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)
The Pure Storage FlashArray is the primary SAN that runs the entire business. It solved all of the problems we were having with our prior arrays - its speed and dedupe technology allows the business to save money in the long term via its easy management and lower operating cost.
Pros
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
Cons
It was a little bit more expensive up front, but worth it in the long term
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for companies that have a sizable need for storage. I don't know how small they go, but I'd imagine its not a good fit for someone needing only 5-10 TB. To my understanding it grows well beyond 100 TB. Compression and dedupe doesn't work well for already compressed files such as video and pictures, so another technology would be good for that. Does well with database and file servers.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Information Technology (Internet company, 11-50 employees)
Pure Storage is being used across our data centers supporting over 3,000 VMs running enterprise workloads. The solution addresses the issue of provisioning & supporting thousands of disparate workloads with various performance characteristic (medium/high IOPs and low latency requirements) cost-effectively with minimal administrative overhead. The data reduction in production is over 5x which allows great performance with a compelling value proposition.
Pros
Ease of management, deployment (API), seamless capacity expansions and even array upgrades with zero downtime.
Support. Knowledgable engineers that will ' stay with you' till the issue is resolved and provide assistance even when the root cause is.
Data reduction. We are seeing 5.x in Production and 6.x in non-prod environments.
Cons
Slightly higher cost than their competitors
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking for an enterprise-grade storage solution for mixed/high workloads, Pure Storage FlashArray is a fantastic option. It has a very easy to use interface, and advanced features like replication, snapshots, etc. are very easy to configure.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Corporate (Computer Games company, 11-50 employees)
Pure Storage FlashArray is our SAN storage array worldwide for all the sites inside the company. It solves many issues and the main one is the OpEx link to storage management. This is so easy that we prefer to have it everywhere rather than any other boxes for our sites, even the smallest.
Pros
Monitoring with Pure1
Upgrades are belonging to the past
Performance is insane
Very easy setup
Cons
Very difficult to find bad points since this product is so good... Nope, I have no Cons, can't find any! Sorry!
Likelihood to Recommend
All scenarios can be addressed now with the active cluster architecture with synchronous replication. We are using PureStorage FlashArray to handle our IO aggressive workloads that go and look for many metadata info all day long. Pure has been able to deliver increasing performance just by OS upgrades managed centrally by Pure support.
Flasharray backs most of our VMware datastores. It also is the backend to our Linux-HA implementation running SMB and NFS.
Pros
It's fast with low latency under load.
It is supported by an evergreen support policy.
Purestorage sees the under-the-hood issues on it before they become problems. They contact us and schedule maintenance to provide fixes and upgrades.
The thing just works. We spend almost no time on it and it's in use for most of our production environments.
Cons
There's very little improvement to be made. They even have a load prediction engine now that allows you to predict what will happen if you scale up one of your load types (choose a volume and tell it you're going to make ten more of them and see what it predicts).
Likelihood to Recommend
Backend for block-storage needs. Backend VMware with it. Backend Kubernetes with it. Write things fast. Read them faster.
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)
We implemented Pure Storage FlashArrays for our tier 1 storage to meet the high IOPS, low latency demands of our applications. All tier 1 storage resides (currently) on one of three arrays. We have a very bursty workload and Pure Storage is able to handle the workload better than any other storage that we have used.
Pros
Handles bursty (IOPS and bandwidth) workloads very well.
Has great VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) support/implementation.
Upgrades are quick and painless.
Pure 1 site for aggregated telemetry data is very useful.
Cons
Pure Storage is expensive, but worth the premium.
I would like an easier way to identify a particularly hot (IO) VM on vVols during specific, narrow, user-selected time windows.
I would like to see an indicator on the support site for a Pure Support recommended code version of the Purity OS to more easily identify what version we should be running.
Likelihood to Recommend
Pure Storage arrays are perfect for any tier 1 storage need. It excels in VMware environments and particularly with data sets that lend well to deduplication and compression. We have many postgres database servers that can run very hot. Pure Storage has helped us to remove IO bottlenecks that we have run into in the past.
Our organization needed a high-performance storage array to meet the growing IOPS demand and we looked at many options before selecting Pure Storage FlashArray. I was very impressed with the data management capabilities especially dedup, compression, and the written guarantee that came along with the product. The per gig price point compared to big-boys all flash arrays (read EMC,HP) was very aggressive and FlashArray is built future ready being NVMe-Ready. It's been a few years since I have deployed Flasharray and I've never had any issue. It's a solid performer.
Pros
Compression
Very easy-to-use management interface
High IOPS performance
Cons
Scalability. Would like the ability to add more capacity without swapping the SSDs.
More integration into cloud/virtualization solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking for an enterprise-grade storage solution for mixed/high workloads, Pure Storage FlashArray is a fantastic option. It has a very easy to use interface and advance features like replication, snapshots etc. are very easy to configure. The reporting section looks and works well.