Pure is simple and effective
Updated March 23, 2021
Pure is simple and effective
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray
We use it as a back end iSCSI storage target for the whole enterprise's virtualization. All VM disks are kept on it allowing for full SSD level performance of all OS disks.
- Easy to configure. The interface is simple and intuitive. You can tell that a lot of thought went into its design - both the previous 4.x and redesigned 5.x interface. I have configured and reconfigured many LUNs and Hosts/Host Groups as well as redeploying the hardware at a new location and the process is simple, and repeatable.
- Solid. We have had zero stability issues with our devices. They have been our primary back end for several years at this point and have been absolutely dependable.
- Support. Pure support takes care of upgrades on your schedule and are very quick with answers to usage questions. I've been through 3 production upgrades of live environments with support and they have been true zero-downtime upgrades.
- Single purpose. If you aren't into iSCSI, this isn't for you. Can't share out a quick NFS/CIFS share off the fast storage. Not that this is a surprise, they are definitely marketed this way.
- CLI is custom. No root, no standard *nix tools for doing things. It really is an appliance. It all works and is well documented, just non-standard way of doing things. Can also use the REST API for many tasks.
- Cost. They are expensive. Upfront and ongoing. It feels like a premium product and you pay for it.
- Moving from a NetApp NFS (HDD) back end VM storage repositories, we were able to dramatically reduce our hardware footprint while replacing with faster and better storage.
- Flash storage has increased the stability of our entire environment as a whole and the FlashArray has dramatically reduced the amount of time and effort required to maintain the storage environment in particular.
- We haven't been particularly clever with ours. We bought it to dedupe and compress our VM disk images and to speed up our VMs. It has done that effectively and in a very stable fashion.
Upgrading Pure Storage FlashArray
Yes - Everything went exactly as Pure told us it would. The Pure tech started at the agreed upon time and handled the whole upgrade. There were no issues during the upgrade and there were no unexpected impacts. Our production processes did not notice at all during the seamless failover from one controller to the other. We have followed Pure's best practices in setting up multipathing in both our Windows and Linux environments, so as long as you do that, their zero-downtime upgrade promises do come true.
- The upgrade was fully handled by Pure Storage techs with no need for assistance.
- The upgrade was able to be done during business hours with no impact.
- The upgrade did not break anything process- or administration-wise.
- Pure proactively reaches out to us with new upgrades, especially when we are utilizing a feature that is upgraded or a bug we may hit is fixed.
- Pure keeps track of bugs that may hit our specific use cases based on our configuration and FlashArray usage. They then reach out to us to let us know we should upgrade.
- Predictability.
- Stability
- Ease-of-upgrade
- That users and production environments do not notice the upgrade