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Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs MinIO comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
Amazon EFS (Elastic File Sy...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Storage (13th), File and Object Storage (17th)
MinIO
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (9th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
reviewer2784675 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Technical Account Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Serverless file storage has simplified multi-tenant Linux workloads and supports effortless growth
When I started working with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), I faced a few issues. One issue was around the number of IOPS limitation. Initially, the number of IOPS that could be performed on the Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) file system was quite low. Later on, it has been increased, and now I believe it is at a level where only very specific workloads might not perform optimally, but otherwise everything should work smoothly. By the time I was there, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) was supporting NFS version 4.1, not 4.2. Currently, it is supported up to NFS 4.1. A notable limitation of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is that it does not support Windows. If your workload is running on a Linux operating system and you do not want to manage it or even understand NFS at all, you should still be able to use it fairly quickly. There are scenarios where Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) might not work effectively. For example, database-type workloads do not run properly on Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) because at the end of the day, it is a network file system and requests must travel from one place to another and then return. This process takes time, so if you are running a database-type workload, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) might not be the right approach, and you would need to look elsewhere.
Abdelrahim-Ahmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Provides good object storage functionalities
MinIO should provide an easier subscription model for companies that don't have a huge amount of data. Our company has a maximum of 100 terabytes of data. The solution should provide more bugging tools in the open-source version to encourage people to buy the support services. It's not an easy decision. If I go to the management and tell them that I need to buy a service, there should be an easier subscription model for companies that don't have huge amounts of data. For me, getting a subscription for 15,000 a year for a system already in production might be a bit hard. I think MinIO supports a minimum of one petabyte or 100 terabytes of data. Since we don't have such huge amounts of data, buying a subscription for the solution is a bit difficult. Hence, we're only using the open-source version for now. If MinIO becomes really crucial for our business, we could ask the management to get a subscription.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"You get what you pay for; it is expensive, but it really works, so I would really recommend using Pure Storage."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"In Pure Storage FlashArray, the dedupe and compression are excellent, and performance is good too."
"It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done."
"Biggest lesson learned: Why didn't I switch sooner?"
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is secure as it is used under VPC."
"The automatic scaling functionality has helped manage fluctuating workloads because when we have 10 gigs of data and a customer needs to put even 10 times the data, no action is required as it will grow automatically."
"Elastic File Systems allow me to share data, provision, and manage capacity and performance in AWS."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"We are not that big of a cloud user. We just use it for the storage of our bytes. The most valuable aspect is the storage."
"Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is an excellent service that provides a serverless solution with unlimited storage and easy configuration."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The productivity of the customer has improved by around 30% by using Amazon EFS instead of a unique EC2 NFS instance."
"I use the solution's basic object storage functionalities, like AWS S3 compatible APIs and creating buckets."
"Reliable erasure coding."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of management and administration."
"MinIO is easy to install and use, especially for standalone installations."
"I was using Amazon's S3 and nothing really seemed to work as well as this, until MinIO, the product is comparable."
"My advice for anybody who is implementing MinIO is to visit the website and view the documentation."
"Saves a lot of time in generating and managing documents."
"Nice web interface, easy to use, with a low memory footprint."
 

Cons

"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 system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"The only thing is that we've had to upgrade controllers a few times because we ended up wanting to use more stuff on here."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"The product's stability has some shortcomings where improvements are required."
"What should be improved in Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is the costing, as it should be reduced, but that depends on Amazon."
"Amazon EFS is more costly compared to other storage options available from AWS."
"EFS could be improved by including a one-click setup."
"The main challenge with EFS is its cost, which is slightly higher compared to EBS or S3."
"A notable limitation of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is that it does not support Windows."
"Around 80 percent of the features of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) are available on Linux and not in Windows, making it a major drawback of the product."
"Initially, the cost of storage seems to be small, but customer cost for the storage is really very high and this doesn't work for India."
"The product's initial setup phase is complex."
"MinIO should provide an easier subscription model for companies that don't have a huge amount of data."
"The Distributed User Interface (DUI) needs some work. It's hard to view a large set of data on the DUI. It's an issue with the DUI's performance."
"The MinIO dashboard is minimal as there are only a couple of features inside the dashboard for a basic user. I would like this to be more robust with more click-around features."
"The developer support could be better."
"We've had a few crashes because of excessive use. We struggled a little to learn where the problem was."
"The only downside I see is that you do not have a complete picture of an object."
"I think the product tends to be more oriented toward Kubernetes and lacks documentation for people who don't want to use it, so they could improve their documentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective..."
"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"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."
"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature."
"My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"The product charges are based on the amount of data stored."
"The solution's price is mid-ranged."
"The product's price depends on the services and the size and capacity at which it is used in a business environment."
"I would rate the pricing 7 out of 10."
"Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) offers a pay-as-you-go model, so whenever you use its services, you need to pay."
"The main challenge with EFS is its cost, which is slightly higher compared to EBS or S3. For one GB or ten GB of data, S3 is much cheaper. EFS could cost around $30 to $50 per month for similar usage."
"It has flexible pricing. You are charged based on your storage."
"This solution is open source so it is free."
"This is an open-source solution but I am using the licensed version."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"My company hasn't tried the version of the solution where we need to pay to use it."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"MinIO is a free open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
Which file storage system is better - Amazon EFS (elastic file storage) or Azure File Storage?
Amazon EFS is easy to set up: you can use the AWS management console, API, or command-line. Amazon EFS can grow to pe...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
We don't need to purchase it; we are just using it and paying Amazon as per the utilization. We make direct payments ...
What needs improvement with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
When I started working with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), I faced a few issues. One issue was around the number o...
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
What needs improvement with MinIO?
* Rolling upgrades, vs. upgrading and restarting all daemons at the same time, which is risky and impactful. * Remov...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Arcesium, Atlassian, Seeking Alpha, Zend
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs. MinIO and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
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