NetApp AFF vs Pure Storage FlashArray vs SolidFire comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF, Pure Storage FlashArray, and SolidFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage.
To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
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Questions from the Community
Top Answer:The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover… more »
Top Answer:I would rate the solution as an eight out of ten in terms of costliness.
Top Answer:There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class… more »
Top Answer:Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in the… more »
Top Answer:This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended cost… more »
Top Answer:The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matters… more »
Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure… more »
Top Answer:We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
Top Answer:We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
Top Answer:The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance… more »
Top Answer:It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for… more »
Top Answer:There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This… more »
Comparisons
Also Known As
Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
Learn More
Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.

NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.

AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.

AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.

NetApp AFF Benefits

  • Speed up your critical applications with lightning-fast end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays.
  • Increase Performance: AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
  • Save up to 95% of rack space and up to 85% of power and cooling cost over hybrid flash storage.
  • Reduce cost with guaranteed storage efficiency.
  • Realize even greater savings by tiering cold data to the cloud easily.
  • Simplify Operations on premises or in the cloud: Eliminate fragmented and redundant toolsets and combine visibility and manageability of storage instances with data services in a unified control plane across the hybrid cloud.

NetApp AFF Features

  • Expand capacity with nondisruptive scaling in a cluster without silos or data migration.
  • Manage data with the ultimate flexibility of unified support across different storage media and protocols, on premises or in the cloud.
  • Scale performance with technology innovations of NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP connectivity.
  • Safeguard your data with best-in-class data security, ransomware protection, multifactor admin access, secure multitenant shared storage, and in-flight and at-rest encryption.
  • Simplify backup and recovery with built-in application-consistent data protection.
  • Achieve business continuity and fast disaster recovery with zero data loss and zero downtime.
  • Scale out to 24 nodes, 367PB of effective capacity, and 4 million IOPS non-disruptively.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”

Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”

Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

  • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

  • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

Reviews from Real Users

Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."

PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center and beyond. With SolidFire you can deploy new applications and capabilities faster, provide more agile and scalable infrastructure, increase application performance and predictability, enable automation and end-user self-service and raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

Sample Customers
Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks
Top Industries
REVIEWERS
Computer Software Company25%
Financial Services Firm15%
Comms Service Provider15%
Manufacturing Company15%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Computer Software Company17%
Financial Services Firm13%
Manufacturing Company10%
Government6%
REVIEWERS
Healthcare Company15%
Financial Services Firm11%
Computer Software Company11%
Energy/Utilities Company8%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Educational Organization60%
Computer Software Company8%
Manufacturing Company6%
Financial Services Firm3%
REVIEWERS
Financial Services Firm19%
Healthcare Company12%
Manufacturing Company10%
Computer Software Company8%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Educational Organization32%
Computer Software Company12%
Manufacturing Company8%
Financial Services Firm8%
REVIEWERS
Comms Service Provider27%
Retailer20%
Construction Company7%
Computer Software Company7%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Financial Services Firm21%
Computer Software Company18%
Manufacturing Company8%
Real Estate/Law Firm6%
Company Size
REVIEWERS
Small Business37%
Midsize Enterprise27%
Large Enterprise37%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business23%
Midsize Enterprise17%
Large Enterprise61%
REVIEWERS
Small Business12%
Midsize Enterprise14%
Large Enterprise73%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business9%
Midsize Enterprise65%
Large Enterprise25%
REVIEWERS
Small Business27%
Midsize Enterprise16%
Large Enterprise57%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business17%
Midsize Enterprise41%
Large Enterprise42%
REVIEWERS
Small Business27%
Midsize Enterprise20%
Large Enterprise53%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business23%
Midsize Enterprise12%
Large Enterprise65%
Buyer's Guide
All-Flash Storage
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.