We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The latency is good."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"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."
"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"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."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade."
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"It is on the expensive side."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"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."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"We need better data deduplication."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"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."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."
"Improvements can be made with respect to scalability."
"They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues. The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and Dell Unity XT, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and NetApp AFF.
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.
