NetApp AFF A400 vs Pure Storage FlashBlade Classic
Side-by-side specifications from the vendors' own documents. The NetApp AFF A400 is an enterprise midrange all-flash array featuring hardware-accelerated data reduction and native end-to-end NVMe protocol support. The Pure Storage FlashBlade Classic was the pioneer scale-out all-flash storage system designed specifically for unstructured data, high-performance computing, and modern analytics.
| NetApp AFF A400 | Pure Storage FlashBlade Classic | |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | NetApp | Pure Storage |
| Status | end-of-sale | end-of-sale |
| Released | Feb 2020 | Mar 2016 |
| Form factor | 4U rack | 4U modular chassis |
| Controller configuration | Dual controllers in 4U enclosure | — |
| Processor | Intel Xeon processors with dedicated crypto/compression offload engines | — |
| Memory | 256GB system memory per HA pair with NVRAM | — |
| Drive bays | Connects to NS224 NVMe drive shelves and DS224C SAS drive shelves | — |
| Supported drives | NVMe TLC SSDs (1.9TB to 15.3TB) and 12Gb SAS SSDs (960GB to 15.3TB) | — |
| Maximum raw capacity | Up to 140PB in a 24-node cluster | Up to 780TB raw per 4U chassis, scalable across multiple chassis |
| Host connectivity | PCIe slots supporting 100GbE, 25GbE, 10GbE, 32Gb FC, and 16Gb FC | — |
| Storage protocols | NVMe/FC, NVMe/TCP, FC, iSCSI, NFS, SMB | — |
| Clustering | Up to 24 nodes (12 HA pairs) | — |
| Management | NetApp ONTAP 9 | Pure1 cloud-based management |
| Chassis form factor | — | 4U modular chassis holding up to 15 blade modules |
| Operating system | — | Pure Storage Purity//FB |
| Blade options | — | 8TB, 17TB, and 52TB flash blades (integrated CPU, FPGA, and NAND) |
| Network connectivity | — | Integrated Fabric Modules (EFMs) with 40GbE and 100GbE QSFP uplinks |
| Protocols | — | NFSv3, NFSv4.1, SMB 2.1/3.0, and S3 Object |
| Architecture | — | Massively distributed scale-out architecture with hardware-accelerated metadata |
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