Flash Array Performance (154)
    10.0
    100%
  • Simplicity (154)
    10.0
    100%
  • Non-Intrusive Upgrades (148)
    10.0
    100%
  • 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 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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(356)

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

(176-200 of 207)
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Aaron Bryant | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Russ Givens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Patrick Sullivan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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!
Tulio Conrado Campos da Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Jack Garvey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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 07, 2019

I Love My Pure!!!!!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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!

Bryan McLeod | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Cory Salvesen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Robert Chen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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