NetApp NVMe AFF A800 vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp NVMe AFF A800 and Pure Storage FlashArray 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 NVMe AFF A800 vs. Pure Storage FlashArray Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate.""One of the best features is the support, which is excellent.""The solution is very straightforward to set up.""The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes.""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.""It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems.""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.""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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pros →

"The storage features are valuable.""During the use cases of the solution, its reliability and suitability are the best.""Low latency is the most valuable feature.""The most valuable features are stability and performance.""The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O.""You can easily scale up, and scale-out.""Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time.""We find the product to be very flexible."

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"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy.""Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive.""The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring.""It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.""Technical support is good.""The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond.""The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes.""Cost, racial per terabyte, and speed is why we chose PureStorage. It was no brainer."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Pros →

Cons
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe.""In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified.""It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking.""The UI for this solution needs to be improved.""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.""Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient.""There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product.""The software layer has to improve."

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"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach.""The technical support has room for improvement.""Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best.""The initial setup is complex.""Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve""The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less.""Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial.""The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative."

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"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end.""It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them.""If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it.""A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption.""I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS.""It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive.""A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement.""It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."

More Pure Storage FlashArray 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."
  • "We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
  • "With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
  • "Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
  • "As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
  • "They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
  • "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."
  • "The licensing is on a yearly basis."
  • More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Considering the requirements and the situation, I don't feel that this is an expensive product."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • "There are licenses for the use of this solution, such as commercial licenses."
  • "I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten."
  • "Though NetApp NVMe AFF A800 may seem like a highly-priced product, it is not extremely expensive."
  • More NetApp NVMe AFF A800 Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
  • "There is always room for negotiation."
  • "The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
  • "It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
  • "For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
  • "We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
  • "It is a cheaper solution."
  • "Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover… more »
    Top Answer:I would rate the solution as an eight out of ten in terms of costliness.
    Top Answer:There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O.
    Top Answer:Though NetApp NVMe AFF A800 may seem like a highly-priced product, it is not extremely expensive.
    Top Answer:The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better. I don't expect to see… more »
    Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure… more »
    Top Answer:We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
    Top Answer:We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
    NetApp NVMe, AFF A800
    Learn More
    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.

    Your data is a gold mine. Get the most out of it - faster - with AFF A800. Designed for NVMe media, further accelerated with NVMe/FC connectivity to the host, AFF A800 all-flash systems deliver an incredible sub-200 microsecond latency. Providing more than 11.4M IOPS and 300GB/s throughput in a single cluster, AFF A800 redefines the limit of what’s possible with artificial intelligence and deep learning.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

    Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

    Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

    • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

    • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

    PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "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."

    PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

    Sample Customers
    Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
    Information Not Available
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider15%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company22%
    Real Estate/Law Firm11%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    University11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization32%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise37%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business10%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise42%
    Buyer's Guide
    NetApp NVMe AFF A800 vs. Pure Storage FlashArray
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp NVMe AFF A800 vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 17th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is rated 8.8, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of NetApp NVMe AFF A800 writes "Very easy to manage, highly stable and offers robustness of the CLI, API, and GUI ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Dell PowerMax NVMe, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and IBM FlashSystem, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN. See our NetApp NVMe AFF A800 vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.

    See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.

    We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.