We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) vs Pure Storage FlashArray
based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Pure Storage FlashArray has a slight edge in this comparison because users were happier with its ease of deployment and features.
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The latency is good."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it."
"I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror."
"One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time. Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love."
"The most valuable feature, primarily, would be speed. That's why we got it. Storage is costly but it's very, very fast. Very efficient, very fast."
"We had some customers who were running virtualization workloads on classical spinning disks. We implemented an AFF system, and they got a huge performance boost out of it because the latency of the SSDs is simply much lower. Actually, most customers benefit from the improved latency and performance from the AFF systems."
"We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"Its efficiency and scalability are the most valuable features."
"It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"It reduces space and the polar consumption. It also accelerates the application."
"The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"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."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"The software layer has to improve."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"The monitor and performance need improvement. Right now we are using the active IQ OnCommand Unified Manager, but we also have to do the Grafana to do the performance and I hope we will be able to see the improvement of the active IQ in terms of the performance graph. It should also be more detailed."
"The Bezels need improvement."
"It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"On the fiber channel side, there is a limit of sixteen terabytes on each line, and we would like to see this raised because we are having to use some other products."
"Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment."
"The price of NVMe storage is very expensive."
"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"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."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"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 system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem, VMware vSAN and Dell Unity XT. See our NetApp AFF vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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