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 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."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"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."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"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."
"Supports file formatting, the main protocols, and the hot swapping of disks and features."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"If you need a replacement part, they will provide it."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."
"The most important features are the IOPS and the ease of the ONTAP manageability."
"Efficient and easily scalable all-flash storage solution, significantly reducing latency, optimizing data management, and providing cost savings for businesses"
"NetApp is like a one-point central management. For example, one can put everything on the right version and control the whole environment from one software solution."
"We use the NFS and SIP protocols a lot. The NFS is the most valuable feature."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"The performance is very good."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"In fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"The software layer has to improve."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"I've had a few cases where support wasn't able to answer the question or they took quite a while."
"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."
"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
"The product has size limitations on fax volume. They have increased from 100 to 300, which is still less than other vendors. Or flex groups are not supported."
"Higher communication: I love the professional services and I love everything that everyone's able to offer us, but I find sometimes we're not aware of all the things that NetApp can do."
"Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use."
"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."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"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."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
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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