NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs Pure Storage FlashBlade comparison

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

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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

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 NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 1.8%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

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.

Read full review

Tayo Olubanke

Managing Director at GCET

Offers flexibility and top-notch technology

You can go to bed peacefully if you have a NetApp. If you have NetApp within your data center, you get to know about power failure if you are using it. Your NetApp will still come alive. Even if it does not come alive, I can say that it is not like other tools when it comes to dealing with power failure. The tool is affordable, and the technology is top-notch. It is the only technology that has software for what we call inline compression and deduplication. All the products under NetApp are aiming to use AI. I know that you can achieve whatever you want to do with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

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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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."

"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."

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

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

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload."

"I like the performance aspect of EF Series. It basically provides everything that we are looking for as a solution, very low latency and very high performance."

"Rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas."

"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."

"I would have to say performance at this point, because the application it is based on is so diverse."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its speed."

"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays pros

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

Cons

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

"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."

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"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."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"As far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve."

"The management interface, while very reliable, it seems a little old now and could maybe use a little modernization."

"The pricing could be cheaper and it should have documentation in more languages, specifically, Russian."

"NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate."

"I would like to see higher-capacity drives, as they come out; I have heard that 15 TB are out on a different NetApp series. Getting those on the EFs would be nice."

"We have used IBM previously. We found that the storage from IBM was poor and we chose NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays because it can scale very easily."

"The price of the All Flash solution is very high."

"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays cons

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"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."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"Its configuration should be easier."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"The product is expensive."

"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."

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The pricing of this solution is competitive with other vendors here in Egypt."

"Most of my customers pay for the license on a yearly basis. It can be expensive depending on the capacity number."

"It's a way to get relatively low-cost, very high-performance, low-latency block storage as a point solution."

"Price-wise, NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is costlier than Dell. You have to buy a lot of licenses separately."

"Its cost-effectiveness is a major selling point. Compared to other storage vendors, the EF-Series offers excellent value for its price. It's truly a leading product in the industry."

"Cheaper pricing is always good. NetApp has been doing everything the right way. They've been figuring out things really well, going in the right direction."

"The price point for EF is considerably lower than the alternatives."

"The pricing of the solution is expensive, considering the initial investment required...At the end of the product's life cycle, it could get cheaper, but the initial investment in NetApp makes it one of the most expensive solutions."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays pricing and cost advice

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"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."

"The price could be cheaper."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

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

"The product is very expensive."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

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

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

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Manufacturing Company

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.

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.

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 do you like most about NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

One has to opt for a perpetual-based licensing model for one year or three years. After three years, you need to rene...

What needs improvement with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

The support of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. I want NetApp's supp...

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...

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...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparisons

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 EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 33% of the time

NetApp AFF vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 15% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 10% of the time

Dell XtremIO vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 10% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 9% of the time

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Download NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays product report

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Also Known As

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

NetApp EF540, NetApp EF-Series

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

The NetApp EF560 all-flash array is an all-SSD storage system for applications that demand extremely high levels of performance and reliability. Requiring just 2U of rack space, the EF560 all-flash array combines extreme IOPS, microsecond response times, and up to 12GBps of bandwidth with leading, enterprise-proven availability features.

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

RP Data, Western Oregon University, Toei Animation

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

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade