We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashArray and DNN IntelliFlash based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Pure Storage FlashArray came out ahead of DDN IntelliFlash. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found DDN IntelliFlash more difficult to deploy, with more capabilities for improvement, and with less reliable support.
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"The solution is scalable."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"It is easy to deploy and it's all-flash, so it's very fast."
"It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore."
"Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage the tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles."
"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."
"We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"It is on the expensive side."
"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."
"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"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."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 29th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of DDN IntelliFlash writes "Good features with an easy initial setup but technical support is slow ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". DDN IntelliFlash is most compared with VAST Data, Tintri VMstore T7000 and NetApp AFF, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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