We performed a comparison between Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The latency is good."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"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."
"I like its speed. It has all the features that I need."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"It's actually very stable"
"Pure Storage FlashArray has significantly improved our data center performance. It handles high workloads efficiently, providing better performance in the environment. With increased storage capacity, it has led to improved overall system performance. The tool's technology is a standout feature. It has helped me reduce storage costs by 15 percent."
"We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"The solution has high performance."
"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"It is on the expensive side."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues. The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly."
"It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis."
"When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them."
Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and Dell Unity XT, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and NetApp AFF.
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