Pure Storage FlashArray Pros and Cons

Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use.

As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change.

Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes.

The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases.

It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit.

We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates.

The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure.

It is the SAN backbone for our company.

The reliability is very good.

We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us.

We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten.

Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular...

It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution.

The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled.

It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore.

Has also helped simplify storage for us. The other person we put in there, took about a week to implement. And we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations.

Most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services.

The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features.

In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized.

The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless.

The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go.

The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN.

The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times.

They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is its infinitely scalable.

Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been.

Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations.

We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted.

Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers.

The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware.