NetApp AFF A-Series vs Pure Storage FlashBlade comparison

NetApp and Pure Storage are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. NetApp is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.6, while Pure Storage is ranked #17 with an average rating of 9.0. Additionally, 100% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Pure Storage users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF A-Series and Pure Storage FlashBlade based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed NetApp AFF A-Series vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF A-Series vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

April 2025

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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

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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Raymond Ciscon

Senior Systems Engineer at MacLean-Fogg Company

Gives us the foundation to grow efficiently

We're a manufacturer. All of our ERP software is dependent upon fast performance and connection to this hardware. So when there was an issue years ago when something was wrong or slow, that prompted us to say, "Can we check storage? Can we check the network?" Ever since we've gone up to all-flash FAS systems, there's never any questions about performance when it comes to storage. There's been a huge leap from spinning disks to SSDs. I'm hoping with the next update, we'll go to NVMe and we'll have similar experiences. Last year, we refreshed the SAN at our headquarters. We signed a Keystone agreement with the ability to pay for storage as a service at an excellent price point yet still have the hardware on-prem. I manage the hardware, and, for me, it's the best of both worlds. We've just come up with a situation where, finally, after some time, we're going to need to buy some additional storage. In previous situations like this, it usually meant the purchase of an additional shelf at a large price. Now we have Keystone, and we're locked in at that price per tebibyte. We just have to say that we want to add 25 tebibytes and they take care of it. It's worked out really well. We work ISO 27001 certified. Since I manage the enterprise storage, we use SnapMirror, and we're currently using Veeam for backups. Thanks to what this tool provides, we are able to get through that portion of our certification without a problem. No changes, no rectifying. It's very slick. Our company's goals include maintaining a level of consistency. We're never going to be on the bleeding edge. We're never going to have the super fastest abilities. We want something that works, is easier for us to manage, and has a better growth path. For us, in the past, in the need for additional disk space, if we didn't do the sizing right in the first place, buying additional disks was incredibly expensive. Now, with Keystone, that's no longer an issue, and that's what we like.

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Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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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

"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."

"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."

"The solution is scalable."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The amazing thing is that whenever we have come up with an issue where we need to get something done, and it wasn't necessarily available, they could do things for us, usually within the next revision of the software."

"NetApp helps us get the fastest output."

"NetApp support is fantastic."

"NetApp's hot and cold storage are its most valuable features. We currently use the A series. Immutable snapshots are another advanced security feature that is positive."

"NetApp AFF A-Series is faster and more robust compared to the all-flash storage of NetApp."

"NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors."

"MetroCluster is the best product on the market. It synchronizes the storage. NetApp's update packages are a huge advantage because the firmware and server updates are in one package."

"We've reduced downtime. Without all of NetApp's benefits, we would have had to reconfigure parts of storage that would have required downtime. We have dramatically reduced our downtime through successive generations of NetApp, allowing us to get Five 9s availability."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"It's very easy-to-use."

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

"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."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

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

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

"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."

"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

"I really don't have a lot of complaints. In the past, there were issues, however, they've really done a great job of reaching out."

"NetApp is shifting to the cloud and adopting AI, but it is not improving its core technology to deliver faster storage. We're still waiting to see if it improves speed with solutions like the 90 series."

"NetApp AFF A-Series should work on cost. The solutions, especially enterprise-level storage, should be more affordable to improve their appeal to businesses."

"We have several problems with the limitations of NetApp systems in terms of volume shares. We have a brick in a 700 or a controller, and we sometimes make small volumes, but Kubernetes container volumes don't allow us."

"It would be helpful if our partner organized a yearly session with my team to discuss the new feature sets on our current solutions and other ways NetApp can help us. Perhaps we are missing some information to help us make the right decision."

"The solution's ransomware protection could be improved."

"Pricing could always be lower."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"The solution is expensive."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"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."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

No data available

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

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.

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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.

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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 ...

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What needs improvement with NetApp AFF A-Series?

Pricing could always be lower. That said, when calculating it all together, they are competitively priced. There are ...

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What advice do you have for others considering NetApp AFF A-Series?

Overall, I rate NetApp A-Series an eight out of ten. The main issue is the price. Technically, there is no concern wi...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp AFF A-Series?

Pricing is different among competitors, however, we use NetApp primarily due to the cost savings on compression and d...

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What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 30% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF A-Series

Compared 47% of the time

NetApp AFF C-Series vs NetApp AFF A-Series

Compared 33% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp AFF A-Series

Compared 20% of the time

More NetApp AFF A-Series Competitors

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 2% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

April 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

April 2025

Download NetApp AFF A-Series product report

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

April 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

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

NetApp AFF A-Series is ideal for high-performance storage in enterprise environments. It efficiently handles large-scale data and provides reliable storage for virtual machines, databases, and critical applications.

NetApp AFF A-Series stands out for its speed, reliability, and robust data protection features. Users find its management easy and appreciate the efficiency in handling large workloads. Its seamless integration with cloud services and high data transfer speeds with reduced latency enhance its appeal. Scalability and support for various applications make it a top choice for enterprises. However, there is room for improvement in documentation, technical support response time, and third-party application integration.

What are the standout features of NetApp AFF A-Series?

High Performance: Delivers fast data transfer speeds and reduces latency.
Data Protection: Robust features ensure data integrity and security.
Ease of Management: Simplified administration enhances efficiency.
Cloud Integration: Seamless integration with cloud services.
Scalability: Easily handles growing data and application demands.

What benefits should users look for?

Enhanced Efficiency: Streamlined management processes save time.
Increased Reliability: High reliability ensures continuous operation.
Improved Data Security: Advanced data protection features safeguard information.
Cost-Effective Scaling: Efficiently scales to meet growing storage needs.
Better Cloud Utilization: Leverages cloud capabilities for more flexibility.

NetApp AFF A-Series is implemented across industries to support virtual machines, large databases, and critical applications. It's particularly valuable in financial services for fast transaction processing, in healthcare for managing extensive patient records and imaging data, and in tech companies for supporting development environments and big data analytics.

NetApp

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.

Pure Storage

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Information Not Available

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF A-Series vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

April 2025

Free Report: NetApp AFF A-Series vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp AFF A-Series vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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