Pure Storage FlashBlade vs SolidFire comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashBlade 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Pure Storage FlashBlade vs. SolidFire Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,246 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
"Support has been helpful.""It's actually very stable""Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed.""The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive.""It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive.""It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be.""I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity.""The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray."

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"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on.""Using this solution has made our backups more reliable.""The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective.""It's very easy-to-use.""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.""We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it.""Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features.""The product is scalable and easy to expand."

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"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it.""The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.""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.""It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady.""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.""SolidFire is one of the products that does have great APIs right out-of-the-box. It works great. The tools and the other stuff seem to work a little better right out-of-the-box than the ONTAP stuff does, C-Mode.""If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well.""It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."

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Cons
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration.""Storage. There could be better storage.""They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about.""We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM.""Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included.""Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable.""I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end.""They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."

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"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads.""I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution.""Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups.""It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release.""There could be improvements in public cloud integration.""The features provided for SMB customers are limited.""They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution.""In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

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"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is.""The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products.""We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us.""The technical support is really bad and has to be improved.""So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it.""One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued.""A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do.""I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."

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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 →

  • "We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"
  • "The price of this solution is more expensive than others."
  • "Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."
  • "On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."
  • "It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."
  • More SolidFire Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    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.
    Top Answer:The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance… more »
    Top Answer:It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for… more »
    Top Answer:There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This… more »
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.

    SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center and beyond. With SolidFire you can deploy new applications and capabilities faster, provide more agile and scalable infrastructure, increase application performance and predictability, enable automation and end-user self-service and raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

    Sample Customers
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
    California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks
    Top Industries
    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%
    University12%
    Energy/Utilities Company12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization36%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider27%
    Retailer20%
    Pharma/Biotech Company7%
    Transportation Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Real Estate/Law Firm6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise42%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise67%
    Buyer's Guide
    Pure Storage FlashBlade vs. SolidFire
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Pure Storage FlashBlade vs. SolidFire and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". 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 FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our Pure Storage FlashBlade vs. SolidFire 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.