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.
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"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 standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The solution is scalable."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"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"
"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 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."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"The performance is very good."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"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."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"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."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"They could improve the price."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
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, Tintri VMstore T7000 and NetApp AFF, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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