Pure Storage FlashArray Pros and Cons

It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity.

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's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done.

All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it.

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.

It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive.

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.

The back-end data reporting for Pure Storage is phenomenal. The data that you can see on the performance of your customers' array, so you can be proactive about upgrades or enhancements, and is a phenomenal tool to have access to as a partner. I haven't seen this type of stuff out of anything of the other storage systems.

For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space.

They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth.

I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers.

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.

We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter.

I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side.

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.

I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution.

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 setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier.

The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be.

I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates.