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DDN IntelliFlash vs NetApp AFF comparison

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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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DDN IntelliFlash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
31st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (15th)
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
315
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 6.9%, up from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DDN IntelliFlash is 1.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 7.3%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp AFF7.3%
Everpure FlashArray6.9%
DDN IntelliFlash1.6%
Other84.2%
All-Flash Storage
 

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.
Anil Rahulwar - PeerSpot reviewer
L3 Storage Engineer at Capgemini
Good customer service and support and suitable for large environments
It is very easy to install. Users don't need to remember anything while deploying IntelliFlash because everything will be taken care of by tech support. They can easily modify the installation or change the password with the help of the tech support. It is very easy to integrate IntelliFlash with other solutions. We have plugins that can be integrated with other solutions. It will require maintenance. It is the same as any other storage solution: updates and upgrades, firmware upgrades, and drive upgrades.
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Synergy Computers
Unified storage has delivered efficient AI analytics and low latency for critical workloads
There might be some lag or response time with respect to support cases, but even then I will rate it 8.5 out of 10. All of this is the same for all product ranges, whether E-series, NetApp AFF, or FAS series, because they are very efficient to respond. The only reason I rated it 8.5 is because the warehouse for spare parts, when a problem comes, a spare is needed to replace it, for example, a disk. In Pakistan, they have only one warehouse in Karachi. This warehouse manages all the problems when a problem comes. They ship the part based on the customer use case and customer service request. That is the only reason I rate it 8.5 because they have only one warehouse in Pakistan, which is in Karachi. For example, if a problem comes in Islamabad, it will take time to deliver the spare because the part will be shipped from Karachi to Islamabad, which will take around maybe a day. Other OEMs have their warehouses in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi also. In terms of part replacement requirements, they are very efficient in that area because they have warehouses in multiple cities of Pakistan.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the speed of it, as it is much faster than anything that we can get from similar competitors, and the solution helps to simplify storage."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications."
"The support has been very good from Pure Storage FlashArray."
"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."
"We tested our VDI environment on this array and it performed flawlessly and boosted the user experience."
"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."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"After five years, the cost decreases over 30% and the performance increases over 50%."
"It has cut batch job runtime in half, so we're seeing performance improvement throughout the organization."
"With so much technological advancement and more coming, the world is their oyster."
"Ease of Use: Someone can learn it in only few hours Performance: Easy Tier is doing miracles Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome."
"For us, it's brilliant to have all the functionality that NetApp gives you out the box."
"The stability and performance over the years have been good."
"We are likely to consider them for our mission critical storage because we've been running on them now for eight years and they've been running our critical applications, so they've proven it to us."
"We have reduced latency from 100 milliseconds to just 1 millisecond."
"It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product."
"It's certainly better than our previous Pure Storage system."
"The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively."
 

Cons

"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"I would not say anything because we still do not use Everpure FlashArray fully."
"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."
"I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped to decrease the total cost of ownership, and I believe our total cost has probably gone up, but that's balanced by our increased amount of data and number of use cases."
"The solution needs an integrated NAS platform, file platform."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"I would say it's somewhat scalable, maybe not so much as some of the competition, but we don't really care."
"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."
"The solution as it is right now is not very stable. The stability seems to have eroded."
"When we did our upgrade, if we could have done it without doing a whole migration; the migration was painful."
"Technical support can be a little slow when it comes to escalating through levels of support."
"The front-end of ONTAP and its web UI could be improved."
"We do need, however, more training, which NetApp wasn't able to provide."
"There are no pNFS with VMware VVOLs."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"I would like to see them improve the GUI. It's not really AFF; it's across the board."
"Sometimes it's difficult to escalate correctly and get the right people involved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"The best features come included without any additional cost."
"Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less... It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace."
"We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars."
"The licensing is $100,000."
"I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."
"I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."
"I do not deal with pricing, but the pricing of NetApp and Dell seems pretty close. NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support."
"I understand the cost is less than many other storages of same/similar performance benchmark."
"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion."
"It definitely reduces costs because it simply takes less power to run these systems. While the SSDs don't take power, they are in general very big right now. So, the running cost has decreased for a lot of our customers."
"I am able to store two times more data than what I'm purchasing, which affects the way funds are being utilized."
"I would like it to be a lot less expensive, but it's been a very good solution for us."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive product, although not compared to other vendors."
"Our space savings through dedupe and compression is over 50 percent, so we are saving. I think our 8080s has 20TBs. We are saving at least 10TBs and that's over 50 percent of the capacity that we're using."
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees
Jan 28, 2015
NetApp vs. XtremIO
Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise242
 

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?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IntelliFlash?
It is a bit cheaper than other products, 10% to 20% cheaper.
What needs improvement with IntelliFlash?
DDN IntelliFlash should improve in terms of sales. In future releases, I look forward to more features about AI and M...
What is your primary use case for IntelliFlash?
We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways. They have large scalability and use more th...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about DDN IntelliFlash vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.