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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

(76-100 of 207)
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Don Howard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
September 24, 2019

Pure Magic

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Performance - Workloads moved to the Pure Storage from other mfg arrays saw significant performance improvements.
  • Value - For the cost versus performance/capacity gain, Pure Storage FlashArray was an investment that provided great returns.
  • Support - A high level of customer support across the board (sales, pre-sales, post-sales, technical). Our reps are always in contact with us to see if we need anything.
  • Have not uncovered any yet.
Michele Gottardi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Data reduction is the best we have ever seen. It is always improved at each release.
  • Managing PureStorage FlashArray is very simple and secured, it unloaded the storage from over 80% of charge.
  • Support is the most efficient and reliable we have. They are amazingly proactive and reactive in case of failure.
  • Design and features are great.
  • Growth steps. Increasing arrays is quite expensive because steps between tiers are high.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Extremely simple to manage.
  • The tech support when you call is amazing at fixing your issue in a timely manner.
  • I think that the initial system requirements checks could be an automated process so that you don't have to check the 50 best practices.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Dudupe and compression is very power and space efficient
  • All flash based array solved all performance problems
  • Easy to expand and upgrade solved the fork-lift upgrade problems of past arrays
  • It was a little bit more expensive up front, but worth it in the long term
September 18, 2019

Pure Storage Review

David Gates | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Krishna Prasad Reddy Kunkala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Easy to maintain.
  • Easy to upgrade.
  • Easy to link into our hyper converged cloud disaster recovery solution.
  • We initially had some issues tuning our arrays and getting them to deliver the compression ratios we were expecting. We have been able to correct most of this but think that they could improve the initial sizing and implementation specs prior to rather than during install.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Why to choose Pure Storage

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Due to all flash disks, it supports very high IOPS. It also has very good compression and deduplication ratio.
  • It helped run a very critical application with > 0.5 ms latency.
  • It has a very friendly user interface and support portal.
  • We couldn't create local users on this array.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Hugely reliable and with amazing support staff. This is probably the most critical factor for us and makes our PURE arrays my favourite bits of kit in our environment. Many occasions where PURE storage support staff have identified and resolved issues with our virtual platform better than the support staff of the virtual platform (and so far never something that was caused by the PURE storage arrays). Really quick and easy to raise cases through the management web interface and always good quick responses.
  • Very high speed (average read and write latencies of between 0.2 and 0.4ms). Never had storage speed being a bottleneck.
  • Great dedupe and compression. We can massively over-allocate storage, confident that the PURE storage arrays will crunch it down as much as possible. On average between 4 and 10 times reduction (although of course, it does depend on the data).
  • Great extra features at no extra cost, such as Veeam plugins and the amazing Active Cluster synchronous replication.
  • The EverGreen option (only if you get 3 years support in one go) has already replaced our FA-420 controllers with the newer FA-m20 controllers at no extra cost. Really good to know that controller upgrades are included in the support costs so we won't fall behind and have to start from scratch again with newer hardware.
  • I suppose the only real downside we have seen has been that these are definitely a premium cost item. However, so far they have been worth every penny in reliability, performance and features so until someone finds me something as good for less money then I will keep these, thank you very much.
  • Okay, just scraping the barrel for negatives, but these are an expensive way to store media content as it doesn't compress or dedupe well.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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 11, 2019

Fast, easy, and reliable

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ability to server high IP, latency-sensitive applications.
  • Data reduction ration has beat our expectations.
  • Very intuitive set-up and management.
  • No notable cons at this time.
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