DDN IntelliFlash vs Pure Storage FlashBlade comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between DDN IntelliFlash and Pure Storage FlashBlade 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).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels.""The technical support is very good.""The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution.""The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple.""It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.""Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications.""Provides fast access and is user-friendly.""We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform."

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"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome.""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's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust.""It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression.""The initial setup is straightforward.""It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."

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"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on.""The initial setup is pretty easy and simple.""The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great.""I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good.""It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless.""The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there.""We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it.""The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

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Cons
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity.""It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive.""I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS.""Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing.""Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex.""I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works.""It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure.""We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."

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"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition.""Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible.""It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element.""They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution.""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.""Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."

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"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product.""I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now.""Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes.""It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release.""I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution.""I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads.""The features provided for SMB customers are limited.""File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
  • "There is always room for negotiation."
  • "The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
  • "It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
  • "For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
  • "We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
  • "It is a cheaper solution."
  • "Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • More DDN IntelliFlash Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We used a reseller for the purchase."
  • "Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."
  • "I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."
  • "Our licensing is renewed annually."
  • "Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."
  • "The price is a little high."
  • "In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."
  • "The price of this solution could be made more affordable."
  • More Pure Storage FlashBlade Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    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.
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    Top Answer:The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is… more »
    Top Answer:Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series
    Learn More
    Overview

    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."

    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.

    FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

    Sample Customers
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University
    ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization32%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    University8%
    Healthcare Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    University12%
    Energy/Utilities Company12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization36%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise42%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business67%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise17%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise68%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise45%
    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.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 28th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 30 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. 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 FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". DDN IntelliFlash is most compared with VAST Data, NetApp AFF, Tintri VMstore, Dell Unity XT and DDN SFA7990X, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS.

    See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.

    We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.