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.
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively."
"The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive."
"The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast."
"Over the past 18 years, it has been extremely easy to upgrade to newer products and technology. We can upgrade as we move along. So, we have been able to keep up with the newest technology with zero downtime."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use."
"It has a good interface. Its configuration and flexibility are also good."
"NetApp tech support is so good. Their tech support has always been so stable and the people are so good in case of any failure or any good feature that needs to be updated or features that supposedly can help with performance to improve some performance. NetApp support is one of the best that I deal with."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten."
"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We need better data deduplication."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"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."
"To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"I would like to see aggregate level encryption in the next release. This is critical."
"The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions."
"I think adding more features to make it more cloud enabled will help us with cloud tiering and simplify the whole cloud operations when it's integrating with our on-prem AFF products. That is one area where we would like to see more improvements from NetApp."
"The price could be better."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"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."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"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 price should be lower."
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.
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