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HPE Primera vs Pure Storage FlashArray 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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
HPE Primera
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pure Storage FlashArray
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
4th
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 August 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Primera is 3.8%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashArray is 6.6%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
Taufeeq Rauf - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a simple user interface and is useful for data replication
I use HPE Primera for mission-critical applications. My company uses the product as a storage solution for our machines. The availability of HPE Primera in our company is critical for us, considering that we operate in an HA environment where we can't have downtime since we need to deal with cheque clearance for banks. The product's interface is simple to use. I am satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The ease of use of the product's interface has directly had an impact on our company's operations, along with the improvement in the availability and performance of machines. Compared to HPE Primera, I work with a much more reliable storage solution like Dell PowerStore. Compared to HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore's features related to deduplication are very good, and it also offers a physical storage capacity of eight TB, which can be expanded up to forty TB. I would recommend the product to others who plan to use it only after taking into consideration their usage and requirements. From the price and performance point of view, Dell PowerStore is a better choice. I rate the tool a seven out of ten.
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

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."
"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."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The latency is good."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"The solution is scalable."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex."
"The most valuable feature is an all-flash system, which means the data access speed is amazing while the latency is almost nothing, and it can deliver IOPS up to 16,000."
"The most important thing that we had found when we purchased this product around six months back was its 100% availability and uptime."
"The most valuable feature of HP Primera is that you don't have to buy an additional product for application replication. It's a stable product. The tool is scalable. I recommend HPE Primera because it's one of HP's most stable product."
"The product is stable."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the artificial intelligence for the storage inside of the software and firmware because customers do not like functionalities which require manual interruption."
"HPE Primera is stable."
"The performance of the solution is good."
"Compared to Unity, these arrays offer significant advantages, such as NVMe technology and higher IOPS."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"Pure Storage FlashArray offers numerous valuable features, such as low latency and high throughput."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"I like its speed. It has all the features that I need."
"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."
"Their support is top-notch, and their NPS scores reflect this."
 

Cons

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We need better data deduplication."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"Increasing the IOPS and throughput values would make the product even better. Improving the scalability of HPE Primera is also recommended."
"The solution's compression ratio feature could be improved."
"Like most storage, we want to see flash become more and more stable. Like any flash that uses MLC or TLC techniques, over time, the more writes you have, the less usable the storage becomes. They try to plan for this and have a lot of extra space in the arrays, but over time, their performance does degrade. This is true for any flash storage."
"The pricing is very high."
"The reporting console can be improved with out of the box reports."
"HPE Primera's pricing model is an area of concern and can be considered for improvement."
"The price of the product is an area of concern. From an improvement perspective, the solution should be made more affordable in terms of price."
"The product's stale snapshots feature needs improvement."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"It would be beneficial to have a separate pricing point for environments with lower performance requirements or less workload."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for 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."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"The product is expensive."
"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 price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"There is only a one-time license purchase needed and no additional costs. If HP could reduce the training cost, then that would be advantageous to the seller."
"The license for HPE Primera is all-inclusive."
"The price of HPE Primera could improve, it is expensive."
"The pricing for HDD was good."
"The price to capacity ratio is good."
"Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis and the cost of GreenLake service is included."
"HPE Primera service is cost-effective."
"We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing."
"Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"It could always be lower, but it's okay."
"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."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contact clarity. We went with the Evergreen plan and I don't have clarity on what am I supposed to pay each year or every three years. There was not much contract clarity."
"We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves."
"There are no licensing fees aside from the support."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...
Which would you choose - HPE Nimble Storage or HPE Primera?
HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. Th...
What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?
HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...
What do you like most about HPE Primera?
For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product.
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
Primera
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 HPE Primera vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.