This document compares all-flash storage solutions from NetApp and Pure Storage. It finds that NetApp has stronger performance capabilities, supported by its scale-out architecture and Data ONTAP innovations. However, Pure Storage leads in storage efficiency through its deduplication and compression techniques. While both vendors offer enterprise-grade reliability, NetApp provides more robust data management services and flexibility in scaling storage capacity and performance over time. The document recommends that NetApp focus on medium and large enterprises by emphasizing its strengths in scalability, performance, and data services management.

1. THE ALL FLASH FAS V/S PURE
STORAGE
SHRIDHAR SHRIRAGHAVAN

2. EVOLUTION OF ALL FLASH MARKET
LANDSCAPE

3. INFLUENTIAL TRENDS
 Flash brings high performance to data services
 Storage efficiency technologies
 The newer application workloads are driven by mobile computing, social
media, big data/analytics and cloud computing
 These associated higher workloads require storage performance (IOPS,
latency, throughput, consistency) that HDDs alone cannot cost effectively
meet
 Data is expected to grow at 44% CAGR, so the ‘managing growth’ problem
will not let up soon. Flash is needed to maintain balance as infrastructure
density increases.

4. ECONOMICS
 SSD Prices per GB have steadily
fallen since 2013, from about $2
to 69 cents while HDD’s remain
constant
FLASH AT SCALE
 Flash at scale delivers significant secondary economic benefits
 Fewer devices, reduced energy/floor space consumption, fewer
servers, lower s/w licensing costs

5. AFA MARKET – REVENUE & FORECAST
 WorldwideAFA segment reached $1.3 billion in 2014
 Market expected to grow 5 times in revenue by 2019
 AFAs will dominate primary storage by 2018-2019
 AFAVendors pursuing lower entry price points
 Shorten sales cycles, newer customers
REVENUE ($M) SHARE (%)
EMC 112.3 22.6
Pure Storage 90.9 18.3
IBM 82.9 16.7
NetApp 45 9.1
SolidFire 35.6 7.2
Nimbus Data 34.3 6.9
Other 95.3 19.2
Total 496.3 100

6. FUTURE OUTLOOK
 Mixed workload consolidation is the competitive
background for AFAs for 2015 and beyond
 Independent software vendors (ISV) will develop
primary storage applications assuming all flash
configurations
 VM-level storage management will become a way
of life by 2017

7. VENDOR COMPARISON

8. FOREWORD
 The two products under comparison come from firms
whose competency and outlook in the AFA market is
different
 Pure Storage’s competency lies in software (storage
efficiency) and reducing effective cost
 NetApp’s competency is hardware, performance and
enterprise class data services
 Ultimately, it is the application workload that governs
which solutions you should consider

9. TARGET MARKETS
 The Pure Storage FA-405, FA-420 and FA-450 are
designed to address the small business and remote
offices, mid-market and high-end enterprise
markets respectively
 Netapp All Flash FAS is targeted for enterprise
customers who want an all-flash system for
performance while maintaining their familiar
storage management and data protection features

10. PRODUCT ARCHITECTURE
NETAPP PURE STORAGE
Scale out approach - Is a cluster of servers
(nodes) with a single point of management
Scale up approach – One stand alone server
deployed. (Moore’s law allows for
replacement of the stand alone server in the
tech. refresh cycle. *How long now?)
COMMON GOALSOF EACH APPROACH
Scale performance, capacity or both non-disruptively and without performance
degradation.
Others include affordability, interoperability and operational simplicity
Regarded as the storage of the future
Mission critical workloads can run on 2 or
more servers to preserve availability
Suitable when a large number of smaller
nodes are needed, perhaps for a web server
farm or a server cluster where physically
redundant hosts are required
Suitable for major virtual server
consolidation
Works only if resources to a virtual machine
are carefully allocated
Potential for scale-up server failures and
work disruptions is real
*“I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call [Moore's law] dead”, Bob Colwell (Intel)

11. PERFORMANCE
 Performance is one of the most important metrics for
embracing All Flash Storage.
 Impacts your business by increasing efficiency and
reducing server and licensing costs by 50%
 Key factors are
 IOPS (Higher the better)
 Latency/Response time (Lower the better, <1ms)
 Consistency

12. NETAPP WINS IN PERFORMANCE
NETAPP (STRENGTH) PURE STORAGE (WEAKNESS)
Scale out performance Use commodity SLC flash drives as
“NVRAM” to journal data, so maximum
theoretical write performance of only
150,000 4K IOPS*
685,281 IOPS, $2.68 IOPS and 1.23
millisecond response time at 100% load
(Variability in latency is low too)
The 512B granularity approach shall lead to
fragmentation over time.
And since in flash, sequential IO is faster
than random, when the system would have
to hop around (random read) to read in
512B blocks, performance dips
NetApp’s Data ONTAP FlashEssentials
innovations increase flash performance and
efficiency
500,000 overall IOPS sustained (@ 4KB)
200,000 write IOPS sustained (@ 4KB)*
Pure Storage’s ACTIVE/ACTIVE Controller Message (P.S. – Similar to
ACTIVE/PASSIVE)
Understand your requirements to determine if you need high performance or consistent
performance

13. STORAGE EFFICIENCY
 Second most important metric enabling more data to be
stored in less space
 Storage efficiency significantly reduces your cost of
ownership and effective cost
 Areas of study include
 Deduplication (Inline and cluster wide is desirable)
 Compression (Inline is desirable)
 In-line data reduction
 Thin provisioning

14. PURE STORAGE WINS
 Pure Storage is the leader in storage efficiency with it’s
differentiator being deduplication and compression
NETAPP’S WEAKNESS
 The new AFF offers partial inline deduplication with
actual byte-to-byte comparison being post process
 NetApp’s deduplication is volume based only
 Data ONTAP lacks global deduplication across
LUNs which means that 250 LUNs can have 250
copies of same data adding up to a high cost flash
array

15. CAPACITY (NETAPP WINS)
 NetApp’sAFF offers upto 384TB in raw capacity
and 1565.3 in effective capacity (Single HA Pair)
 NAS Scale out (12 HA Pair) can offer 4.6 PB
 SAN Scale out (4 HA Pair) can offer 1.5 PB
 Pure Storage’s //m Series offers only upto 136TB in
raw capacity and 400TB in effective capacity but
with high storage efficiency

16. APPLICATION PERFORMANCE + DATA SERVICES
 While Pure Storage supports enterprise applications
likeVDI, Oracle etc., superiorVDI application
performance is achieved on NetApp.
 For databases however, Pure Storage wins
 Data services like Replication, Encryption etc. are
refined at NetApp

17. APPLICATION PERFORMANCE + DATA SERVICES
NETAPP PURE STORAGE LEADS
Converged
Infrastructure
AllFlash FlexPod
available forVDI
environments
Hybrid Array FlexPod
available too
Flash Stack CI
announced Dec 2014
NETAPP
ORACLE & Microsoft
SQL
Supported Supported - It
requires 5-10x less
flash than hyper
converged approach
PURE STORAGE
VMWare (VDI) &Citrix Supported - Storage
costs as low as $55/
desktop with Horizon
View
Supported - Markets
only against disks
NETAPP
Openstack Deeply Integrated Recently added (2014) NETAPP
Data Services
Snapshots,
encryption,
replication,
Integration
Supported (MATURE) Supported and free in
Purity 4.0
(FlashProtect &
FlashRecover
(Launched 2014))
NETAPP

18. FLEXIBILITY AND SCALABILITY(NETAPP WINS)
 How confident are you about your future data architectures?
 Flexibility - NetApp’s FAS allows for a lot of flexibility by allowing
data to be moved from flash to disk to cloud.
NetApp offers both SAN & NAS architectures, while Pure Storage
offers SAN only
 Scalability - A Pure system uses a whopping 384 GB of RAM to
deliver 120TB
Given that DRAM prices are dropping at a much slower pace than
flash, Pure is hitting the limits of commodity server design

19. QUALITY OF SERVICE (NETAPP WINS)
 Built-in QoS lets you set performance limits on files,
volumes, LUNs, or an entire storage virtual machine
(SVM) to give priority to your most important
workloads.
RELIABILITY (STALEMATE)
 Both companies boast >99.999% reliability across all systems deployed
 Pure Storage - Proprietary RAID 3D is deployed
 NetApp – RAID 6 or RAID 4 or combination of prior with RAID 1 is deployed

20. PURE STORAGE – STRENGTHS (INHERENT & TRANSIENT)
 Cost efficient performance driven by deduplication and compression driving down
effective cost
 Creative pricing and guarantee programs around controller upgrades, SSD
warranties and maintenance pricing
 Customer trust by demonstrating it is reliable, stable and easy to work with
 Delivers capable data management services and proven data reduction
implementation while based on consumer-grade SSD technology
 Accelerate the I/O performance for relational databases, virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI), and virtual server infrastructure and clouds.
 Others (TRANSIENT) – Gartner Magic Quadrant Leadership status

21. PURE STORAGE - WEAKNESSES
 Performance
 Lack of enterprise class data management and
application features, NetApp standard
 Pure Storage’s FA-400 series product has limited
scalability (read high RAM/Storage ratio) when
compared to competitive products.

22. NETAPP - STRENGTHS
 Robust performance
 Leading data management services and ecosystem
 Scalable – All flash systems will run out of capacity
before performance levels decrease
 All-Flash FAS is available as part of the FlexPod
reference architecture
 Alliances (Cisco,VMWare etc.)

23. NETAPP - WEAKNESSES
 Lack of data reduction capabilities limits the appeal
of FAS Series in server virtualization, virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) and online transaction
processing (OLTP) consolidation use cases.
 Creative Marketing capabilities vis-à-vis Pure
Storage

24. PROMOTION (TRANSIENT – Info only)
 Pure Storage introduced the ForeverFlash initiative,
which combines the ability to non-disruptively scale
performance or capacity with a maintenance program
that promises no hikes in annual fees.
 When users extend support for another period, Pure
provides new controllers at no cost.
 Caveat
 Pure must continue to excel at R&D and deliver upgrades
from engineering
 With majority of sales from channel, how would the finances
work out?

25. PRICING & STANDARD WARRANTY – (STALEMATE -
PRICE/SERVICE WARS)
 FACT - Flash performance is so good that customers want to stay on one platform for as long as possible
 PURE STORAGE
 FlashArray 405 & 450
 List prices range from sub-$100K to multi-$100K.
 Pure's raw flash is the most expensive at $12.03/GB
 Standard warranty is 3 years from initial purchase.
 Maintenance and support are offered in 1, 3 and 5 year plans, each with 4-hour or next business day (NBD)
options (both options are 24x7).
 Pricing for support is based on percentage of list price:
 1 year 4-hour is 8%, NBD is 6%
 3 year 4-hour is 20%, NBD is 15%
 5 year 4-hour is 33%, NBD is 26%
 NETAPP
 Starting street price is $25,000
 AFF8000 is now priced at the same $5 per raw GB
 Support flat maintenance for up to seven years versus the typical three to five years, so there's no penalty for
staying on the platform for longer times

26. GAPS IN NETAPP’S OFFERING
 Storage efficiency is an industry requirement and
NetApp is lagging.
 NetApp lacks ease of use for the SME target
market. Pure Storage achieves this well.
 Training and professional services are required for
most of NetApp’s deployments

27. RECOMMENDATIONS
 LONGTERM
 Product Enhancements
 SHORTTERM – SAY “Capacity is free, performance costs”
 Focus on the medium & high-end enterprises targeted by Pure
Storage’s FA-450 only.They are more inclined to need performance,
data services, application integration etc.
 Leverage and build a compelling case for scalability, performance
and data management services (NetApp’s strengths) during the
pitch
 Storage is a long term investment, caution the customer to not rush
into the decision based on cost (Pure Storage’s strength)
 “Moore’s law will be dead in a decade”, Bob Colwell (Intel), marking
an end to scale up architecture (Pure Storage)
 Discuss NetApp’s whole range of offerings

28. RECOMMENDATIONS
 Partner with ISW’s/Alliances to offer discounts on licenses
 Attack Pure Storage’s hardware/weakness & marketing (Consumer
grade SSDs, Performance, 50% CPU utilization etc.)
 Tackle the prospect’s H/W and S/W needs separately (Review and
refine product offerings, Unbundle premium offerings)
 Focus on customer priority - $/GB or $/IOPS ?

29. THANK YOU