What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?

We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.

Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company.

It has a flexible, pay-as-you-go option.The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations, but this is the only major downside.

FlashArray is a premium solution, having all-inclusive licensing including future functionalities, and being end/to/end NVMe. Also, it is not ALUA - all the paths are Optimized - and does not lose performance when one of the controllers is upgraded or fails. Maintenance costs are then low, flat, and fair. Those hunting for flash at the lowest price, like a JBOF, should look elsewhere. Those who need the cream of the cream with 7 years+ longevity should sit down and calculate some TCO, ROI, or even NPV if buying as a service. 

The solution is expensive.

Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive.

It's a costly solution. It is not cheap. There is no subscription fee. There is just one initial fee.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I am using the latest version of the solution and it is deployed on-premises. The tool is easy to implement and does not require much training. Moreover, it has good support.

The pricing is okay. It's somewhere in the middle. I'd rate it five out of ten overall.

The licensing cost is close to zero. Every new function or functionality is included when paying the annual maintenance. Our customers value it because the maintenance is always the same regardless of whether it's the first year, the seventh or the tenth year. Additionally, the products use the same operative system with new capabilities, like ransomware and safe mode. Another thing that is quite nice to have is outstanding performance. They can provide a lot of performance, so there is not a lot of difference. Still, efficiency is something customers value because the compression can be up to twice of the second competitor. I rate licensing costs a ten out of ten.

The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive. There are no licenses outside of the storage. When you buy the solution, you receive all the software capabilities and license with the box.

With Pure Storage, we buy the array and then all the features can be enabled on that. It is more expensive than Nimble. The price is likely double Nimble's. You do not have to pay for any extra features or add-ons. Everything is included.

The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contact clarity. We went with the Evergreen plan and I don't have clarity on what am I supposed to pay each year or every three years. There was not much contract clarity.

The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions.

It could always be lower, but it's okay.

The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support.

The pricing is okay. We pay to license on a yearly basis. It's just a standard fee with no extra costs.

We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves.

The best features come included without any additional cost.

You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced.

There are some additional costs.

I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC.

The pricing is rather costly when compared to similar solutions. There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once.

When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us.

The pricing is reasonable.

You do have a license that is required and you also have to pay for support. The license we have is not a monthly subscription model.

My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing.

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good.

While it is my understanding that the solution is a bit expensive from a financial point of view, I don't know the exact costs. The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more. I don't have the details anymore. I know it was much more than HP 3PAR and Dell Storage Center or DataCore. We have a five-year contract. We would need to renew it in two years or so.

I was not involved with the licensing of this solution.

Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution.

The price of this solution is high.

Our costs are around $100,000.

I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000.

I am not sure what the costs for the solution are but it is embedded in the solution support.

We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars.

Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models.

We have a package deal on the solution because we bought it through a software vendor, so they packaged it with their solution. I don't know what the individual costs would be for the Pure side of it. It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside.

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year.

The solution could be cheaper. There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it.

We just barely bought our Pure Storage, so we haven't been able to use Evergreen Storage subscription at all yet. However, it's a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm doing right now again.

The licensing is $100,000.

The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years.

It is cheaper than NetApp.

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature. It is an excellent choice, if you can afford it.

We have an Evergreen Storage subscription. We like it a lot. We recently upgraded from the M-series to the X-series FlashArrays. We used the Evergreen Storage solution and expanded our footprint.

You are buying a premium product, and it is worth it.

The cost has room for improvement. Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade.

With the pricing, they have, it is pretty competitive to spinning disk. I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it.

The cost has room for improvement.

Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs.

Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs.

It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.

All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help.

Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors, as we've looked at some of the other competitors on the market. Pure, for the quality of gear we're getting versus the price, is a good value for us.

Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop.

I definitely like the licensing model. It's a lot better than being "piecemealed" as a customer. I've been extremely happy. Cost-wise, it's been very effective. We're a nonprofit-based organization, so pricing is at the forefront of every conversation we have, and it's been a good marriage between the technical capability of the product, the software that we get, the service and support that we get. From a price standpoint, it's been very effective.

I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less. That's standard business. It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace. That's huge for me.

In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides.

It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective, but I would say better than many in terms of performance and service.

Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great. The client environment for a non-profit 501C3 organization makes it much harder for us to come up with the dollars and to cover the increased cost of hardware support, but we do like the way the product runs. It's perfect for us.

Like anything, when you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it. But what you are getting for it, you are definitely seeing a good ROI.

In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify.

We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products.

It's cost-effective when we replace it and has rich improvements with low effort from the customer side.

The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive.

The price is too high. Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction.

I would prefer that they lower their pricing.

The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities.

Pure Storage is expensive. It comes with features, so you get what you pay for. It is expensive compared to our old storage systems, but from the amount of human effort that you have to pay to babysit a storage system, it reduces that. I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us. The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations.

Pure Storage is a good price and it's a solid product for the price point. Only two or three times over the last 5 years have we had Pure flash drives die to a point where they had to be replaced, so the reliability is also very good.

There are a lot of companies that give a solid performance and a lot of places you can get flash. The pricing wasn't that much different, It's really the simplicity that makes a difference. If the data starts flowing too fast, it slows things down and does it later. Those features are the winners for us.

The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments.

The cost of the storage needs improvement.

It's expensive but compared to other solutions, you get what you pay for.

It's expensive, but it's worth it.

The price-to-performance is good. I looked at Pure about three to four years back, but the price-to-performance wasn't right for us. Now, it's right.

Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning. Once a customer gets a demo and starts using Pure Storage, sees it working with its ease of use, stability, and performance, this encourages them into purchasing the product.

It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point.

Speak to an account manager and get the right deal.

In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for. It isn't priced for you to just go buy one off-the-shelf. It isn't a casual purchase. If you have an appropriate use case though--heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or workloads that just really need low latency and high throughput--you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage. For example, we are starting to use our second array for high performance computing, primarily machine learning, and for that sort of research analytics and heavy math computation you really need all-flash.