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.
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"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 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."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash."
"AFF has improved my organization because we now have better performance. We can scale up and we can create servers a lot faster now. With the storage that we had, it used to take a lot longer, but now we can provide the business what they need a lot faster."
"Supports file formatting, the main protocols, and the hot swapping of disks and features."
"It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment."
"The file-based protocol supports NFS and CIFS."
"The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast."
"The ability to do SnapMirror or SnapVault for data resiliency and backup."
"The most important features are the IOPS and the ease of the ONTAP manageability."
"The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"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."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"In fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"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."
"I would like for them to develop the ability to detach the fabric pool. Once you've added it to an aggregate it's there for life and it would be nice to disconnect it if we ever had to."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."
"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."
"The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID."
"I really don't have anything to ask for in this regard, because we're not really pushing the envelope on any of our use cases. NetApp is really staying out ahead of all of our needs. I believe that there were firmware issues. I think it was just a mismatch of things that were going on. It could have possibly been something in the deployment process that wasn't done exactly right."
"You have a limit in terms of how much you can expand storage. It sounds like a lot. However, over the years, as you grow, it may be smaller than you think."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
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.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.