Pure Storage vs. NetApp

Only Pure Storage eliminates complex, disruptive upgrades and costly refresh cycles. Move up to future-ready storage built for continuous innovation and financial flexibility.

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Overview

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Differentiators

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Overview

Benefits

Compare

Differentiators

Customer Stories

Resources

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Buy Once, Upgrade Forever

The Pure Storage platform’s evolutionary architecture eliminates the need for data migrations with full trade-in credit for capacity and technology refreshes—unlike NetApp's periodic rebuying and complex upgrade processes. With a Pure Storage Evergreen® subscription, you buy once and receive continuous upgrades without frequent and costly refresh cycles.

Investment Protection

Pure Storage: All products are designed to be future-ready, and with an Evergreen subscription, you get ever-improving storage that never needs replaced. Donʼt take our word for it, we have a proven track record of over 30,000 Ever Modern upgrades performed for more than 3,000 customers.

NetApp: NetApp's Storage Lifecycle Program claims to be similar to Pure Storage Evergreen, but it involves complex head swap services and aggregate relocation processes, highlighting the gap between NetApp's marketing and their actual technology capabilities.

Non-Disruptive Operations

Pure Storage: Proven 99.9999% availability with non-disruptive, multi-generation software and hardware upgrades with no environment changes, ensuring continuous performance.

NetApp: Traditional upgrade paths that often involve planned downtime or maintenance windows, which can affect performance and disrupt business operations.

Consistent Performance

Pure Storage: DirectFlash® Modules (DFMs) enable the system to manage media, enabling smarter data placement, wear leveling, and garbage collection. Our DFM density is two to three times better than our competitors while consuming 39% to 54% fewer watts per terabyte.

NetApp: Relies on commodity SSDs and is at the mercy of supply chain constraints and fixed drive sizes, which increases the overall rack space footprint, power, and cooling requirements of their solution.

Certified Net Promoter Score

Certified NPS of 82 with over 619 Gartner Peer Insights reviews for FlashArray with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5.0.

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See Why Pure Storage Leads The Way

Feature	Pure Storage Evergreen//Forever™	NetApp Storage Lifecycle Program (SLP)
All-inclusive software subscription	All-inclusive features, now and in the future, with a solid history of releasing new features for customer benefit	Marketed as all-inclusive with ONTAP One, yet has history of complicated licensing bundles, adding required additional SKUs, and optional add-ons
Non-disruptive Hardware and Software Upgrades with Data-in-place across Generations	Proven data-in-place upgrades with full performance, across generations via Evergreen architecture	Announced as part of the SLP, however vendor has history of disruptive upgrades across generations and complicated migration requirements with lacking customer references
Included controller upgrades to latest generation	Ever Modern included controller and blade upgrades with no data migration—can be repeated indefinitely	Although NetApp claims it is valid on AFF, FAS and recently announced ASA product families, upgrades require NetApp “Head Swap Services”, which is a professional services-led aggregate relocation (ARL) process and is not data-in-place by definition
No-limit anytime controller upgrades (Latest generation and next model)	Ever Agile (anytime 100% trade-in credit)¹ which can be continually repeated at any time	One-time controller upgrade during term requiring a completely new purchase once expired, which requires a complete capacity repurchase
Anytime media upgrade/trade-in	Capacity Consolidation Program¹ enables a higher capacity swap with trade-in credit, even with different media technology	Capacity refresh requires 4x purchase to receive 100% raw capacity trade-in credit and only applicable to same type of media
Guaranteed effective capacity (Not just an efficiency ratio)	Right Size Guarantee enables a stated effective capacity (not just an efficiency ratio) on both FlashArray//X™ and FlashArray//XL™	Marketed at 4:1, this applies only to SAN protocols and includes other “efficiency” ratios (not just deduplication and compression) which artificially inflates the ratio, misleading customers about their savings
Unified storage services	Pure Storage platform supports multiple protocols including SMB, NFS, S3, iSCSI, FC, NVMe/TCP, and NVMe/FC, delivering predictable and high performance without translation layers and gateways	NetApp supports unified protocols (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, FC, NVMe/TCP, NVMe/FC) yet can struggle with block performance since the array needs to “translate” block protocols into a file request in order to talk to their WAFL file system. Perhaps this is why NetApp has released a “block only” version of their arrays (NetApp ASA line) which is confusing for customers.
Proven record of delivering on promises upgrade/trade-in	>30,000 controller upgrades, without disruption or re-buy	NetApp has no history or track record of data-in-place upgrades across generations and customer references are lacking

Slide

¹ Upgrade Flex and Capacity Consolidation require purchase of qualifying capacity
² Per this source (as of October 2024)
³ Per this source

Proven Track Record

With proven availability, industry-leading efficiency, and consistent performance, our products are designed for the most demanding applications. See why Gartner® has named Pure Storage as A Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for the last 11 years.

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The Pure Storage Evergreen Experience

One of our key design principles from the start was to provide disruption-free software and cross-generation hardware upgrades to keep storage modern without platform refreshes. We have continued this design principle with all of our products, enabling no forced data migrations with consistent performance despite technology changes.

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The Most Energy-efficient Data Storage

Powerful, efficient storage from Pure Storage can dramatically lower your energy bills, using up to 85% less energy than competitive all-flash storage.

See the Impact See the Impact

“We have had 100% uptime on our Pure arrays for nearly five years, and that includes software updates and controller upgrades.”

David Coindreau

Manager of Server and Storage Services, Frost Bank

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Resources and Insights

FEATURED WEBINAR

Don’t Settle for Disk - Embracing Flash for Backup and Archive

48 min

Explore Pure Storage's vision of the most efficient data center with FlashArray//E, designed to handle capacity-intensive workloads like archive and backup.

Watch the Webinar

INFOGRAPHIC

Rethinking Mid-range vs Enterprise Storage

Legacy data storage, with its complexity, forklift upgrades and limited “mid-range” features, is a relic of the past. Learn why Pure Storage is more feature-rich, more cost-effective, more agile, and radically easier to use.

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SOLUTION BRIEF

Evergreen//One for AI

Solving the unpredictability of AI with an SLA-driven, storage-as-a-service subscription to Evergreen//One.

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WHITE PAPER

Power Agility with a Modern Storage Infrastructure

Read the report to learn how you can modernize your storage infrastructure.

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ANALYST REPORT

Agility and the Future of the All-flash Data Center

S&P Global Market Intelligence shares their findings and key considerations for enterprises looking to extract maximum value from their storage investments.

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WHITE PAPER

10 Ways Pure Helps You Uncomplicate Storage, Forever

Discover 10 ways Pure Storage® can help you uncomplicate storage, forever.

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Get Started with Pure Storage Today

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Evergreen//Forever

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