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.
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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.
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