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Pure Storage FlashArray vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (16th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (7th)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
197
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
VMware vSAN
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
229
Ranking in other categories
HCI (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

All-Flash Storage
HCI
 

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.
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.
Lipaz Hessel - PeerSpot reviewer
Expensive solution that requires professional services for installation and implementation
I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware. Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware. That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."
"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."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
"I appreciate the ease of provisioning storage on Pure Storage FlashArray."
"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."
"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."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"Pure Storage FlashArray simplifies maintenance and management with its intuitive GUI, making storage allocation and other processes easy to understand, even for beginners."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. The capacity of the system is quite constant so it's got some of the good features."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"The most valuable features are its price point and that you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed."
 

Cons

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"The software layer has to improve."
"The price could be better."
"I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"A noticeable area for improvement is the support for object storage. The FlashArray does not natively support object storage like S3 or Swift, which pushes customers needing these features towards the more expensive FlashBlade."
"The solution is not cheap."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."
"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 support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The product is expensive."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks."
"I would prefer that they lower their pricing."
"Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure."
"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."
"It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models."
"Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
"It is cheap. It is $0.02 a gig."
"The product's price has been increasing lately...VMware vSAN is expensive."
"The vSAN licensing is not an inexpensive product. It does cost more than hypervisor."
"The vSAN is somewhat expensive to license."
"The licensing cost is high and should be taken into account."
"It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
52%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

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?
Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive.
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?
Pure Storage FlashArray is a premium product, but the introduction of the C-series has been a strategic move to make ...
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
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