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 most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"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."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"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 standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"Most of our business-critical systems are provisioned from the NetApp AFF system. Compared to others, we have a minimal latency. Configuring the DR for high availability or migrating the volumes from one box to another is pretty easy with NetApp AFF."
"The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance."
"The tool has lowered latency."
"I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features."
"Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well."
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability."
"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 solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"This solution is very scalable."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"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."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"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."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"The response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now."
"We only had a few upgrade issues."
"NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"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."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"There are no RDMA capabilities in CIFS (SMB) and NFS protocols."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"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."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 43 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 22 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "It has simplified our operational model by making routine processes easier and less prone to error". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Reasonably priced with excellent rates of deduplication and compression". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and VAST Data, 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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