We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashArray and SolidFire 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."The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"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."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"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."
"Performance is the most valuable feature."
"One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is."
"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us."
"SolidFire has seamless performance for the nodes and extensions. I also like the tool’s scalability. The product’s performance does not get affected when we scale either up or down. This is not the case with other products."
"Greater IOPS, speed, it's all-flash. So seeing that everything is going to all-flash, all SSDs, SolidFire fits right in there with the emerging trend in IT."
"We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."
"It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."
"The scalability and being able to implement it quickly."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"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."
"It is on the expensive side."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"We need better data deduplication."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform. The idea is that they would run a basic NFS or CIF share from the controllers. FlashBlade is the powerhouse for File and Object storage, but if you don't need all that power, a lightweight file function would make FlashArrays more versatile."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products."
"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."
"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
"The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity."
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
"One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued."
"So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it."
"For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there."
Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our Pure Storage FlashArray vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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