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 initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"One, it's easy to use and understand. You don't have to be an engineer or an expert to use this storage solution. That's the bad part of Dell PowerMAX. You have to go through very expensive education for one or two weeks and pay ten thousand dollars just to be able to use the product. With Pure Storage, you have a half-day workshop, and you know everything you need to know."
"The latency is good."
"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."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"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."
"The most important features are the IOPS and the ease of the ONTAP manageability."
"Technical support has been okay."
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs. We have moved our primary data stores for production over to AFF, and a lot of the problems that might happened have gone away."
"The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance."
"Batch times went from approximately seven hours down to about two and a half. Functionality during the day, such as taking or removing snapshots and cloning instances, is higher than it has ever been."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"It is fast and reliable. It works."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"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."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"We need better data deduplication."
"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."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"We would like to have more behavioral reporting."
"Tech support is a place where there is room to improve the product experience. The response time when they are busy is not very good."
"In terms of what needs improvement, I would like to see more consistency with the UI. It seems to change every few versions. The menus can be in a completely different place."
"The quality of technical support has dwindled over time and needs to be improved."
"To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash."
"The product should be more competitive and come up with additional features. They should keep the client always in mind and as the top priority. This would be the best way to compete with other solutions."
"We should be able to manage NetApp AFF as per the desired usage and needs."
"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"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.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.