Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

NetApp NVMe AFF A800 vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
NetApp NVMe AFF A800
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
18th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (8th)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashArray is 6.3%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
Tanveer Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable solution that serves as a storage for the cloud services opted by organizations
My company uses NetApp NVMe AFF A800 as storage for our cloud The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O. The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better. I don't expect to see additional…
Nabeel Sayegh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supercharges enterprise storage by way of highly optimized hardware, comprehensive data management and a feature rich interface.
During their early years, I was a member of Pure's Customer Advisory Board. In addition, when we first adopted Pure, they did not have replication GA yet. We got into their beta testing program and help them work out certain issues with that technology. One weakness I can say the array has, still to this day, is limited control on scheduling snapshots. Depending on the type of replication schedule you are building, you may or may not have control on specifying the start time of a given replication schedule. This is not a very big problem in the grand scheme of things, but something nonetheless that has bothered me about the scheduler in general. Another area for improvement would be automatic host alias creation. Other platforms such as EMC Unity/PowerStore will automatically detect the host name, create a alias for it and associate the logged in HBA's to it. Pure does not do this for you and as a result, requires manual configuration. This can be very time consuming especially when you are deploying a large number of new servers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"I appreciate the performance."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"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."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The most valuable features are stability and performance."
"NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally."
"Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time."
"The storage features are valuable."
"Low latency is the most valuable feature."
"During the use cases of the solution, its reliability and suitability are the best."
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"They have a very good support system, and the GUI is also very intuitive."
"The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"Access speed and power consumption are most valuable."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity."
"With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration."
"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
 

Cons

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"The software layer has to improve."
"It is on the expensive side."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"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."
"The product’s UI could be better."
"The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative."
"The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best."
"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach."
"The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less."
"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
"The product is expensive."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."
"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."
"I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten."
"There are licenses for the use of this solution, such as commercial licenses."
"Though NetApp NVMe AFF A800 may seem like a highly-priced product, it is not extremely expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"Considering the requirements and the situation, I don't feel that this is an expensive product."
"Pure came in at a better price point than EMC and performed better than Compellent."
"In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides."
"No storage device is cheap, but Pure Storage is fairly priced and offers what you pay for. You get all the licenses in the future when you purchase a license."
"The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments."
"There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"The solution is expensive."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.
852,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
22%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
9%
Educational Organization
32%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
What do you like most about NetApp NVMe AFF A800?
The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp NVMe AFF A800?
Though NetApp NVMe AFF A800 may seem like a highly-priced product, it is not extremely expensive.
What needs improvement with NetApp NVMe AFF A800?
The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better. I don't expect to s...
Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashArray?
We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't have the billing details right now, but the pricing is high.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp NVMe AFF A800 vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
852,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.