"We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN."
"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."
"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."
"Technical support has been okay."
"Technical support is good."
"Other manufacturers claim simplicity. In fact, frankly, they do have an advantage in that regard, however, they don't have the functionality. If you were to compare one of those products to NetApp, head to head from a feature perspective, NetApp would wind up in the top 10."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"It has a good interface. Its configuration and flexibility are also good."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments."
"The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"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."
"This solution is very scalable."
"In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented."
"The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"The admin tools and the integration with other products and clouds can be improved. It should also be easier to identify and troubleshoot problems in this solution. It takes a long time, and it should be improved."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"For ONTAP, in general, the deduplication ratio and Snapshot limitation are areas that need improvement. There is a global limitation on the number of Snapshots or clones that can be spun off of a particular Snapshot. If those limitations are increased, it might be helpful."
"Their backup software could be improved."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform. The idea is that they would run a basic NFS or CIF share from the controllers. FlashBlade is the powerhouse for File and Object storage, but if you don't need all that power, a lightweight file function would make FlashArrays more versatile."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
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NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 15 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 33 reviews. NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) writes "Provides us with quick options when restoring things for customers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Provides protection against ransomware threats with immutable snapshots, and it is well known for its scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades". NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is most compared with Dell EMC Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Dell EMC PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage and IBM FlashSystem, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN. See our NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
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