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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 Enterprises (1,001+ 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

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pure Storage FlashArray across the whole organization. It is our primary enterprise storage for general purposes from database to virtualization data. So far we have had an excellent return of investment with high performance and low latency. Pre-sales and after-sales support have been very positive.
  • Simple management
  • High performance
  • Excellent support
  • Quick installation and setup
  • Trend line in local management
  • Performance analysis for more concurrent disks
  • More accurate data reduction information by volume.
Very suitable for general purpose data. Unsuitable for compressed and encrypted data as these functions will be repeated without gain. We expected greater gains in the Hyper-V virtualized environment, which turned out to be not as great, but still significant. Very useful in environments that require high availability because of its architecture supporting the full IO load by a controller as the environment is updated.
Enterprise Flash Array Storage (6)
96.66666666666666%
9.7
Flash Array Performance
100%
10.0
Flash Array Integration
100%
10.0
Data Compression
90%
9.0
Non-Intrusive Upgrades
100%
10.0
Simplicity
100%
10.0
Power Savings
90%
9.0
  • About 30% reduction in database backup times.
  • Sustained latency below 1 ms with 1.5 GB / s load
  • Good performance with data from diverse sources
As a government organization, we cannot just choose a specific product for purchase, so Pure FlashArray was one of the participants that was able to meet the needs of the purchasing process. In proof of concept it proved simpler and more versatile than the HPE solution in the circumstances of our environment.
Yes
Update occurred as expected, with no impact or downtime.
  • Periodic update without further functionality to be used by the corporation. Preventive update only.
  • Use of NVMeOF functionality.
No
No
15
Third-level technical support team.
15
Technical team with basic knowledge of storages is important. Highlighting snapshot features, replication, volume creation are desirable.
  • Primary storage
  • Data Bases
  • Server Files
  • Virtual machines
  • Integration with NVMeOF
Reliable equipment, excellent support, stable performance and excellence in addition to simplicity in use are preponderant factors for continuity in the use of PURE equipment. Cost is a possible negative element.
Yes
It replaced much of the primary storage previously used in a hybrid IBM storage.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
Performance was the main item for acquiring a primary storage, for use in enterprise applications. Usability issues and the reputation of the supplier and product are the basis for any company acquisitions.
Satisfaction with the product showed that the acquisition was acertive, so we would only review to update performance indices and possible new functionalities.
  • in-person training
The material presented could be better elaborated, but the content and instructor were excellent. Doubts and clarifications always clear, with no doubts or pending information.
Yes. Because the product was purchased for critical corporate use.
It is a very helpful support with fast service and always satisfactory results.
No
During a firmware upgrade procedure, support has identified a lack of redundancy on one of our hosts by communicating and providing time to resolve the issue without interruption of service. This was a proactive attitude. We had trouble with UEFI boot. Support reported as soon as the option was made available for the firmware to be updated.
  • Configuration of Volumes
  • Snapshots operations
  • None identified
Very simple equipment to install, configure and start its use. In general its functionalities are quite intuitive for a technician already familiar with storages.
Yes, but I don't use it
In two years of use, the equipment has proven reliable, without interruptions or breaks. There was no need to replace any parts and the updates were always made with monitoring and without impact on the productive environment.
The corporation has a very diverse data load and when we migrate from a hybrid storage to pure all-flash, significant gains have already been observed. Latency always remains below 1 ms regardless of the load and volumetry used.
Application performance also depends heavily on whether or not the code is more permormatic and network access infrastructure.
The product has been meeting expectations.
  • Windows Servers
  • Linux Servers
  • Data Bases Servers
Native integration via SAN with no identified problem.
  • NVMeOF
We intend to make use of NVMeOF features in the future, but for this we will need to both perform updates to the operating system and to make switches servers and infrastructure available with such capacity.
None
The use we perform does not require deep integration, so there are no restrictions identified.
None.
Equipe de pré-venda e técnica com profundo conhecimento e prestatividade. Disponibilidade para realização de POCs.
No intervention that was necessary presented any difficulties with the pure technical team.
Storage capacity, snapshot resources, and NVMe technologies disks.
It seems to me that each case should be evaluated particularly with the supplier facing the customer's needs. There's no rule of rule.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pure Storage is used by the entire organization to host Microsoft SQL Server 2019 database as well as hosting multiple VM's. Pure Storage is extremely efficient for fast database OTLP & OLAP processing. Data duplication allows us to host many copies of the database and duplicate VM's for production, testing and development. Pure Storage has completely changed and improved our entire development. Things that used to take hours and days have turned into seconds and minutes.
  • Data compression and data duplication.
  • FAST FAST FAST and reliable It just works!
  • Customer support is #1. We have never had a vendor better than Pure Storage.
  • EASY EASY EASY It just works! Stupid simple and easy to configure and manage.
  • Love to see the price come down. We want more units for data replication.
  • More details on the mobile app.
  • More support for Hyper-V.
When you need speed, it's FAST, especially for MS SQL databases. If you are having bottlenecks, you can spend your time finding it in the code because it's not Pure Storage. Love the data reduction and duplication. We can store so much more on this unit than the base physical size. Love the data snapshots. When you need to complete copy your entire environment for testing etc. Nothing is easier, a few clicks and you are done. Extremely helpful for testing and training.
Enterprise Flash Array Storage (6)
96.66666666666666%
9.7
Flash Array Performance
100%
10.0
Flash Array Integration
100%
10.0
Data Compression
100%
10.0
Non-Intrusive Upgrades
100%
10.0
Simplicity
100%
10.0
Power Savings
80%
8.0
  • [Pure Storage has turned] days and hours into seconds and minutes. We are dramatically more productive from development to servicing our clients.
  • Consistent costs.
  • No down time for upgrades and maintenance.
We reviewed Dell EMC and said no because of spin drives, hard upgrades. NetApp was not easy enough to use.
Pure Storage was easy of use, had reliability, evergreen, and we got much more in productivity than we could even imagine at the time.
Yes
Upgrade process was easy easy easy. Zero down time or slowness. Pure support did it all. We have performed firmware upgrades, controller upgrades, model upgrades (/M to /X), storage shelf additions, drive swaps (SAS to NVME) and storage pack increases, drive replacements, and NVRAM module swaps . Never had a single performance issue ever.
  • Storage size increase and speed with SAS to NVME
  • Even more performance from /M to /X series
  • Even more speed
No
No
105
Database use from processing, accounting, customer service, end user access
2
Only need 1 but have two for backup. Maintenance is simple and mostly hands off. Mainly just check if their are new firmware versions, if so we schedule Pure to do the upgrade. Extremely easy, simple, and reliable.
  • Reliablity
  • Speed
  • Easy of use
  • Easy to create test environments for developers.
  • Cloud replication
Simple to renew and to upgrade. Zero down time, no speed issues during changes / upgrades. Evergreen service makes budgeting and cost controls reliable and predictable.
Yes
DELL PowerVault MD's
No more spin drives
More speed
More reliably
No more big "upgrade" cycles and down times
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
We needed speed and reliability. Pure seemed more expensive than we wanted to pay but we have received much more than we expected.
Data reduction and compression have been much higher than we expected.
Snapshot feature and the ability to mount snapshots in seconds has changed the way we develop and increased the speed our product development.
Simple simple simple. We have time to deal with other IT issues and never worry about storage.
Don't focus only "replacement" cost only. Look at other costs that will be reduced such as storage maintenance, down time. Look at things that will increase: Performance, productivity, reliability. You will sleep better knowing Pure will be up and running everyday.
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
Just have Pure do it and there are no issues.
  • None once we had experienced support doing a firmware upgrade, we never worried again about any updates and upgrades.
Just works and Pure did all the work.
  • Online training
  • in-person training
  • no training
Excellent training and really you don't need that much. We received training at the Pure offices and also on site when the product was installed.
Simple things like how to login to the GUI interface, how to setup users, how to create volume and mount it. How to make a snapshot, how to copy it and mount it.

Really is pretty self explanatory on how to do things with the GUI interface.

We were expecting complicated base on other vendor products, we got super simple.
Great videos and documentation. There is a common theme with PureStorage, "Keep it elegantly simple". They have great support network and great support user groups. Documentation has been very helpful with providing auditors with methods and procedures on security and other ways the product works. Great documentation on setting PureStorage to be the most effective with VM's, SQL Server, and other products.
In many cases we didn't need any training. The GUI was very simple to use. In some cases we would attend a user group and some new thing was reviewed. We would then go back and look at it ourselves and figure out how to do what we needed very easily.
It took like 15 minutes for the product to be configured. So simple. Once we started using the GUI interface we quickly with just a few clicks were able to setup our networking, volumes, etc. Snapshots and scheduling are so easy. We were able to concentrate on our needs and not worry about how we need to "configure" the device for performance. It takes the worry out of "am I doing this right"
If you are setting up VM's and SQL review Pure's best practices articles. Easy and clear instructions how to configure for best performance and reliability.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
We haven't had the need to for any customization, everything we needed has been in the box already.
Yes, Gold support for new controllers when we want to renew them and to stay current with the latest technology improvements.
Never had an issue. Support is proactive in many cases. Complete follow through from beginning to end.
No
Late at night we got an alert that a drive was predicted to go bad. We didn't even have to call support, a replacement drive was already in our hands that morning. We swapped out the drive expecting it to take some time to fully rebuild. The rebuild was done in under a minute. Zero down time, zero slowness.
  • Creating volumes
  • Mounting and organizing volumes
  • Taking snapshots, mounting them and using them.
  • Swapping drives
  • Upgrading the firmware - Pure does it and reviews any potential issues
  • Maintenance basically none
  • None so far
Turnkey product. Setup was done in minutes, easy GUI interface. You don't have to get caught up in dealing with the usual storage concerns like load balancing, volume issues etc.
Yes
Simple metrics, you don't get lost in information overload.
We have been able to expand our storage without any interruptions. We have been able to setup replication between 2 Pure devices with no issues.
We have never had an outage with Purestorage. Yes we have had 2 drives go out but replacements were installed so fast there wasn't any issues. We have had a NVRAM module replaced but were noticed from Pure they were sending a replacement because they were predicting a failure so pure was proactive preventing any issues. Knowing Pure is monitoring our device 24x7 gives us peace of mind.
Performance is blazing fast. When we have performance issues, we now don't waste time "thinking" it's storage but instead spend the correct time tracing the issue back to a coding issue. What we were not expecting was how fast we could snap our entire environment and mount it for other testing and use. This process has completely changed how we can develop, trouble shoot and deliver faster and more reliable products.
  • Veeam
Easy
  • Cohesity
Yes
None
Everything is easy
Pure is always simple and easy
Can't say enough good things about the Vendor. They were patient, answered our questions. Allowed up to visit their support facilities. Allowed us to talk to other customers and get their honest reviews of PureStorage. We spent a significate amount of time due diligence in review PureStorage before our purchase. Many things Pure told us we took with a grain of salt but they have turned out to be much more that we expected.
We continue to be treated like we are their only client. Concerned about any issues we may have. Always wanting to make our experience the best. During the upgrade process, they wanted to make sure they were meeting our needs and not just doing a "renewal". I've always had a good experience with them.
Pricing and timing of delivery. Delivery ending up being weeks faster than we both expected making implementation so much easier.
Be honest on your needs and exactly what you want to use the product for. Ask lots of questions, especially if you have different growth options in the future so you can get the best product to fit your needs now and in the future.
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.
Enterprise Flash Array Storage (6)
100%
10.0
Flash Array Performance
100%
10.0
Flash Array Integration
100%
10.0
Data Compression
100%
10.0
Non-Intrusive Upgrades
100%
10.0
Simplicity
100%
10.0
Power Savings
100%
10.0
  • It was massively cheaper than the old guard, EMC, HP, IBM. And has performed as well if not better than their much more expensive products.
It's faster and more affordable.
Yes
No downtime. No issues. You login to Pure1 Portal, select Support > Schedule Array Upgrade. Then select the array you wish to upgrade, the code level you want to upgrade to, and select a date/time that Pure Support Team has open to perform the upgrade. From there you open the Remote Assistance connection to Pure Support and an engineer will pre-check the array and send an email for sign off to proceed at the scheduled date/time. Then at the date/time scheduled, they will remotely connect and upgrade the array as planned. It's seamless, I have upgrades multiple arrays, multiple times each and never had a single issue. Not even an attached host dropping path's and not re-establishing (hosts are all ESXi and AIX).
  • Security Improvements
  • Purity Enhancements - File Protocol Addition
  • Continuous Replication Technology and Unified Block and File Capabilities.
No
No
All of the applications for the entire company runs on FlashArray; We have multiple FlashArrays across various datacenters.
1
I am able to support multiple FlashArray storage array's by myself with very little effort and time investment. It is an easy to use management system. Purity is always evolving and makes life easy.
  • VDI
  • High Performance Virtualization
  • Ease of Snapshots
  • Ability to offload standalone snapshots to cheaper storage
  • They recently introduced file protocol access to the FlashArray; So some potential NAS replacement opportunities now exist.
We have already renewed our first round of evergreen upgrades and plan to continue doing so for the forseeable future. The array's have been bullet proof and with the evergreen upgrade the controllers are able to keep up with the newest technologies. (NVMe, etc.)
Yes
EMC ExtremIO - Support renewal costs were outrageously high.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
Price and usability. Pre-Sales experience was also impressive. They were able to let us test-drive a unit and provided training on Purity before purchase commitment.
would have still settled on Pure. Even today I would buy it as my first choice still
  • in-person training
I have 20 years storage experience, so an informal online session to run through the mangement interface was all I needed, but it's an easy to pick up system
Yes we have full support for the arrays. It is necessary to ensure quick break/fix resolution and support.
The support team is great. Pure1 portal allows customers to easily manage support cases and schedule code upgrades. The support team will remotely connect to the array and perform the code upgrades at the scheduled time, with or without your involvement (your choice). They also proactively monitor the array with AI and ML technologies and quickly alert you when anything is skewing off the normal expectation. The experience has been refreshing.
No
Upgrades are always seamless;
Disk replacements are rare, but when necessary they happen within hours on the same day.
They have proactively alerted me to SFP issues on the array that I hadn't noticed myself and we swapped the optic out the same day.
  • Snapshots - Protection Grouping, Offloading (optional), and rollback to snapshots is a breeze. They are each fully independent and recoverable. No chain to break or worry about. Also no need to use external software to quiesce the volume prior to snap creation.
  • Code upgrades - just schedule in Pure1 portal; complete pre-checks sign off, open remote assist connection to Pure and let them do the upgrade at the scheduled time.
  • Replication - Volume and Snapshot/Protection Group Replication over Ethernet to other Pure FlashArray's is simple and works without the complexity of FCoE routing.
  • Volume Creation and Host Path validation is easily confirmed via the port maps
  • nothing
Its extremely easy to use and works like you would want. It also eliminates alot of the complexity of volume snapshotting and array to array replication.
Yes
There is a mobile application to view array health / performance metrics and support cases, but not to manage the actual array.
The product suite scales well and the FA in particular can service any need for all but the most demanding file protocol environments
No outages over the last 4 years using FA
no performance issues; All LUN's run sub <1ms, most sub<500us. Performance is great. I have yet to have a single application team complain about storage performance. It is no longer a potential bottleneck in our environment.
Pure is a great partner, and fun too!
They continue to be great to work with. No pressure sales and they stay engaged with our business needs.
n/a
be upfront about your needs and expectations.
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.
Enterprise Flash Array Storage (6)
96.66666666666666%
9.7
Flash Array Performance
100%
10.0
Flash Array Integration
100%
10.0
Data Compression
90%
9.0
Non-Intrusive Upgrades
100%
10.0
Simplicity
90%
9.0
Power Savings
100%
10.0
  • Return on investment has been great, lowering management costs and providing greater storage efficiencies.
  • System reliability is awesome. We have several FlashArrays and very few hardware failures; something like 4 drives in 4 years, and no controller issues.
  • No negative impacts with these systems for us at all.
They know of our issues before we do, the people are personable and helpful. They have worked with us on everything from drive replacements to architecture to multi-vendor configuration issues. They are always the easiest to get a hold of and always the most flexible of our vendor's support teams.
At first, they most of our selection criteria but were missing some key components. We could use them for specialized deployments but not shared systems. They worked with us and added the components we required and we now are moving all storage needs to Pure Storage systems. Their service team is way ahead of the others we evaluated and have done nothing but improve since we moved to Pure.
50
All of our internal business functions and all are client's environments (minus one) run on the Pure FlashArrays. We have replaced all but one array (it uses a specialized function only that manufacturer provides) for us and our clients. We will use nothing else in the future.
2
The Pure FlashArrays have been so low maintenance all the administrators have had their duties greatly expanded. We used to have one fulltime admin and four that would help as needed maintaining storage systems, we now have two that spend less than 10% of their time with the Pure systems.
  • Databases - mainly SQL
  • VDI environments
  • General virtualization - both VMware and Hyper-V
  • We are examining disk to disk to cloud backups.
  • Clustering arrays for business continuity and performance balancing
  • Hybrid computing - moving between cloud providers and local virtualization
With the Evergreen program, we can upgrade (and we have upgraded all of our FlashArrays at least once) without downtime for the customers. This allows us to avoid "forklift" upgrades and provide our customers the best technology and limited disturbance to their environments.
Yes
We replace Netapps FAS storage systems. They did not provide the density or features we needed for the future. They are using outdated technology in their flash systems and their service group of late has been lacking.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
We wouldn't. We were very though and went thru 5 vendors before making a final selection.
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
Limited change management was required. Once the FlashArrays were online and connected to the client environments it was a matter of vMotioning the virtual machines to their new homes.
  • Poorly configured virtual machines
  • Limited networking - environment required more addresses for implementation
The Pure side of the implementation went well, it was cleaning up bad decision made earlier that were the problems.
  • no training
A little help from our Sales Engineer was all that we needed.
Just doing one or two items will teach you where everything is in the interface and the rest is easy. One of the simplest configurations I have ever done.
Read the documentation from the Pure Support site, excellent references.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
Yes
Allows us access to the Evergreen program.
No
  • Network configuration
  • Volume allocation and configuration
  • Support requests.
  • None so far.
Yes
Very well, have been able to track open support cases and verify system performance on the go. New features are popping up all the time and some are very useful, like opening up remote access for support - they can fix the issue and you never have to sing into the FlashArray itself.
Purity is an awesome system, easy to configure, easier to use and simple to monitor.
All the features are there and we didn't have to purchase an extra license for anything. All pretty straight forward to confugure.
We have never had one go down!
We have solved clients' performance problems with the FlashArray, it has never been the problem.
I have been working with Pure for six years and I know my sales people well. They listen to our use cases and find the answers to my questions. They are simply the best sales group I get to work with.
We check in with each other all the time, new products, how our company is doing, new uses, just great to work with.
Yes
All upgrades have gone smoothly but one and that was handled with openness and candor. They identified the problem and explained how this would not happen in the future. Don't believe a vendor had been so honest with me before.
  • Greater ease of operation
  • Better monitoring and reporting
  • Increased storage efficiencies
  • new features
  • increased storage efficiencies
  • More integration with cloud
No
No
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use the Pure Storage FlashArray as general use block storage for a VMware environment with around 450 guest VM's for a single department. When we replaced out Vmax array, we were looking for an all-flash solution that was easy to manage and delivered great performance with very high uptime. Pure Storage FlashArray has delivered on all of these.
  • 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
We are using it as a general purpose block storage with replication to a remote site. Our guest VM's are mostly Windows with a lot of SQL servers. The array has performed very well for this workload.
  • The performance had really helped our day to day business processes. Run time of daily processing jobs has reduced significantly.
  • The dedupe and compression have really helped with the amount of storage buys we have had to do over the last 4 years. We have a lot of headroom for growth with the amount of raw storage we have purchased.
  • The Pure Storage FlashArray has not had a single second of downtime in the 4 years we have had it. This kind of reliability is almost unheard of.
Pure's support is fantastic. We have not needed them very often but when we have they have been quite responsive. When our array has dialed home, they usually know about it before we do. We have used them for code upgrades in the past and they are very proactive about letting us know about upgrades as they come out to get them scheduled.
We compared this unit directly against the EMC XtremIO array. We selected Pure for a number of reasons. The points where Pure really stood out were the method of scaling/ ease of additional hardware updates, single SKU licensing, Evergreen upgrades and built-in replication. Upgrades and replication are two that really stand out for us.

With EMC, to add more disk we would have had to add more bricks which could result in downtime. With Pure Storage, they can add a shelf and configure it in less time than it takes to remove it from the box. Replication was also a big factor. With Pure Storage, it's built in with no extra cost. EMC would have required us to also buy Recoverpoint which would have almost tripled the initial buy-in.
  • When we were still evaluating Pure Storage FlashArray, we had to use it as a data lifeboat for all the LUNs on our Vmax when an SRM failover test left all the LUNs with invalid signatures and some of the VMware hosts were unable to talk to them. The only recourse was to format the LUNs, but we had to do something with the data. We were able to put it all on Pure while we formatted them. Despite filling the disk on that eval box, it never skipped a beat and delivered sub-millisecond latency and outstanding performance. We were able to reconfigure the Vmax and suffered zero downtime.
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
The install was very quick. The engineer that Pure sent said that if we started by 10 am we would be done by lunchtime, and he was not kidding.
Pure was very attentive and I also appreciated that they did not bad talk their competitors when we brought them up. They simply asked us to give the unit a fair eval and see how it stacked up. The competition, on the other hand, tried to trash Pure at every turn. I think that is because they were afraid their product was not as mature and not as solid.
Our Pure Storage rep has always kept an open line of communication with quarterly roadmap updates. The SE that works with him always makes sure that we know about the latest features and software fixes as they are released and has taken ownership of any services that we have needed. Pure has been very good to work with.
Yes
We have done 2 hardware upgrades. Both times there was zero downtime and zero impact to running virtual machines.
  • Ability to upgrade to NVME disk in the future
  • More fiber for added FC bandwidth
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