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 use the Pure Storage FlashArray as our main storage system for all of our Hyper-V Virtual Machines (around 150 on 4 different hosts) and we use it across the county in multiple locations.
Pros
All-flash array, super quick and responsive
Ease of setup and management
Incredible call-home support
Cons
Pricing
A more streamlined update process
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking for an all-flash storage solution there really is no competition. The quality of the product, the support offered and the costs are unbeatable.
Alternatives
Dell EMC VPLEX and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Accounting company, 1001-5000 employees)
Pure Storage FlashArray is used by my department to support various customers. FlashArray helps my organization to resolve problems that our legacy storage lack in terms of IOPS, hardware issues, manageability, and performance.
Pros
Pure1 portal where you can see all your Pure Storage usage and other features is very impressive.
Pure Storage integration with VMware SRM makes it very easy to configure array-based replication.
Pure Storage Support is very good and the resolution time to fix a problem is impressive.
Pure GUI is very user-friendly and makes it very easy for new users to learn how to create LUNs and others in no time.
Cons
Introduce a new support tab in Pure Storage GUI for any individual storage would be great.
They offer few trainings for Customers who have invested in Pure Storage for free.
Suggest to Customers how they can improve Pure Storage functionality from time to time.
Likelihood to Recommend
Pure Storage FlashArray is suited for environment where high performance is needed with very less latency.
Alternatives
Dell EMC Unity
We had an outage on EMC Unity because of one of its bugs and also its simplicity and performance is not as good as Pure Storage.
Pure Storage FlashArray runs the entire infrastructure for one of my clients. It initially replaced Equallogic arrays that did not meet our performance needs. Our database applications average 30k+ IOPS and the old array just wasn't enough.
Pros
Storage performance is outstanding.
Service has been excellent.
Ease of use is wonderful.
Cons
Array didn't integrate well with our old v-center and we were not notified about the incompatibility.
Documentation can be difficult to access.
Likelihood to Recommend
Pure Storage is great for medium to large businesses that need high-performance storage for applications and databases.
Alternatives
EMC VNX (Discontinued)
Pure storage was cheaper and faster.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Professional Services (Information Technology & Services company, 501-1000 employees)
We're using it in an environment where code is being tested by thousands of VM's at once. They spin up, test code, and then spin down and generate the results.
Pros
Provides the ability to create tens of thousands of VM's virtually instantly.
The ability to work with large amounts of data rapidly.
Zero downtime updates and maintenance, and power failures are basically nonexistent.
Rock-solid reliability.
Cons
VVOL's could be implemented in a clearer manner.
Likelihood to Recommend
PS FA is well suited to environments that utilize many hundreds of thousands, or millions, of IOPS where you need rock-solid reliability and ultra-fast response times. It would be overkill in an environment where IOPS is in the tens of thousands or less, in my opinion. You'd still get the same reliability and outstanding latency/performance though, which is a huge plus.
Alternatives
It is light years ahead of our previous solutions, including xyzApp, xyzGen, FusionXY and Superxyz.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 10,001+ employees)
Pure Storage FlashArray provides superior performance at an attractive price point to support our organization's applications. Almost all workloads that we have moved to Pure Storage FlashAray have seen a noticeable improvement in processing times, not just noticed by IT metrics but also by end-users.
Pros
Performance - Workloads moved to the Pure Storage from other mfg arrays saw significant performance improvements.
Value - For the cost versus performance/capacity gain, Pure Storage FlashArray was an investment that provided great returns.
Support - A high level of customer support across the board (sales, pre-sales, post-sales, technical). Our reps are always in contact with us to see if we need anything.
Cons
Have not uncovered any yet.
Likelihood to Recommend
We saw a tremendous performance boost when migrating MS SQL workloads to the Pure platform. Pure also gave us unbelievable capacity from its data reduction algorithms.
Alternatives
When comparing Pure Storage options to other major vendor's products (in as much of an apples to apples manner as possible), the Pure solution provides much greater value and return to our business.
The FlashArray is being used across our entire environment/organization. Internally, and customer clouds as well. Atmosera is a cloud service provider of both Private and public cloud offerings. We utilize the FlashArrays for our private cloud offerings, selling datastore volumes as managed storage. The FlashArray allows us to be scalable in our internal infrastructure, while also offering the huge benefits of Flash storage. The FlashArray fleet we have also given us a single vendor infrastructure, which eases management.
Pros
The Pure Array is scalable (easy to add more storage, easy to split up/provision existing storage).
The Pure Array handles deduplication and compression better than any storage array I've worked with.
Pure Support is very knowledgeable and responsive to issues and questions.
The Pure Web GUI is very intuitive and easy to use.
VM Analytics is a great and easy to enable feature.
Cons
While the GUI is easy to use, some management features are only available in the CLI.
Likelihood to Recommend
The FlashArray is well suited in a high utilization environment. I believe the best use for the FlashArray is for cloud/managed service providers, however, the FlashArray has its place in on-prem high utilization environments as well. The FlashArray is also well suited in environments where there will be multiple FlashArrays as you can set up pods and interconnect the arrays. In smaller and lower utilized environments, the FlashArray may not be as well suited due to the cost of the array. For example, the FlashArray is not the best use for backup storage (as backup storage does not need to be fast and does not typically carry production workloads).
Alternatives
NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays, NetApp FAS series and Synology DiskStation
Although more expensive, the FlashArray's performance, dedupe, simplicity of configuration, and support all blow the other arrays out of the water. I have had nothing but pleasant experiences with the techs at Pure Storage, and they've been plenty helpful and supportive (both the techs and our dedicated engineers). Our experience with the FlashArray has been nothing but pleasant.
Across the whole organization to provide manages Sap service.
Pros
Innovation
Snapshots
Performance
Cons
Performace
Backups in min
Restore in min
Likelihood to Recommend
PureStorage is well suited for ALL SAP Databases. It's less appropriate for backups on secondary storage. Flash Array is good to get excellent performance when the Sap system is needed.
Alternatives
It is repetitive, better performance, better cost, better deduplication, simplicity in administration, etc.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive (Information Technology and Services company, 51-200 employees)
To support customer data. With the customer we have, we are managing Pure to be used only for HA type of infrastructure with enhanced performance using it's Flash storage module.
Pros
Performance factor at applications end which are using Pure SAN Infra are running smoothly
It's very user-friendly to do administrative kind of work. Not too complex to manage the Pure environment when we have a basic understanding of storage engineering.
Pure1 monitoring tool is a bigger plus point of Pure as it handles multiple things, advance reporting, even migration, prediction, scheduling, high-level planning etc.
You don't need any third-party software to do and manage multipathing like MPIO for Netapp or PowerPath for EMC in Windows Environment when you have inbuilt Microsoft multipathing software at OS end.
Cons
Should introduce for NAS infra along with SAN infra (ignore if already implemented and useful for NAS infra).
Must integrate some more features for solid marketing and productivity and competition in today's market. Say, for example, can integrate some backup concepts along with storage structure and check the product cohesion with its hyper-converged cluster style.
Likelihood to Recommend
As shared under pros and cons, refer to my comments.
