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 scalable."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The latency is good."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"Deduplication"
"Setting up storage for an application (storage provisioning) is quick and easy. Maybe a quarter of the time is now spent getting the application up and running, or even less."
"Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much."
"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."
"We are a large-scale company, and our growth has been pretty significant over the last five or six years. We like the scale, and the way NetApp grows, so that's why we use it. It's mostly for block storage."
"Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"If you need a replacement part, they will provide it."
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"Technical support is good."
"Very efficient storage"
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"It is on the expensive side."
"In fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"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."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"There is no direct storage attachment available. Most configurations require additional switches for data access."
"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."
"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."
"We were migrating from Data ONTAP 7-Mode to its Cluster-Mode. Therefore, we had to get swing gear, then do the migration from loner gear and back onto our new gear. This was a bit difficult. It took us several months to do multiple migrations."
"I just got through the session where it looks like they are going to support Oracle running on Linux with SnapCenter. That is one of the main things that we are hoping to get integrated."
"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."
"It is a bit expensive."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
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 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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