We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and Pure Storage FlashBlade based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"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."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"It is fast and reliable. It works."
"It reduces space and the polar consumption. It also accelerates the application."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment."
"We just migrated two petabytes of data storage from IBM over to NetApp All Flash. Some of the performance improvement that we've seen is 100 times I/O and microsecond latency."
"The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance."
"It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes."
"Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance."
"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."
"What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."
"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."
"The solution provides many controllers."
"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."
"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."
"The product is scalable and easy to expand."
"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"The price should be lower."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"Automation could be simplified."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"A lot of the tools that are built into the stock, ONTAP operating system, instead of having to buy the add-ons and things."
"We would like to have NVMe on FabricPool working because it broke our backups. We enabled FabricPool to do the tiering from our AFFs to our Webscale but it sort of broke our Cobalt backups."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
"The cost of this solution should be reduced."
"The SRA stuff that intergrades with SRM is a problem point. It's a pain point. The support personnel aren't always knowledgeable on that product. At times, they are not even aware what product is supported and what is not, when one has been deprecated and there is a new one out, and what the bug fixes of the newer version are."
"When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance."
"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."
"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."
"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."
"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."
"I would like to see more deduplication."
"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."
"The solution is expensive."
"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. 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 FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Qumulo. See our NetApp AFF vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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