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HPE MSA vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
HPE MSA provides cost-effective storage solutions, optimizing business operations and delivering substantial monetary savings and better returns.
Sentiment score
5.8
NetApp FAS Series offers strong ROI with VMware integration, reducing costs through efficiency, consolidation, and strong service value.
It certainly shows a return on investment with HPE MSA, but we have framework contracts with special prices for the HP hardware, so I am not sure that our return on investment calculation corresponds to what other people should have.
If you have the configuration well maintained and configured, you should have good efficiency and compression for the clients and for yourself.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
HPE MSA support is mostly effective and reliable, but improvements in response times and proactive measures are needed.
Sentiment score
7.3
NetApp FAS Series' support is generally praised for knowledge and responsiveness, though some note variability in service quality.
I would rate technical support a three out of five due to the lack of effectiveness in preventing recurring problems.
Sometimes, the support was inadequate because the initial architecture was poorly defined.
We are also using it ourselves for the SAN and CIFS protocol.
They often provide basic solutions, such as suggesting a failover or a power cycle, which are not the sophisticated solutions we expect from a vendor.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
HPE MSA is scalable for small to medium businesses, offering easy expansion and positive feedback on workload hosting capabilities.
Sentiment score
7.4
NetApp FAS Series offers impressive scalability and efficient data handling, with considerations for cost and planning for expansion.
It is more profitable to use HPE MSA because if you run out of space, you can expand the capacity of the array using expansion enclosures, making it more flexible and profitable.
HPE MSA's scalability benefits are notable as its speed and performance are good.
We normally avoid current versions and use versions that have been running for at least two months in client usage before updating drivers.
NetApp FAS Series is scalable, and it is possible, but you need to pay.
The NetApp FAS Series is scalable and offers numerous solutions, but only if customers are willing to invest in the shelves.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
HPE MSA is highly reliable and stable, excelling in performance and compatibility, despite occasional hard disk concerns.
Sentiment score
8.0
NetApp FAS Series is highly reliable with minimal downtime, praised for redundancy and continuous operation despite occasional issues.
I faced issues with hard disk reliability, as they frequently fail and risk losing redundancy.
When panic occurs on the node, it reboots itself, and we have experienced numerous hardware-related issues.
Most things are tailor-made, and we avoid downtimes even with primitive CLI commands.
 

Room For Improvement

HPE MSA requires better scalability, GUI, replication, cloud integration, security, performance, and affordable support, addressing user concerns.
NetApp FAS Series needs better performance, integration, monitoring, pricing, usability, and support to enhance competitiveness and user experience.
Data security features are more important to me than anything else, and I think HPE MSA lacks in this area.
If it could be a hybrid with SSDs and hard disks, then it would be more economical and efficient.
Storage companies should create encrypted storage solutions between the OS and storage to protect against ransomware attacks.
Nutanix leads the business in this approach, and I feel that NetApp is missing some aspects, such as CPU, GPU, and RAM, in its AI portfolio.
There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
 

Setup Cost

HPE MSA's pricing is high with costly support and licensing, but users value responsive support; better pricing could aid businesses.
NetApp FAS Series is seen as high-cost but justified by features and performance, with negotiable pricing and discounts.
The pricing of HPE MSA is not deemed reasonable.
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable.
 

Valuable Features

HPE MSA is praised for its ease of management, scalability, robust features, and suitability for SMBs due to reliable performance.
NetApp FAS Series provides reliable, flexible storage management with high availability, supporting SAN/NAS protocols and VMware integration for cost-effectiveness.
I found that its scalability benefited my organization, especially in larger settings.
In terms of disaster recovery, we can define global spares in HPE MSA. When one disk fails, a global spare is automatically allocated to that particular disk, which saves the data.
The most useful feature of HPE MSA is VAAI, which are the functions embedded in the system, allowing operations on the server or storage without using server CPU, making it easier.
While NVMe disks are expensive and require three disks for parity calculations, hard drives in NetApp FAS Series are inexpensive, making it more cost-efficient per GB, even with RAID tech implementation.
Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k.
One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments.
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE MSA
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp FAS Series
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (3rd), NAS (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category, the mindshare of HPE MSA is 18.3%, up from 18.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp FAS Series is 15.2%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetApp FAS Series15.2%
HPE MSA18.3%
Other66.5%
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
 

Featured Reviews

Pragnesh Sachania - PeerSpot reviewer
Scalable, easy to manage, and used for virtualization environments
We didn't face any issues with the technical functionality. However, we faced a lot of challenges with our custom configuration. The HPE support person who did the installation was very technical. He answered all the queries, and we resolved the entire setup. We set up the storage as per our requirements. We previously used a physical server instead of virtualization. With the help of an HPE engineer and partners, we prepared a strategy for migrating the entire physical servers to our virtualization infrastructure. It took two days to deploy the solution. Six people were involved in the solution's deployment, including two from HPE and four from our IT team.
Srikanth Purushothaman - PeerSpot reviewer
Has supported long-term data protection and backup while requiring better part availability and pricing options
For monitoring purposes, we normally use flash access storage exclusively. We utilize a hybrid system because we need performance, combining NL-SAS for the volume and SAS flash to use as a fast cache system that provides more IOPS. We normally implement RAID 10, which we prefer over RAID 6's n plus 2 combinations. We utilize it for data redundancy, even with write intensity on. Regarding the unified storage architecture for NetApp FAS Series, we normally opt for exclusivity unless budget constraints exist. Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k. The high performance ensures minimal latency. An advantage we've seen with NetApp FAS Series is that snapshots provide very rapid backup and fast recovery. We basically use snapshots for data protection as first-level protection, with deduplication between the two storages serving as second-level protection.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HPE StorageWorks MSA?
The most valuable feature of HPE StorageWorks MSA is its flexibility.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE StorageWorks MSA?
I did not compare the cost of HPE MSA with others because we buy with a framework contract, and HP is the only brand available on that contract, so we have no comparison.
What needs improvement with HPE StorageWorks MSA?
The user web interface is a bit slow, but it is really easy to use, although you still have to wait a bit when you send an operation. We have had some drive failures, but with the redundancy, we ha...
Which SAN product would you choose: IBM FlashSystem (FS9500) vs PureFlash Array/X NVMe vs PureFlash Array/XL NVMe?
Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They fo...
 

Also Known As

HP StorageWorks MSA
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Femsa CSC, TTX, Rabobank
Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE MSA vs. NetApp FAS Series and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,785 professionals have used our research since 2012.