DDN IntelliFlash vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays comparison

DDN IntelliFlash vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DDN IntelliFlash is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Anil Rahulwar

Storage Engineer at Movate

Good customer service and support and suitable for large environments

It is very easy to install. Users don't need to remember anything while deploying IntelliFlash because everything will be taken care of by tech support. They can easily modify the installation or change the password with the help of the tech support. It is very easy to integrate IntelliFlash with other solutions. We have plugins that can be integrated with other solutions. It will require maintenance. It is the same as any other storage solution: updates and upgrades, firmware upgrades, and drive upgrades.

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Tayo Olubanke

Managing Director at GCET

Offers flexibility and top-notch technology

You can go to bed peacefully if you have a NetApp. If you have NetApp within your data center, you get to know about power failure if you are using it. Your NetApp will still come alive. Even if it does not come alive, I can say that it is not like other tools when it comes to dealing with power failure. The tool is affordable, and the technology is top-notch. It is the only technology that has software for what we call inline compression and deduplication. All the products under NetApp are aiming to use AI. I know that you can achieve whatever you want to do with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"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."

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."

"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."

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"

"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."

"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."

"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."

"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."

"We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways."

"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"

More DDN IntelliFlash pros

"The speed is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access."

"The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our data bases."

"I would have to say performance at this point, because the application it is based on is so diverse."

"The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload."

"The main advantage of this solution is performance."

"We do a lot of in-house, application-dependent type things, where we find the different niches to the different things. Certain things they do better. We've found that it actually does very well on some of our higher-end applications."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays pros

Cons

"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"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."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

"We need better data deduplication."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."

"In future releases, I look forward to more AI features."

"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."

"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."

"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."

"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."

"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."

"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."

More DDN IntelliFlash cons

"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."

"We have used IBM previously. We found that the storage from IBM was poor and we chose NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays because it can scale very easily."

"There could be better integration with some of our Cisco products."

"NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate."

"It needs a better management tool."

"This solution does not have any compression or deduplication."

"I would like to see higher-capacity drives, as they come out; I have heard that 15 TB are out on a different NetApp series. Getting those on the EFs would be nice."

"There could be an improvement when it comes to SLA support, it could be faster."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"The product is expensive."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."

"I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."

"It's a lot cheaper than what the other vendors have for the same type of environment. It saves us money."

"Its cost-effectiveness is a major selling point. Compared to other storage vendors, the EF-Series offers excellent value for its price. It's truly a leading product in the industry."

"They need to improve its pricing. The storage market is dying. So, they need to improve the price because it should reach all people. NetApp is one of the top ones, and they are charging a little bit of royalty as compared to other storage solutions."

"Adding more capacity will increase the cost."

"he price point that we're getting is very competitive in the market. Since we are buying in such a large quantity, they gave us a huge discount."

"The pricing of the solution is expensive, considering the initial investment required...At the end of the product's life cycle, it could get cheaper, but the initial investment in NetApp makes it one of the most expensive solutions."

"The pricing of this solution is competitive with other vendors here in Egypt."

"This solution is not available to many users because the cost is very expensive."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Real Estate/Law Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IntelliFlash?

It is a bit cheaper than other products, 10% to 20% cheaper.

What needs improvement with IntelliFlash?

DDN IntelliFlash should improve in terms of sales. In future releases, I look forward to more features about AI and M...

What is your primary use case for IntelliFlash?

We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways. They have large scalability and use more th...

What do you like most about NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

One has to opt for a perpetual-based licensing model for one year or three years. After three years, you need to rene...

What needs improvement with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

The support of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. I want NetApp's supp...

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparisons

Compared 29% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

VAST Data vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 32% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 22% of the time

NetApp AFF vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 17% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 14% of the time

More DDN IntelliFlash Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 28% of the time

NetApp AFF vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 15% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 13% of the time

Dell XtremIO vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 11% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 9% of the time

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Competitors

Product Reports

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

DDN IntelliFlash

Download DDN IntelliFlash product report

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Download NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays product report

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series

NetApp EF540, NetApp EF-Series

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.

Pure Storage

Western Digital through its IntelliFlash arrays delivers high-performance storage with a complete range of features and connectivity options, including inline compression and deduplication, application and VM consistent snapshots, replication, RAID, data encryption, VMware vCenter integration, and multi-protocol support for SAN (FC, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS, SMBv3). IntelliFlash arrays deliver high availability through dualredundant and hot-swappable components, active/active or active/passive controllers, non-disruptive software upgrades, eMLC flash, and proactive cloud-based monitoring, analytics, and intelligence. A RESTful API provides scripted or programmatic control.

DataDirect Networks

The NetApp EF560 all-flash array is an all-SSD storage system for applications that demand extremely high levels of performance and reliability. Requiring just 2U of rack space, the EF560 all-flash array combines extreme IOPS, microsecond response times, and up to 12GBps of bandwidth with leading, enterprise-proven availability features.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University

RP Data, Western Oregon University, Toei Animation

DDN IntelliFlash vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays