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.
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The solution is scalable."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"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 Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"The stability is solid. It doesn't fail on us, which is exactly what we want. We are in a critical business that we can't have any percentage of downtime."
"The most valuable features are the IO performance that we get, the cluster part, and the increased workload and performance with the SSDs."
"The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"Technical support is good."
"Other manufacturers claim simplicity. In fact, frankly, they do have an advantage in that regard, however, they don't have the functionality. If you were to compare one of those products to NetApp, head to head from a feature perspective, NetApp would wind up in the top 10."
"I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product."
"Things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"In fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I've had a few cases where support wasn't able to answer the question or they took quite a while."
"The price of NVMe storage is very expensive."
"The certification classes are good, but they don't cover enough of the material, and the exams only test on what is covered in class."
"It has not reduced our data center costs. NetApp charges a pretty penny for their stuff."
"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion."
"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."
"Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use."
"NetApp AFF needs to focus more on block storage. It has to focus on high-end, performance-driven applications."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"The solution is not cheap."
"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."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 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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