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NetApp FAS Series vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
1.0
Organizations reduced costs and improved performance with Pure FlashArray X NVMe, achieving quick ROI and efficient resource management.
Sentiment score
5.8
NetApp FAS Series offers efficient storage, cost savings, and satisfaction, especially in VMware environments, despite high expansion costs.
Sentiment score
3.9
Pure Storage FlashArray offers cost-efficient performance and management, reducing labor, enhancing data compression, and providing long-term value.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
If you have the configuration well maintained and configured, you should have good efficiency and compression for the clients and for yourself.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
We have seen a return on investment as the solution has reduced resource requirements, allowing less experienced personnel to manage the storage.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe's technical support is praised for responsiveness, despite occasional follow-up issues, earning high customer satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.3
NetApp FAS Series customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, though regional availability and resolution streamlining can improve.
Sentiment score
8.0
Pure Storage FlashArray's customer service is proactive, knowledgeable, and responsive, earning high satisfaction and reliability from clients.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Pure has good storage.
Sometimes, the support was inadequate because the initial architecture was poorly defined.
We are also using it ourselves for the SAN and CIFS protocol.
They often provide basic solutions, such as suggesting a failover or a power cycle, which are not the sophisticated solutions we expect from a vendor.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
The support from Pure Storage is excellent.
Opening a case with Pure is a smooth process, and they prove to be reliable, even in severe cases where infrastructure issues arise.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers scalable storage with low latency, easy upgrades, though capacity customization and high costs are noted.
Sentiment score
7.4
NetApp FAS Series offers seamless scalability, integrating old and new components for medium to large enterprises despite potential cost issues.
Sentiment score
7.4
Pure Storage FlashArray offers seamless scalability and flexibility with non-disruptive upgrades, benefiting diverse environments across multiple expansions.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages.
We normally avoid current versions and use versions that have been running for at least two months in client usage before updating drivers.
NetApp FAS Series is scalable, and it is possible, but you need to pay.
The NetApp FAS Series is scalable and offers numerous solutions, but only if customers are willing to invest in the shelves.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
The solution is highly scalable, particularly when there is a need to expand capacity.
I rate FlashArray's scalability nine out of 10.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Pure Storage offers exceptional stability and reliability with outstanding support, consistently achieving high user ratings for performance and service.
Sentiment score
8.0
The NetApp FAS Series is praised for stability and reliability, with users noting minimal issues and high performance.
Sentiment score
8.3
Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for reliability, minimal downtime, seamless upgrades, and excellent performance under high-demand conditions.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
When panic occurs on the node, it reboots itself, and we have experienced numerous hardware-related issues.
Most things are tailor-made, and we avoid downtimes even with primitive CLI commands.
For stability, I rate it a ten out of ten.
I have not encountered any significant issues, such as applying firmware that introduces bugs.
Stability has never been an issue except for minor controller glitches causing failover events, similar to brakes and tires on a car.
 

Room For Improvement

Pure FlashArray X requires cost-effective improvements in UI, integration, cloud features, multitenancy, analytics, backup, AI, and scalability.
NetApp FAS Series needs enhancements in flexibility, pricing, integration, performance, documentation, support, virtualization, and scalability to address user concerns.
Pure Storage FlashArray needs scalability, unified management, integrations, enhanced features, cost-effectiveness, and improved performance, analytics, and documentation.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment.
Storage companies should create encrypted storage solutions between the OS and storage to protect against ransomware attacks.
Nutanix leads the business in this approach, and I feel that NetApp is missing some aspects, such as CPU, GPU, and RAM, in its AI portfolio.
There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers see Pure FlashArray X NVMe as a justified premium investment due to performance and comprehensive licensing.
NetApp FAS Series is pricey but offers good ROI and savings through bundled licensing, with support impacting overall costs.
Pure Storage FlashArray is costly but offers high value with performance, support, and upgrades, ideal for high-performance needs.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
I would give it a nine out of ten in terms of costliness.
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable.
They're expensive.
While they say it's free, we actually pay for support upfront.
The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price.
 

Valuable Features

Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers exceptional performance, reliability, scalability, and seamless VMware integration, enhancing workload efficiency and user experience.
NetApp FAS Series excels in high availability, integration, and efficient storage solutions, featuring robust disaster recovery and unified storage.
Pure Storage FlashArray offers impressive data reduction, speed, and ease of use, with strong integration, scalability, and customer support features.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
While NVMe disks are expensive and require three disks for parity calculations, hard drives in NetApp FAS Series are inexpensive, making it more cost-efficient per GB, even with RAID tech implementation.
Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k.
One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments.
FlashArray's integration with the Pure One instrument provides a centralized platform for efficient management of all arrays.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
It handles internal data migration seamlessly in the background without going offline, achieving a hundred percent uptime.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (14th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
NetApp FAS Series
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (3rd), NAS (3rd), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (1st)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
202
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
 

Q&A Highlights

DR
Jun 01, 2022
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
Srikanth Purushothaman - PeerSpot reviewer
Has supported long-term data protection and backup while requiring better part availability and pricing options
For monitoring purposes, we normally use flash access storage exclusively. We utilize a hybrid system because we need performance, combining NL-SAS for the volume and SAS flash to use as a fast cache system that provides more IOPS. We normally implement RAID 10, which we prefer over RAID 6's n plus 2 combinations. We utilize it for data redundancy, even with write intensity on. Regarding the unified storage architecture for NetApp FAS Series, we normally opt for exclusivity unless budget constraints exist. Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k. The high performance ensures minimal latency. An advantage we've seen with NetApp FAS Series is that snapshots provide very rapid backup and fast recovery. We basically use snapshots for data protection as first-level protection, with deduplication between the two storages serving as second-level protection.
Parul-Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Expands capacity and requires minimal management
The main drawback is the support. I’ve been working for four years without a local representative, and although I’ve submitted many requests, nothing has changed. They sometimes call me in the middle of the night, even though I’ve informed them about my working hours. I often raise cases to speak with someone directly because I prefer to discuss issues over the phone rather than via email. I specifically request them to call me when I open a ticket, but they continually reply by email instead. This ongoing situation has been very frustrating in terms of the support I receive. As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs. Whenever an issue arises, a ticket is opened for us. While I'm glad they take this step, it can be frustrating. They inform me, “Hey, we opened this ticket for you. It’s critical. Call me so we can discuss what’s going on.” However, as a product manager for my institution, I don’t have access to the logs, which are withheld due to, as they say, proprietary code. I understand that, but I have been working in storage for many years and am not new to this field. In fact, I spent 17 years at IBM Storage, dealing with large enterprise systems, not just small vendor products. I wish I could access the normal logs to diagnose issues myself, rather than relying solely on their information. Before I can escalate issues or open a checklist, I need to have a clear understanding of what’s happening based on the logs. Sometimes the situation feels rushed, and I end up having to push my support team for answers. There are moments when I feel like I’m left in the dark about the log details until I actually call them for clarification. It can be quite challenging. Pure Storage can improve FlashArray by providing more logging visibility to customers. Currently, there is no log visibility. They could include an audit log, but I cannot see any system logs when problems occur.
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Answers from the Community

DR
Jun 1, 2022
Jun 1, 2022
I think they are different types of storage for different purposes. If you are looking for a storage where to put backups data you can think Data Domain is the perfect choice because it is its main use (most or all the backup softwares have plugins in ordere to manage data domains). If you are looking for a primary storage (where to put your servers' data) then you can look to Netapp FAS and Pu...
2 out of 3 answers
GL
May 31, 2022
I think they are different types of storage for different purposes. If you are looking for a storage where to put backups data you can think Data Domain is the perfect choice because it is its main use (most or all the backup softwares have plugins in ordere to manage data domains). If you are looking for a primary storage (where to put your servers' data) then you can look to Netapp FAS and Purestorage. The latter are flash natives so it's simpler to manage and configure. If you look at the Netapp FAS you can also choose storages with HDDs with less performance (and a cheaper price). 
MS
May 31, 2022
@Dhruba Roy, your question conflates very different kinds of storage.  PowerProtect DD is Dell's latest version of Data Domain. It is ONLY useful as target storage for backups. Nothing else, not even archiving. If that is what you want, it does what it's supposed to do. Albeit, it's a bit pricey and underperforming.  There are much faster, cheaper, and more advanced backup target storage. Especially when measuring restore performance. I would suggest you take a hard look at a variety of backup target storage vendors including, Infinidat InfiniGuard, ExaGrid, Quantum, StorONE, iXsystems, and many more. Most backup target storage is all HDD although some are hybrid SSD and HDD. NetApp FAS is a general-purpose storage system for blocks and files. It can be all HDD, hybrid HDD and SSD, or all SSD (all-flash FAS or AFF). It's a solid all around storage system with NetApp pioneered capabilities, but expensive as a backup storage target.  Pure Storage FlashArray//X or //C are block all-flash storage arrays. Their FlashBlades are all flash file and object storage systems. Good performers but overkill and way too expensive for backup target storage. I think you need to define what it is you really need. Of the 3 vendors you asked about, I am going to repeat myself, PowerProtect DD is ONLY useful as a target storage for backups. The other two can do so, but are really not priced nor designed specifically for backup target storage.  If general purpose storage is what you need NetApp and PureStorage are good possibilities among many others.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business60
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise137
 

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 price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...
Which SAN product would you choose: IBM FlashSystem (FS9500) vs PureFlash Array/X NVMe vs PureFlash Array/XL NVMe?
Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable be...
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?
I don't have the billing details right now, but the pricing is high.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp FAS Series vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.