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.
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning."
"The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them."
"The overall latency in our environment is very low because it's All Flash and we've got 10 Giga dedicated to the storage network"
"The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer."
"Switching to AFF has improved the performance of a lot of our virtual machines in a VMware environment. The number of support tickets that we receive has fallen to almost zero because of this, so it's been a real help for our virtual server support team."
"It's helping to leverage data. The storage is being utilized to implement larger, complex file sizes."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, so we get more out of our storage. The replication is also important."
"Efficient and easily scalable all-flash storage solution, significantly reducing latency, optimizing data management, and providing cost savings for businesses"
"Very efficient storage"
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"It is on the expensive side."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"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."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"They should provide easier integration with multiple systems."
"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."
"The total cost of ownership has increased a little."
"I would like to see an improvement in the high availability of the NFS and CIFS sharing during upgrade and patching; this would help to avoid downtime."
"The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID."
"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."
"We don't have many issues related to the appliance itself. In terms of the OS, we do get some hiccups here and there."
"The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different, so I had to program something to catch a different error case or something like that. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About, 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different."
"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
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 Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, 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 Pure Storage FlashBlade. See our NetApp AFF vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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