Storage that just goes.
January 25, 2019

Storage that just goes.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pure Storage FlashArray

Pure support has generally been proactive with upgrades and responsive to tickets. We haven't really had much trouble so our sample size is small. We did have some local rep turnover though.
We use Pure as our primary block storage; it backs our VMware, databases, and for misc block storage needs.
  • Speed. We don't know how fast it can go because we've never been able to tax it.
  • Ease of setup. Web or CLI it's trivial to provision, replicate, or snap volumes.
  • Integration. There seem to be plugins for all of our current and upcoming software.
  • Drive failures are stupid. We're a hands-on shop, the drive indicator should be lit by default, I shouldn't have to do it manually.
  • Compression has not been as good as we'd hoped, but the failure was more likely on the sales side.
  • I want to see the logs. I'm a Unix admin, I can read and understand. Passwording the log dump is irritating and increases costs for both sides.
  • We'd really like more local users. It's stupid to have a dependency on windows in your storage, and it's also stupid to only have one user for your API calls.
  • Our 4 Pures have replaced 6 full racks of storage, in about a half rack. It's a space, power, cooling, and management win.
  • Have I mentioned the speed? Having a one-stop top tier that handles DBs and VMware has been great, it's almost completely removed "slowness" tickets from our radar.
There's not much comparison to be done, features, TCO, and raw speed are all on Pure's side initially, and in use reliability becomes a glaring benefit. We've never had a storage outage with Pure, I can't say the same for any storage I've ever used previously.
We've been quite pleased [with it] as a VMware back end (200 nodes, thousands of VMs), and have even started virtualizing high io machines because it's so fast. It's nice to just not worry about disk io problems anymore.

Cost: We use other storage for tier 3/low priority data simply due to cost. Having cheap spinning disks available in the same array might be a management benefit.