NetApp AFF vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 5, 2022
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
281
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.9%, up from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashArray is 6.4%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
Unique Categories:
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
3.9%
No other categories found
 

Featured Reviews

Paul Pearson - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 25, 2022
Works well, is easy to implement, and has upgrade analysis capabilities
Currently, it's our tier-one storage. We use it mostly for our Oracle databases It has drastically improved the performance of our high-end Oracle databases and allows us the ability to replication to a DR location with ease. We love the product. Pure Storage works really well.  The CAT tool and…
PS
Nov 30, 2022
Great speed, easy to set up, and offers excellent throughput
We use the solution for virtualization. We run VMware on it Before running AFF we ran regular SAS Disk Arrays. NetApp AFF greatly improved the performance. The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate. The throughput is excellent. It's useful for running…
PH
Aug 2, 2021
Provides protection against ransomware threats with immutable snapshots, and it is well known for its scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades
I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings. Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. They can work on the price to make it more competitive.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"The latency is good."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."
"We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there."
"AFF has improved my organization because we now have better performance. We can scale up and we can create servers a lot faster now. With the storage that we had, it used to take a lot longer, but now we can provide the business what they need a lot faster."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do QoS."
"The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive."
"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."
"The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options."
"​It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment."
"Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid."
"I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"This solution is very scalable."
"It's actually very stable"
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"The software layer has to improve."
"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."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"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."
"We need better data deduplication."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"FC and ATTO bridges are still needed for cross datacenter replication."
"The monitor and performance need improvement. Right now we are using the active IQ OnCommand Unified Manager, but we also have to do the Grafana to do the performance and I hope we will be able to see the improvement of the active IQ in terms of the performance graph. It should also be more detailed."
"Customer service is one area of the product line where I would love to see improvement. I have had several vendor experiences with NetApp where I faced challenges in the initial call trying to navigate the requirements of the service level expectation. Their response could be better improved. However, the final result is great. It is just the initial support level where improvement would help to effectively solve problems."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"I would like to see an improvement in the high availability of the NFS and CIFS sharing during upgrade and patching; this would help to avoid downtime."
"We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad."
"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."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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 licensing is on a yearly basis."
"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."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"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."
"Using NetApp, our total cost of ownership decreased by 17%."
"NetApp AFF's pricing is competitive. It is not expensive or cheap. The tool's pricing is based on configurations and can cost around 150-160 dollars for 70 TB of storage."
"The pricing is competitive when we compare it to other products."
"Our TCO decreased significantly because we were paying maintenance on nine different arrays throughout the country. We've condensed those down to three arrays, and our maintenance fees from the IBM product dropped by over a half million dollars a year, saving us $500,000 USD."
"You need to be careful with the licensing since it can become expensive."
"I find the pricing to be reasonable, particularly with the recent inclusion of features like snap locking and ransomware protection within the ONTAP license instead of having them as separate licenses."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is good."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"It's a good price point and it's a solid product for the price."
"I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC."
"The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments."
"Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks."
"Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"It is a cheaper solution."
"Our costs are around $100,000."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 28, 2015
NetApp vs. XtremIO
Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
62%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Educational Organization
32%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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?
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 se...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products ...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...
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?
We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp AFF vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.