We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashArray and DNN IntelliFlash based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Pure Storage FlashArray came out ahead of DDN IntelliFlash. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found DDN IntelliFlash more difficult to deploy, with more capabilities for improvement, and with less reliable support.
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"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."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"It has good stability for our company."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"The tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC"
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"The software layer has to improve."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"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."
"It is on the expensive side."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."
"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."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 29th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of DDN IntelliFlash writes "Good features with an easy initial setup but technical support is slow ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". DDN IntelliFlash is most compared with VAST Data, NetApp AFF and Tintri VMstore, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN.
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