How do NetApp All Flash FAS and Pure Storage compare? Let the community know what you think.

Hello, We don't use AFF but we used 8020 SAS and 8020 SSD and we replaced them to PURE. IO problems minimized, volume limitations resolved
I degraded servers ram and cpu which were working on Netapp but when i moved systems to PURE, they started working as never degraded

Hello,
In the design of choice of our AllFlash storage we tested several equipments, among them NETAPP and PURE. The finalists were: PURE / NETAPP / EMC. All delivered the performance and features that we had as success requirements. But ... our choice was PURE for simplicity of implementation and management, in addition to its innovative licensing model where you have the right to use everything that is implemented and what will be implemented yet you will also have right of use. We have been with PURE for 12 months and very satisfied with the results.

I'm afraid my experience with Netapp arrays has not been a good one. My experience is mainly with FAS, but lately with AFF arrays. Their architecture has "evolved" from NAS and it shows. By comparison PureStorage is very simple to install, run, maintain and expand. Comparing Netapp to PureStorage is very much like comparing an old Ford escort to a new Tesla. Concentrate on the simplicity of using the array, dealing with performance issues (never with Pure) and the ratio of physical storage to "useable".

Answer:
I assume your inquiry that you wanna know the difference between NetApp AFF series storage system and Pure storage system. So let me briefly explain about the NetApp storage first. There are three series of NetApp storage: E series, FAS series, and AFF series.
In NetApp storage, read/write performance is really so fast because it is not directly read/write into the hard disk. It works via NVRAM first.
AFF is the most reliable and fastest storage system in NetApp. It is all flash series. NetApp has a lot of feature as free although DELL EMC, IBM are charged for the same feature. Eg. Volume move feature and Deduplication feature are free in NetApp, but not at other storages.
Then NetApp can scale up and scale out easily. If I explain more about NetApp scale out/up infrastructure how it is easy, please read detail below explanation,
We know there are three levels in IT infrastructures: Entry, Middle, Enterprise. In Entry level and Middle level, most of Storage Vendors can scale up by adding Disk or Disk Shelves as like NetApp, but for scale out, they cannot extend other clusters (new storage). NetApp can only scale up and scale out for all level at all NetApp models. Other storage vendors can scale out only at Enterprise level model.

NetApp All Flash FAS uses ONTAP software which has many features that Pure Storage can’t match. NetApp AFF with SnapManager, SnapCenter and Snap Creator provides the best application integration in the industry. Another differentiator is NetApp ability to tier data automatically to the cloud giving users outstanding data management for the hybrid cloud. NetApp AFF has the flexibility to run both SAN & NAS workloads from a single OS without the burden of managing separate platforms.

Pure Storage’s performance is very good until it hits over 55% full. Garbage collection and data efficiency processes cause latency to spike. However, AFF avoids the latency issues by leveraging native SSD garbage collection rather than depending on ONTAP to manage it. Additionally, AFF active/active controllers and scale-out clustering can spread the load across more controllers to further enhance performance.

Hope this is helpful.

I don’t have a NetApp AFF array. Our NetApp is actually quite old so I’m sure that taints my experience but from that experience, I will say it’s night and day difference between Pure and NetApp in ease of use, support, and customer service. Pure is set it and forget. It’s been mostly hands-off since we purchased it which for our team was a big selling point. I believe the NetApp AFF we were looking at still had some quirks with how patching was done even down to updating firmware on the individual drives. The NetApp allowed for more tuning of the pools whereas the Pure managed it all behind the scenes. In a larger environment, those may be selling features for the NetApp but those things were detractors for us as we don’t have a dedicated storage admin.

Hope that helps.

Hello,

Everybody like to go easy way to manage their storage infra structure and Pure Storage has proved it very well.

Pure storage AFF products are easy to manage compare to NetApp products,
Performance of AFF Pure storage is quite consistent as I have not seen storage system gives more than > 2 ms latency if the system designing was done well as per requirement.

Their support access for customers is very much approachable so you will not have any hesitation while troubleshooting with Support Engineer over webex/call or home support.

Pure storage company give life time support to AFF products(Not sure about other product), Available Online scalability either go with Tech refresh option or Upgrade.

Also migration to Pure storage is quite easy as Pure AFF tested by many migration tools, appliance etc which are available in market.

Regards...
Naveen Kumar

I have experience in all-flash with Pure-Storage, in the past all my Oracle databases are running in VNX, since then, I have migrated them to Pure-Storage I have the best performance with more IOPs and low latency and good efficiency (from 33TB net to 80TB net with DDR 3:5)

All my Oracle databases have many and large transactions for reading and writing. Another important point, I have replicated in sync mode to other Datacenter via Oracle Dataguard from my Pure to VNX and the performance is good.

On NetApp flash, I don't have experience. my NetApp has only SAS disks and we use this for recorder images from Milestone app.

I hope that my comments can help you.

I'm going to talk you about what I know: Netapp AFF array, especially AFF A200. We have chosen this modèle because :
-we needed performance with cost-effective for our database applications and Microsoft Exchange Server.
-The possibility to use SAN and NAS workload.
-It is VMware VVol compatible.
-Easy to scale-out with 2 or more HA PAIR AFF (Scale-out to 24 nodes)
-Administration is simplified with Ontap 9
-the Compréhensive Storage efficiency in FAS and AFF have improved: Compression, deduplication….
- We needed possibilities to used PRA in Disaster Recovery site with Snapmirror (snapmirror-DR) with cost-effective.
-We needed the possibilities to use plugins in a virtualized environment such as VSC (Virtual Storage Console) and Snapprotect. And others products such Snapmanager Suite.

Hoping to have helped you, Do not hesitate if you have any questions.

Look here are already one report

www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/netapp-all-flash-fas_vs_pure-storage

I don’t have experience with NetApp or Pure (only in selling against) but I think it is always about the fit for purpose. Pure will be iSCSI and/or Fibre Channel, so block storage. NetApp FAS All Flash is Fibre Channel and over NFS/CIFS, so also file connect. So if customer wants to use the storage directly as a file server also, the NetApp will be preferable. From a hardware perspective there is not much differentiation between vendors or you compare to the very high end like EMC VMAX, HPE XP7 or HDS. Everything below that is considered mid-range HW with (or without) enterprise functionality. Pure calls themselves designed for All Flash.
But there are other criteria to look for. When you use a storage array you should look for:

1. Always maintaining data integrity. Also when the total array fails, it always should be designed to keep data integrity!!!

2. Availability is the next big thing. It should be designed for a 99.9999 availability and this should field proven data, especially when you are going to work single site.

3. Performance. This needs to fit purpose. All Flash sounds nice, but there should be a need for this or you can afford it.

4. Scalability. Important when you don’t know where you are heading with the application landscape

5. Data Optimization tools. I put this deliberately as last. Pure is a lot about data reduction with even factors of 5:1 in their marketing or documents to customers. The risk that data gets corrupt when a problem occurs in the array becomes larger when using tools like this to the max. It is application depending and also the calculations are also done taking snapshots into account, which don’t take any space at all, but are surely used for the presenting nice reduction ratio’s.

If synchronous replication is required, Pure has no mature solution for this. They just announced this and I am not aware yet of customers using this. NetApp is more mature in this. NetApp has also Solid Fire All Flash, which is a kind of grid build with servers with SSD’s connected over iSCSI network. Quite expensive, but a solution if you want to start small and scale. Be aware that all iSCSI solutions add 0.5 to 1ms latency compared with fibre channel. And that brings the question why a very expensive All Flash array with around 1ms response time and adding latency?

I cannot neglect that I represent HPE and I would recommend a Nimble solution from HPE. They have All Flash and Hybrid (adaptive) solutions which delivers the same amount of iops as All Flash but based on a combination of SSD and near line drives with very smart software. This cuts the price in half. Check out www.hpe.com/us/en/storage/nimble.html and see why HPE acquired Nimble also for their unique InfoSight software. Also Nimble has no synchronous replication yet. If you are looking for that, look at 3PAR with one of the richest software sets delivered in the industry with the array and also field proven availability of 6-nines. Feel free to contact me if other info is required.