Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade comparison

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96% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Feb 22, 2023

We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashArray and Pure Storage FlashBlade based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users describe the deployment of the two products as easy and straightforward.
  • Features: Pure Storage FlashArray is a scalable and easy-to-use product with snapshots, management, compression, and deduplication listed as valuable features. The storage of the product needs to be improved, as well as the features for data reduction, reporting, and replication. Pure Storage FlashBlade is a stable solution with replication, disaster recovery and backup, compression, and deduplication listed as valuable features. Users state that the product should be more efficient and mature and improve its integration.
  • Pricing: Reviewers evaluate Pure Storage FlashArray as more expensive than its competitors. Although Pure Storage FlashBlade is a high-end product, users state that it is worth its price.

  • Service and Support: As the two products are by the company Pure Storage, users rate the provided support equally high, describing it as very good.
  • ROI: Pure Storage FlashArray brought its users a return on investment. Pure Storage FlashBlade brings different ROIs based on its use cases.

Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Pure Storage FlashBlade came out ahead of Pure Storage FlashArray. Although both products are easy to deploy, with good support, and have brought positive ROI, our reviewers found Pure Storage FlashArray more expensive than its competitors and with more areas that need improvement.

To learn more, read our detailed Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,415 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
"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.""Technical support has been helpful and responsive.""The solution is very straightforward to set up.""Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues.""The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.""The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature.""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.""One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

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"It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore.""It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.""The availability and ease of use are the big features.""This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds.""The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution.""This solution is very scalable.""Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use.""It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."

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"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good.""We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it.""Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage.""It performs well and it is also very fast.""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.""The main feature I have found to be product replication.""What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Pros →

Cons
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models.""Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe.""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.""I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center.""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.""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.""Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution.""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."

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"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI.""CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly.""Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography.""Currently, the solution fails to support file screening.""The initial setup of the product is complex.""On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial.""It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure.""The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."

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"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution.""The speed could be improved.""I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution.""It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology.""It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product.""I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now.""File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs.""The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade 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 →

  • "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 →

  • "We used a reseller for the purchase."
  • "Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."
  • "I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."
  • "Our licensing is renewed annually."
  • "Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."
  • "The price is a little high."
  • "In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."
  • "The price of this solution could be made more affordable."
  • More Pure Storage FlashBlade 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: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.
    Top Answer:The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is… more »
    Top Answer:Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
    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.

    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."

    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.

    Sample Customers
    Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Comms Service Provider14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization31%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Energy/Utilities Company12%
    University12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization36%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise26%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise42%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise45%
    Buyer's Guide
    Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews. Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VAST Data, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS. See our Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade 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.