Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

DDN IntelliFlash vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
DDN IntelliFlash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
30th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (12th)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down 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 Pure Storage FlashArray is 6.3%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Anil Rahulwar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Nabeel Sayegh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supercharges enterprise storage by way of highly optimized hardware, comprehensive data management and a feature rich interface.
During their early years, I was a member of Pure's Customer Advisory Board. In addition, when we first adopted Pure, they did not have replication GA yet. We got into their beta testing program and help them work out certain issues with that technology. One weakness I can say the array has, still to this day, is limited control on scheduling snapshots. Depending on the type of replication schedule you are building, you may or may not have control on specifying the start time of a given replication schedule. This is not a very big problem in the grand scheme of things, but something nonetheless that has bothered me about the scheduler in general. Another area for improvement would be automatic host alias creation. Other platforms such as EMC Unity/PowerStore will automatically detect the host name, create a alias for it and associate the logged in HBA's to it. Pure does not do this for you and as a result, requires manual configuration. This can be very time consuming especially when you are deploying a large number of new servers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"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."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"They have a very good support system, and the GUI is also very intuitive."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"This solution is very scalable."
"One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
 

Cons

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"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."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"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."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"In future releases, I look forward to more AI features."
"Pure Storage had operational challenges between 2016 to 2018, impacting perceived reliability."
"The pricing needs to be improved as they offer very high budgeting prices. Searching is a big challenge in Pure Storage FlashArrays, especially when trying to restore a VM."
"It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"Pure Storage's logs could provide more visibility to the end-user. The logging algorithms are different from those of other vendors. For example, Cisco's logs provide extensive troubleshooting data, whereas Pure Storage logs offer limited information. We have to contact support to get more information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"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."
"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 VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"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."
"I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."
"I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."
"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
"The price was more favorable than Dell EMC."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.
851,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
32%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

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 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...
Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashArray?
We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
The cost of Pure Storage is subjective and determined by your environment. Pure Storage tends to be more expensive th...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about DDN IntelliFlash vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.