Top Pure Storage Alternatives in 2024

‍Effective data storage is a crucial aspect of successful business operations. As data generation escalates by the day, the importance of having a reliable and efficient storage solution becomes crucial. While Pure Storage remains a prominent choice for many businesses, several Pure Storage alternatives present comparable functionalities and features. This article explores some of the Pure Storage alternatives currently in the market.

Traditional data storage solutions often struggle to keep up with the scale and diversity of modern data sources, resulting in performance bottlenecks and high operating costs. In contrast, cloud-based data storage and management platforms offer a more agile and cost-effective solution that can scale with businesses' growing needs. By using tools like Pure Storage and its alternatives, businesses can benefit from improved performance, reduced operational costs, and increased flexibility in managing their data analytics workflows.

In addition, the rising volume of data makes organizations more susceptible to cyber threats, underscoring the critical importance of efficient data management within cloud environments. Prioritizing robust data management practices is paramount to preserving data integrity and accessibility in alignment with organizational objectives. 

Consequently, organizations are increasingly turning to storage management and automation tools to obtain maximum value from their data assets. In this context, Pure Storage emerges as a pivotal player, facilitating seamless data management and optimization to empower businesses in navigating the complexities of contemporary data landscapes. 

What Is Pure Storage?

Pure Storage has long been recognized for its high-performance, all-flash data storage solutions. It offers a range of products and services designed to help organizations manage and store their data efficiently. One of Pure Storage's key advantages is its flash technology, which provides faster performance and improved reliability compared to traditional hard disk drives.

Pure Storage services and products are known for their speed, efficiency, and reliability, making them popular among businesses looking to optimize their data storage infrastructure.

Features of Pure Storage

Pure Storage boasts a robust set of features designed to enhance data storage efficiency and performance:

• All-flash Storage: Leveraging all-flash arrays, Pure Storage delivers accelerated data access and heightened performance compared to traditional spinning disks, ensuring swift data retrieval and processing.
• Data reduction techniques: Leveraging advanced data compression and reduction techniques, Pure Storage helps reduce storage costs and optimize data efficiency.
• Performance thresholds and alerts: With pre-built alerts, you can get notifications regarding storage performance problems with your Pure Storage devices. Establish alerting thresholds and create proactive notifications for usage and status data that are tailored to your company's requirements.
• Multi-cloud integration: Pure Storage provides seamless integration with various cloud platforms, making it easy for businesses to extend their storage capabilities to the cloud.
• Storage capacity forecasting: Pure Storage lets you check every aspect of your storage environment, including how much storage is being used, with its Storage Resource Monitoring feature. Recognize past storage usage, keep an eye on current rates of depletion, and schedule your next storage requirements.

Drawbacks of Pure Storage

While Pure Storage undoubtedly offers numerous benefits, it's important to acknowledge some potential drawbacks that may impact certain organizations. Here are some key considerations:

• Costly: Pure Storage solutions often come with a higher price tag compared to other storage options, which could pose challenges for budget-conscious small and medium-sized businesses.
• Limited scalability: Despite its performance capabilities, Pure Storage may exhibit limitations in scalability, especially for organizations experiencing rapid data growth. This could potentially hinder long-term expansion plans. 
• Vendor lock-in: Opting for Pure Storage could result in vendor lock-in, tying businesses to a specific ecosystem and potentially limiting their flexibility to adopt alternative storage solutions in the future.
• Difficulty in creating SNAPSHOT: Users have reported challenges in creating snapshots of storage with Pure Storage, particularly due to limitations in GUI support. This could hinder efficient data management and backup processes. 

It's crucial for organizations to assess these drawbacks alongside their specific needs and preferences. As technology and data management requirements evolve, exploring alternative options becomes imperative. Whether prioritizing cost-effectiveness, scalability, or specific functionalities like snapshot creation, there are various Pure Storage alternatives available to address diverse organizational needs effectively.

Before discussing the different Pure Storage alternatives, we will first discuss Lucidity - a cloud storage automation platform that helps organizations save up to 70% on block storage without downtime.

Lucidity - For Storage Automation

Lucidity is a block storage optimization tool used by companies like SpartanNash to optimize their cloud storage cost. It facilitates the automation of storage provisioning processes and ensures uninterrupted operations without any downtime or DevOps requirements.

Cloud data storage costs are often underestimated, yet they constitute a significant portion of overall cloud expenses, ranging from 20% –30%. Also, efficient and reliable cloud data management is crucial in this digital data-centric world. 

Meanwhile, traditional approaches cause downtime and performance deterioration because they are not smooth enough to balance overprovisioning and underprovisioning. Also, there is a visibility restriction as you might not be able to see every resource in detail, and inactive resources that are not under observation are missing.

Ignorance regarding overprovisioning and storage optimization can ultimately lead to financial loss. According to Virtana's "State of Hybrid Cloud Storage in 2023" study, which involved 360 IT staff members

• The cost of cloud storage is increasing, according to 94% of these IT executives.
• According to 54% of them, the increase was faster than complete cloud costs. 

To handle all this, Lucidity offers two automated solutions:

• Lucidity Storage Audit
• Lucidity Block Storage Auto-scaler

How does Lucidity work? 

Lucidity operates by overcoming the issues teams encounter during the data transfer from on-premise to cloud infrastructure. Such an approach often results in difficulties like unused, underused, or overused storage. Consequently, this leads to improper resource usage and over- or under-provisioning issues. 

As already discussed, traditional data management methods can lead to ineffective resource optimization which results in wastage or unusage of resources. With this, you can face provisioning issues that too with low quality performance and high costs. 

To tackle these challenges, Lucidity offers storage audit and auto-scaler solutions. You can easily implement auto-scaler features with only three clicks to adjust block storage in real-time as per demand. This automatic process ensures smooth shrinkage or expansion of storage resources to optimize resource utilization and overcome over- or under-provisioning risks. With this automation, Lucidity supports you in increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and providing quality performance in managing cloud data. 

With Lucidity’s block storage auto-scaler automatically shrink and expand your block storage to ensure cost-efficient and no downtime, no matter how quickly your storage requirements change.

Also, you can deploy Lucidity in three different options to enable you to choose the best deployment methods as per your organization’s needs, like different security requirements:

• Self-hosted
• Lucidity-hosted
• Private Link

Lucidity conducts a detailed storage discovery about the current storage scenarios. This report further reveals potential saving areas. 

With its storage audit tool, it is possible to have an easily accessible automated solution for detailed analysis of block storage. Unlike traditional data management and storage methods, it helps to smooth out the process and provide comprehensive insights into cloud costs. With this, you can identify potential areas for savings. 

Some features of Lucidty’s storage audit tool are: 

• Analysis of disk health: Lucidity performs a comprehensive examination of disk usage and performance, offering profound insights into resource management. This enables organizations to use resources more effectively and efficiently, optimizing expenditures.
• Preventing downtime: Manual intervention is necessary for traditional storage management techniques, which can cause performance problems and downtime. You can eliminate this risk by Lucidity's No-Ops disk auto-scaler, which allows for the smooth shrinkage and expansion of storage capacity without affecting performance.

After you are done with the audit process, you can easily integrate your cloud infrastructure with Lucidty in just 15 minutes, which is a very simple and quick process. 

Here, two major functions are performed: 

• Collect and supply the auto-scaler with a variety of storage metrics, including volume, burst, queue, latency, IOPS, etc. 
• Lucidity auto-scaler is designed to automatically expand or shrink, based on the resources that are available. 

Benefits of Lucidity

Some of the major advantages that Lucidity offers:

• No Downtime: Even in the event of abrupt workload surges or dips, Lucidity's auto-scaler ensures continuous operation during cloud maintenance or storage optimization. By doing this, latency spikes and downtime are eliminated, guaranteeing constant service availability. 

• Live Shrinkage and Expansion: DevOps teams can concentrate on high-value work when disk utilization is automatically expanded or shrunk without human interaction. This maximizes productivity and resource allocation without spending time or resources on labor-intensive manual processes.
• Reduces block storage expenses: Lucidity's auto-scaler feature reduces block storage expenses by up to 70%. Optimizing resource use and removing needless storage fees for underutilized resources can significantly reduce costs. 

Also, to check on savings, Lucidity offers an ROI calculator to calculate potential estimated savings on cloud cost management with Azure, GCP, or AWS after implementing auto-scaler. The tool is simple and quick to use; you just need to provide specific details, like your disk spending and the growth rate of disks. 

After entering these details, the ROI calculator can help you estimate the savings you can achieve. With this feature, you can make informed decisions about the implementation and check the potential savings benefits. 

Eager to explore? 

Schedule a demo with Lucidity to learn how automation can reduce your overall effort and storage costs while managing cloud data.

Top Pure Storage Alternatives

To fix the above-mentioned issues, we have presented some of the Pure Storage alternatives based on your organization's specific needs.

1. NetApp

Cloud services from NetApp are specifically made to work with AWS, Google Cloud, and/or Microsoft Azure. This Pure Storage alternative comes with modules for cloud storage, compliance, protection, and multiple backup options for different file types. NetApp offers various storage solutions, including all-flash arrays, hybrid, and cloud storage options. Their products are known for their flexibility, scalability, and reliability.

• Unified data storage: It transcends merged block, object, and file protocols. It helps increase your and your team’s potential with a unified operating environment for every kind of data, workload, or application.
• Integrated data management to handle complexity: With increasing data growth comes a comparable rise in complexity. Also, there are more specifications and more online threats. It helps to handle your data simply, effectively, and securely, whether on-site or between clouds.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.3/5

2. IBM Storage FlashSystem

IBM FlashSystem is one of the best Pure Storage alternatives, offering all-flash arrays with impressive performance, reliability, and scalability features. With advanced data reduction technologies, encryption capabilities, and integration with IBM's broader storage ecosystem, IBM FlashSystem is a versatile storage solution for businesses of all sizes.

Flash memory chips, a solid-state technology, are used to write and store data in flash storage. Compared to hard disks with moving parts, flash storage can attain extremely quick reaction rates (microsecond latency). Since it uses non-volatile memory, information is preserved even during a power outage. Compared to mechanical disk storage, it consumes less energy and physical space.

• Lights out data center: You can view all your data in real time, and it also features AI-based data tiering. It is easier with the Flash system to manage and store data across all the systems, and that too with advanced storage capabilities. 
• Increased Cyber Resilience: Only IBM FlashSystem, as opposed to conventional storage arrays, has an inline data corruption function that uses machine learning to track data patterns and check for unusual behaviors that could be signs of a cyberattack. From there, to lessen the effects of a direct attack against your data, IBM FlashSystem and IBM Storage Insights can initiate autonomous measures like alerts or ITSM playbook activation.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.4/5

3. HPE Nimble Storage

Nimble Storage is a flash-optimized storage solution that offers corporate data security and backup storage. This intelligent, self-managing storage array gives you more time to focus on innovation areas or other essential tasks. It is a platform that supports everything from virtual machines (VMs) to containers for testing and development, extending across hybrid clouds easily and quickly. With HPE Nimble Storage, leveraging the power and agility of next-generation storage is made simple.

• Hybrid data mobility and cloud backup: It supports simple and effective backup, recovery, and ransomware protection and can meet every backup SLA across your hybrid cloud.
• Access private cloud on-demand: Leverage the benefits of automation, elasticity, and simplicity. With HPE Alltera dHCI, you can go beyond the restrictions of HCI to give the private cloud enterprise-level efficiency and power. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.8/5

4. Nutanix

Block, file, and object storage silos are easily accessed and managed from a single platform using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), a software-defined storage system. NUS, which uses the Nutanix Cloud Platform, is designed to meet the integrated data security, scale, and performance needs of contemporary applications running on edge, cloud, or core platforms.

Nutanix provides extensive data services, including data protection, cyber security, lifecycle management, and analytics.

• Combined data services: Eliminate siloed architectures' complexity and costs by unifying the deployment, management, and protection of file, block, and object protocols with snapshots, replication, and disaster recovery services.
• Streamlined administration: Storage generalists oversee unified administration, one-click upgrades, smooth expansion, and extension into the public clouds using a common operating architecture.
• Scale with performance: Increase performance while maintaining capacity to assist you in managing erratic data growth. Without requiring complex planning, start small at 1 TiB, expand to multiple PB, and integrate to the cloud for multi-cluster and multi-site models.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.5/5

5. Cloudian

Cloudian reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 70% when compared to traditional storage solutions and simplifies management by bringing the ease of use and flexibility of public cloud storage into clients' data centers. With a focus on 100% native S3 API storage systems, Cloudian's object-based platform, HyperStore, offers infinite scalability to assist businesses in effectively and economically managing the rapid expansion of unstructured data.

HyperFile expands the capabilities of object storage to include file storage. Its cloud-based use cases include bioinformatics, backup and archiving, IoT, hybrid cloud, AI/ML, and more.

• Geo-dispersed: You can put a Cloudian storage node anywhere and oversee them all from one place. Each node functions as a single system.
• Maximum S3-Compatibility: Cloudian is designed to be fully compatible with S3 APIs, so you can be sure it will function with your S3 applications.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.7/5

6. Cohesity

Cohesity is a pioneer in AI-driven data management and security. You can easily and quickly manage, secure, and extract value from data across data centers, edges, and clouds. With its complete data protection and management features, such as immutable backup snapshots, AI-based threat detection, malicious behavior tracking, and quick recovery at scale.

Cohesity assists you in fending off cybersecurity threats. Its solutions can be self-managed, offered as a service, or supplied by a Cohesity partner.

• Boost the robustness of your data: With a single platform for threat monitoring, automatic disaster recovery orchestration, backup and recovery, and data isolation and security, you can streamline data management hassle-free.
• Quicken the process of recovering data: With fixed, air-gapped backups; you can speed up data recovery and lessen the impact on your business during ransomware attacks or other data loss. 
• Top-notch threat intelligence: It supports highly accurate data classification and discovery powered by ML/AI to find sensitive information, evaluate the effect of an attack, and comprehend sensitive risk throughout the enterprise.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.4/5

7. Dell ECS

Dell Elastic Cloud Services is a viable option that excels in scalability and usability. It supports access controls, encryption, and frequent security upgrades, which are a few of its security features. It provides outstanding performance and dependability with less downtime. Its user interface, which is both basic and appealing, makes managing cloud resources very straightforward.

ECS provides extensive S3 compatibility on a globally distributed architecture and can be deployed as a turnkey appliance or in a software-defined architecture. This allows you to serve corporate workloads like cloud-native, IoT, AI, and big data analytics applications at scale.

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership: If you compare ECS to traditional storage deployments and public cloud storage, it can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership. Storage costs can be decreased by having a smaller data center footprint, less operational overhead, and more storage utilization.
• Adaptable deployment: You can deploy ECS as a software-defined storage solution or as an appliance.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.1/5

8. MinIO

MinIO is an object storage solution that runs well on Kubernetes. MinIO provides S3-like infrastructure on private clouds, public clouds, on-premises, and the edge. You can utilize MinIO to handle analytics, backup, archiving, and machine learning/artificial intelligence tasks, all from a single platform. MinIO provides robust enterprise features aimed at security, reliability, data protection, scalability, and identity management. 

• Realistic Storage Across Clouds: Businesses can construct S3-compatible data infrastructure on any cloud by utilizing multi-cloud object storage. The result is a dependable, portable interface for your files and programs, enabling you to operate from any location, including the edge, without making any code changes to the public cloud.

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.3/5

9. Hitachi Vantara (HCP)

The Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) by Hitachi Vantara offers performance, consolidation, and intelligent data management to satisfy changing needs. With the support of HCP's end-to-end portfolio, enterprises can transition from outdated to S3-based apps, integrate multiple clouds, and handle new workloads like data lakes, analytics, AI, Hadoop, and the Internet of Things.

• Data protection: For over ten years, HCP has offered unparalleled data protection capabilities in the most demanding real-world situations. With its built-in security, you can maintain resilience in this persistent cyberattack era. To provide high availability and accessibility, HCP provides a variety of replication methods and versioning.
• Handle data easily from the edge: HCP Anywhere Enterprise provides secure edge-to-cloud file services to your data centers, branch and remote offices, and IoT far-edge sites. 
• Flexibility to combine the aspects of both worlds: Using a hybrid cloud allows you to benefit from both public and private cloud computing. Connecting cloud storage with on-premises resources can easily convert all data into intelligence. 

Customer Rating 

• G2 - 4.7/5

Look Beyond Pure Storage!

Our blog offers a range of Pure Storage alternatives, empowering users with choices and helping businesses redefine their approaches to achieve maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness. By adopting these Pure Storage alternatives, businesses can stay ahead in this rapidly changing digital landscape and adjust to the constantly shifting needs for cloud data and storage management. 

Each Pure Storage alternatives has its strength, bringing flexibility, scalability, and effective cloud infrastructure management. You can make an informed decision by thoroughly analyzing your unique requirements and evaluating these Pure Storage alternatives that will meet the needs of your company and support future scalability. With the right data storage solution in place, you can ensure that your data is secure, accessible, and optimized for peak performance.