Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade comparison

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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: November 2023).
746,723 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
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle.""The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone.""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 has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.""It has good, reliable, fast storage.""Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model.""Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues.""The solution is very straightforward to set up."

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"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity.""The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring.""The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster.""The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are management and administration user-friendliness, provisioning, and performance.""The availability and ease of use are the big features.""The scalability is good.""The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions.""We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."

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"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective.""The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services.""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.""The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great.""The solution provides many controllers.""The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time.""The product is scalable and easy to expand.""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."

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Cons
"It is on the expensive side.""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.""They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage.""We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly.""Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe.""There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product.""We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI.""The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

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"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release.""We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance.""It was not proactive communication.""The price of the solution can improve.""The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release.""Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution.""Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features.""Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."

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"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket.""I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now.""It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that.""It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release.""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.""An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems.""The features provided for SMB customers are limited.""I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Cons →

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 support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
  • "Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
  • "Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
  • More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
  • "The best features come included without any additional cost."
  • "We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves."
  • "The price of the solution is not expensive."
  • "There are no licensing fees or other costs."
  • "There are no licensing fees aside from the support."
  • "It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure."
  • "The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I feel that the price could always be lowered."
  • "Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."
  • "It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."
  • "The price could be cheaper."
  • "The product is very expensive."
  • "I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."
  • More Pure Storage FlashBlade Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
    Top Answer:Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products.
    Top Answer:Given its price, Pure is not the first option. If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data… 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:Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature.
    Top Answer:Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company.
    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.

    Offer
    Learn more about Pure FlashArray X NVMe
    Learn more about Pure Storage FlashArray
    Learn more about Pure Storage FlashBlade
    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 Company26%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Manufacturing Company16%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization34%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Energy/Utilities Company12%
    University12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization36%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise60%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise56%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise43%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise42%
    Large Enterprise44%
    Buyer's Guide
    Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade
    November 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade and other solutions. Updated: November 2023.
    746,723 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 35 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 9 reviews. Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "User-friendly, fast performance, good data compression and deduplication capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "Immutable snapshots, great performance, and simple and easy replication". Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and Dell Unity XT, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), MinIO, VAST Data, 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.