We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashArray and Pure Storage FlashBlade based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Pure Storage FlashBlade came out ahead of Pure Storage FlashArray. Although both products are easy to deploy, with good support, and have brought positive ROI, our reviewers found Pure Storage FlashArray more expensive than its competitors and with more areas that need improvement.
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"One, it's easy to use and understand. You don't have to be an engineer or an expert to use this storage solution. That's the bad part of Dell PowerMAX. You have to go through very expensive education for one or two weeks and pay ten thousand dollars just to be able to use the product. With Pure Storage, you have a half-day workshop, and you know everything you need to know."
"The solution is scalable."
"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."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible."
"The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"The solution provides many controllers."
"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."
"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."
"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."
"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."
"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."
"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"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'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"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 fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"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."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."
"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."
"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."
"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."
"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."
"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."
"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."
"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."
Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews. Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VAST Data, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS. See our Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
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