TrustRadius Insights for Pure Storage FlashArray are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
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.
We are currently using Pure Storage FlashArray in a productive environment used to deploy core and customer services. The FlashArray is our main storage where all the time-critical application and secured data are stored. Over this duty, the FlashArray solves the day by day operation of our business bringing fast access & reliability of data.
Pros
FlashArray provides a guaranteed R/W time to data, using the great 3D array functionality.
FlashArray has an easy and understandable interface to overview performance and usage.
The compression of data is great for databases and virtual machines.
Cons
There is not much flexibility for upgrade storage capacity, they only offer in standardized sizes.
Likelihood to Recommend
FlashArray is well suited for time-critical applications where the reading & writing of data is time-critical for the performance. Also, the compression of data is nicely developed. I will not recommend the use of FlashArray for scenarios where data backup is the only purpose. It can surely be done but will not be a cost-effective solution.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Telecommunications company, 11-50 employees)
Currently, we use Pure Storage FlashArray for array-based replication. The organisation is using it to develop software to work on top of the infrastructure, and they are testing how the array performs under different test cases (light and heavy workloads, different types of failures etc). These arrays are quite nimble and at times too easy to work with. I'm used to working with big enterprise arrays and most of the time these arrays are as simple to use as a home NAS but at the same time provide the same amount of analytics and performance as the big enterprise arrays.
Pros
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
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
We are using and testing on the SAN capabilities of the array. So far, it's a very good system overall. We haven't extensively tested the NAS side of things. That doesn't mean it doesn't perform well - only that I have no overview on it
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)
Our FlashArray is the primary storage array within our datacenter. With the quality of dedupe and compression that FlashArray provides, it is economical enough to run not only SQL, but all other datasets in our datacenter. We migrated from a cloud services provider using a NetApp storage array to a self-hosted solution. Moving to the PureArray we saw tremendous performance gains across the board with a fraction of the storage utilization that we were being charged for on the NetApp. It solved all of our performance and storage utilization issues.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Any dataset which requires tremendous speed and response times would benefit from PureArray. As for less appropriate use cases, there really is not a bad spot to use PureArray, but there may be situations where it would not provide the most bang for your dollar. Storing cold/rarely accessed data on a PureArray would be a waste.
It is used across the whole organization. It has lowered latency across all environments and the TCO has been amazing.
Pros
Dedupe and compression, especially for VDI.
Speed.
Forever flash and TCO.
Cons
The underlying code is upgraded quite a bit. That means more upgrades than other arrays. It is really both a pro and a con.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is perfect for VDI, SQL and any application that requires high I/O with low latency. It is not well suited for tier 2 or 3 applications like file servers or archived data.
It's used across the entire organization to house virtual machines and containers with varied workloads and purposes. It speeds our virtualization, containerization, and database systems with its incredibly fast and highly reliable storage.
Pros
A single pane of glass management that is incredibly simple to use.
Incredibly fast initial and subsequent deployments.
The deduplication/compression and speed exceed our expectations.
Cons
I can't think of a single thing, to be honest.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend Pure Storage for all workloads except maybe long-term large storage, as the price point might be prohibitive, and a waste of the capabilities of the Pure Storage FlashArray.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Telecommunications company, 201-500 employees)
We use Pure Storage FlashArray across our entire organization to provide sub-millisecond latency to sensitive databases and applications. Decoupling our servers from local storage allowed us to design a proper HA environment and leverage growth in the compute and network layers without impacting our storage reliability and performance. Data Encryption at Rest also enabled us to guarantee full data encryption without the costly CPU overhead of a local solution.
Pros
Data deduplication has saved us many TB of space, as much of our data is copied and reused for QA, staging and testing environments.
Encryption at Rest allows us to offload the management, overhead and cost of encryption with to a single source.
Upgradability between models has allowed us to grow fast when needed, and save money when not.
Cons
Pure is still one of the most costly solutions on the market. Though they provide best in class service and equipment - you pay for it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Pure FlashArray excels when performance and reliability are driving factors. If you need a lot of data, and fast, Pure FlashArray can deliver. If your process doesn't require sub-ms response times, full disk encryption, or massive datasets, you could save money with a cheaper product. Even 'small' models of the FlashArray line are very performant and could be considered overkill for a small workload.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Education Management company, 501-1000 employees)
We are using Pure Storage as a storage platform for our multi-tenant cloud environment as well as for customers with dedicated hardware environments. It provides a solution for high IO environments as well as eases the burden of array management.
Pros
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!
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
When you are talking thousands and thousands of IOPS, Pure Storage is a good choice. If you have a need for multi-speed disks, Pure Storage might not be for you.