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.
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The latency is good."
"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."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"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."
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"It performs well and it is also very fast."
"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"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."
"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."
"The product is scalable and easy to expand."
"The solution provides many controllers."
"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"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."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"We need better data deduplication."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"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."
"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."
"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."
"I would like to see more deduplication."
"I have not seen ROI."
"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."
"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."
"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."
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 and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Pure Storage FlashArray vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
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