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 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."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The latency is good."
"The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning."
"Things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use."
"The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features."
"We just migrated two petabytes of data storage from IBM over to NetApp All Flash. Some of the performance improvement that we've seen is 100 times I/O and microsecond latency."
"The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments."
"It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"The technical support is very good."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"It is on the expensive side."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"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."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"The upgrade process could be a lot quicker, but it's still good as it is. The failovers and things like that are harder than expected."
"We have been seeing some challenges around the application layer implementation. We are having some teething problems now with the cooperation between the application layer and backups to things, like SnapCenter. This may be a question of product maturity."
"I would like it to be an IP as our network is mainly IP-based."
"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."
"The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions."
"Its integration could be improved."
"They should provide easier integration with multiple systems."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"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 had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
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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