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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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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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March 23, 2021
Why Pure Storage FlashArray Should Be Your #1 Choice!
- The integration with VMware's vSphere has made creating and expanding datastores/volumes easy for all of our admins. They can do everything from one browser tab.
- The ability to run future planning scenarios has been helpful in knowing what we need to purchase in future budget cycles.
- The preemptive parts replacement that Pure Storage provides has led to us never having an outage on our arrays.
- We have not seen much, as they seem to be keeping up with requested features and functions over the 5 years we have been consumers.
March 23, 2021
Pure Storage Flash Array
- Easy to configure
- Very fast
- Easy to intergrate
- Great Technical support
- Clearer pricing
March 23, 2021
Pure-ly fast storage!
- The Pure Array does data reduction particularly well. We've seen a 7x reduction on some of our volumes.
- It is easy to get used to the system after coming from other storage arrays.
- It has some welcome additions such as a smartphone app that makes it easier to view your cases, etc.
- It would have been good to see vvol support for ESX 6.0.
March 23, 2021
PURELY Positive
- It is very easy to use the management interface.
- So far the product has been incredibly fast.
- It has a very robust feature set and they are constantly improving upon its capabilities.
- We are waiting for support of VVOLs along with the active clustering at the same time.
- I really don't have any more negatives as the product thus far has been wonderful.
March 12, 2021
Fast Storage with Active-Active Cluster
- Easy to integrate
- Zero maintenance
- Very fast
- Active-Active Cluster with preferred path
- No cons at the moment
December 02, 2020
Pure reliability, pure simplicity, Pure Storage
- 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.
October 26, 2020
Pure storage, great value, fast storage, no headaches.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Incredibly low latency.
- Great throughput, fast transfers.
- Excellent transparent data deduplication.
- Excellent support from pre-sales to setup to post sales followups.
- If I had to pick, orange is an unflattering color on me.
- Speed
- Performance
- Encryption
- Ever green controller replacement
- Cost
August 17, 2020
Fast and easy to manage
- Storage performance is outstanding.
- Service has been excellent.
- Ease of use is wonderful.
- Array didn't integrate well with our old v-center and we were not notified about the incompatibility.
- Documentation can be difficult to access.
August 12, 2020
Pure Storage is Pure Simplicity and Pure Bliss
- Very simple administration of the array.
- No training necessary.
- Fault tolerance is top notch.
- Pure Storage support monitors array(s) and is very responsive.
- Honestly can't think of anything that I wish the arrays had that they don't.
- Haven't had one problem to complain about.
- Pretty expensive, but you get what you pay for...
June 25, 2020
The Superior Solution
- Rock solid SAN
- Storage reduction
- Ease of use/management
- Ease of support and upgrading
- Replication
- Lower cost solutions for ROBO
- A NAS solution
- 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!
May 27, 2020
A Pure pleasure to use!
- Support over the last 18 months we have been 2-3 upgrades - no down time, we just schedule it and the tech gets it done.
- Notification of potential issues - they told us that one of our servers was throwing storage errors, while we were aware of the issue, it is nice knowing that there is another party following up.
- Performance - the array has done exactly what they claimed from density of deduplication to work load support.
- The only con I can think of going in is the expense - the array seems expensive for what you get, but when the value is considered, it really is not a concern. I have to say of all the tech purchased, we have not found a good solid Con.....
May 26, 2020
Pure Storage: A Simplified Effective Flash Array
- Deduplication: Not counting thin provisioning and compression, we are realizing 4 to 1 on our deduplication. It works and it works well. I realize this is totally dependent on the workload. High-level summary, our workloads consists of Windows server, Application Servers, and SQL. And yes, it works really well with VDI.
- Simplified Management/maintenance: Simple, simple, simple.
- Support: support has been exceptional both on the phone and from our local SEs. Not that we've had many issues, but our local SEs are ready and willing to answer any questions we have.
- After having used another storage vendor for years and now using Pure Storage, I'm struggling with improvements. There are some new tools that have been introduced to assist with troubleshooting and forecasting that can be somewhat challenging, but no complaints from an operational view.
May 25, 2020
Very happy end user!
- Very easy to assign storage to any server.
- Really fast disk IO.
- Uptime is remarkable!
- Explaining to management that something so small with so little lights does so much is a challenge. So we always keep an old MFM drive around just to show them that size has changed. So I'd love some clever way or change to make it look flashier! Seriously, for what we use it for, it does the job.
May 23, 2020
VDI Game Changer
- Fast to deploy new machines
- Very fast Setup
- Very good support
- Would like real-time replication
- Unable to expand older units Pure M10
- 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
Pure Storage is purely awesome!
- Increasing LUN sizes as the business needs grow is very easy. The easiest I have ever managed when I compare with other major vendors.
- As stated earlier, the performance with Pure is the fastest available.
- I never worry about growth because I know I just need to add more shelves and not redesign my architecture.
- NFS support would be nice but not really needed. Some people feel NFS is a requirement but I don't agree.
- Snap shots of SQL will be the biggest area of improvement that I can give to my business users. Giving them an almost real time copy of a production database that they can use without impacting production performance would be a huge win.
- Support for Azure storage would also be helpful since it is our primary cloud provider.
May 22, 2020
Pure Storage FlashArray makes me happy
- Dedupe and compression. It always amazes me how much logical data we have compared to how much we are actually using on the array.
- Speed. We measure response time in micro seconds, not milliseconds.
- Support. They know something is wrong or misbehaving before I do.
- As they grow, they become more like the large corporations that are frustrating to work with (EMC, NetApp, etc). I hope they don't lose the core qualities that made them so attractive to begin with.
May 22, 2020
Happy with Pure Storage FlashArray
- 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 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.
May 22, 2020
PureStorage - Why look at anything else?
- Deduplication and compression
- PERFORMANCE!
- Support
- I honestly can't think of anything.
May 22, 2020
Pure, the only choice for flash!
- Being able to capture snapshots of the data and reissue that data as new volumes makes data recovery and refreshes very simple.
- We're currently on our 10th Pure Storage FlashArray and getting them physically set up is always a very simple process with their onsite technicians that handle any issues that come up.
- The biggest strength is the ability to be so flexible when it comes to shuffling or moving storage around as needed and as our business requires.
- We're currently going through a situation where one of our arrays is spitting out false flags alerts. There are no disruptions, but it is always scary to get woken up with a severity 1 alert just to find out it is a false alert.
- 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
Is Pure Storage right for you?
- Management: The interface makes it easy to define hosts, host groups and LUNs. Very quick, very intuitive and simple. AD authentication is also a huge bonus for us. Allows for customers to view but not manage their own array.
- Performance Metrics: Pure Storage has good metrics across the array as well as at the individual LUN. We have begun separating LUNs based on customers and it has been huge when trying to trouble shoot performance for a single customer whose compute is on a multi-tenant cloud.
- Speed: I don't have specific metrics, but all customers that are on the array have never complained about speed. We did have one customer that we were throttling based on the original contract. We opened that up to get them over a couple of initial deployment tasks and they were pleased with the speed.
- VLAN support: The VLAN support in the newer version of Purity was also huge for us. It allowed us to keep SAN networks separate in a multi-tenant environment.
- Support is great: We had a support engineer dig through Microsoft settings for multipathing on iSCSI iniators. He did this on two different occasions!
- See more under the hood: I came from an array environment where there was a little more visibility into what was going on the in the background of the array. It would be nice to have the option to see what type of RAID is being used, and more details on the compression and deduplication that is going on.
- The ability to throttle a specific LUN on the Pure Storage would be nice. Not sure of the implications though.