Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs NetApp AFF comparison

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF

May 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is 3.3%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.4%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

A robust and dependable product that ensures a 100 percent data availability guarantee

Ozair Amin

Sales Manager - Infrastructure at Synergy Computers

We don't encounter any challenges in selling these Hitachi VSPs to our customers. These products boast an exceptionally robust architecture, making them highly reliable. This reliability is the key reason behind our lack of challenges. However, when we delve into the realm of competition, particularly in the unified storage sector, we do face certain challenges. This is primarily due to the usage of gateways in their storage solutions by some competitors. Unlike other competitors such as NetApp and Huawei, who do not employ gateways, we contend with challenges related to these gateways within the context of unified products. Many customers have been utilizing Hitachi Vantara for several years, relying on its storage capabilities. They appreciate its reliable roadmaps, which facilitate long-term planning. This makes it an effortless choice for customers to opt for Hitachi Vantara, as the product seamlessly accommodates updates and future changes. The key focal point of the Hitachi Vantara roadmap for our clients is centered around future upgrades. Typically, customers undergo tech refresh cycles approximately every five years. Consequently, when they embark on a tech refresh initiative, they tend to prioritize options that facilitate a smooth transition of data to alternative storage solutions. In this context, Hitachi Vantara leverages its external storage virtualization platform to ensure a seamless data migration process. This approach proves to be highly advantageous for our customers, and it stands as a primary reason for their choice to engage with Hitachi Vantara's offerings. Our customers are highly satisfied with their choice to acquire Hitachi products and services. I have not observed any of our customers shifting away from the Hitachi brand. I would recommend Hitachi Vantara 100 percent of the time to others. There are tools that assist us in accessing the IOPS per second and latencies of Hitachi Vantara systems. One such tool is the CPK tool, accessible through the Hitachi Vantara portal. Whenever we configure a product and a customer requests information about the IOPS and latencies, we can provide them with a report from the portal. This report includes details about reads, writes, IOPS, and sequential operations, offering a comprehensive overview of the IOPS performance that Hitachi Vantara offers. The combination of low latency and high performance has consistently assisted customers in improving their production and enhancing their working experience. It also aids them in easily managing the product, giving them time to expand their knowledge and plan for the future, rather than dealing with storage-related issues. The cost comparison of IOPS between our solutions and those of competitors is favorable at present, but this wasn't always the case. In the Pakistani market, Huawei used to be highly competitive. However, our current partnership with Hitachi has allowed us to pose a strong challenge to Huawei. Additionally, when considering products from NetApp, EMC, and even IBM, Hitachi remains highly competitive. Hitachi offers flexible media options to support the consolidation of multiple uses within the same platform which is important to our customers. Most of our customers utilize Unified Storage, employing a two-tier storage approach that includes both NVMe and SSDs. However, current trends indicate a shift in customer preferences towards NVMe over SAAS or SSDs due to the heightened reliability and increased cost-effectiveness of NVMe technology. This transition is driving many customers to adopt a comprehensive NVMe solution. Nonetheless, a substantial number of large customers still adhere to the two-tier storage model. For their primary tier, they employ NVMe drives, while for the secondary tier, they opt for NFS drives or a SAAS-based large-scale service. The integration of various use cases into a unified platform to facilitate the transformation of data into business insights is highly valuable. We receive input from our customers regarding their workloads. Based on the nature of these workloads and their intended use for storage – whether for ERP solutions, archives, or backup purposes – we recommend the appropriate storage type. These steps outline our process for evaluating the intended storage workload. Following this workload assessment, we suggest either NAS Unified Storage or Document Storage solutions. In the portal, there is a tool that enables us to calculate Hitachi's guaranteed effective capacity. It is quite straightforward for customers to comprehend and identify the effective capacity ratio. This is because many customers in Pakistan are already familiar with and using effective capacity ratios. Explaining the concept of effective capacity to customers is not a challenging task. Customers typically appreciate the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform due to its efficiency, easy product manageability, and product reliability, all of which offer significant benefits to the customers. This is crucial, especially in sectors like banking, where any breach or downtime could lead to substantial losses for customers. The uninterrupted operation of storage is paramount. This substantial benefit not only ensures customer satisfaction but also underscores the value derived from data utilization. Hitachi's adaptive data reduction technology assists in decreasing our client's storage footprint by around 50 percent. The majority of our customers were using storage from various vendors. We consolidated this storage into a single system using Hitachi Vantara.

Flexible with great support and high-speed multi-protocol storage

Ian Rousom

Owner at RTX

Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident. We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability. It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time. We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is scalable."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"It's a state of the art solution in storage systems. High-availability and performance are the strongest aspects of these machines."

"The feature I like best is the stability of the hardware."

"I am happy about the storage system and availability."

"What I like best about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is that it's a fast storage solution. It also has reliable models. The sales support is also good for this product. Even the pricing for it is good."

"Hitachi's technical support is perfect."

"Overall, the solution is strong, easy and fast."

"The technical support is great."

"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pros

"Things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things."

"The most valuable features of the solution are speed, performance, and reliability."

"Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it."

"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."

"The stability is solid. It doesn't fail on us, which is exactly what we want. We are in a critical business that we can't have any percentage of downtime."

"The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively."

"Before we implemented AFF, Oracle was running on a traditional storage spindle and at a very low speed with high latency, and the database was not running very well. After we converted from the spinning disk to the all-flash array, it was at least four times faster to access the volume than before."

"The most valuable aspect of NetApp AFF is the money it saves our organization."

More NetApp AFF pros

Cons

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"One problem is that there are too many management tools for the F Series and for all the other Hitachi storage systems. There are four or five such solutions. Maybe these could be combined in the future."

"This product should be easier to install and set up."

"I would like the fan noise to be automatically adjusted based on the drive's current workload."

"The admin tools in the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform definitely have certain shortcomings that require improvement."

"The embedded management for installation feature has neither simplified nor complicated the management process, therefore, there is room for improvement."

"Hitachi should launch some small machines in Brazil. The smallest machine here in Brazil is VSP 350, which can be quite big for some of the customers. In China, Hitachi has small models of this equipment, but those models are not available in our region. Its pricing is a big issue for us. We are resellers, and we face some competition from other vendors. Hitachi doesn't always have a good position in terms of the price. Its user interface is also not as good as some of the other competitors, and it can be improved."

"In the next version I would like to see more intelligence."

"The installation procedure it a bit difficult, because it is a high-end solution. With this type of product, the original company is interested in doing the setup for customers in the area, but because of sanctions we were not able to get support in our area. We faced many issued trying to learn to run this product."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform cons

"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."

"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."

"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."

"I just got through the session where it looks like they are going to support Oracle running on Linux with SnapCenter. That is one of the main things that we are hoping to get integrated."

"Their customer support can be better."

"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."

"I think adding more features to make it more cloud enabled will help us with cloud tiering and simplify the whole cloud operations when it's integrating with our on-prem AFF products. That is one area where we would like to see more improvements from NetApp."

"The product should be more competitive and come up with additional features. They should keep the client always in mind and as the top priority. This would be the best way to compete with other solutions."

More NetApp AFF cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"The product is expensive."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The costs were primarily in line with every other vendor at the time."

"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is a very expensive product."

"It is expensive. Everything is included in the license. There is no additional cost."

"I find Hitachi to be cheaper by five to ten percent when compared to Dell and HP's costs, but the features in Dell are better than Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform."

"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a three out of ten."

"A drawback of Hitachi storage systems is that they are expensive. The upfront cost is very high compared to others. But when you compare the IOPS at the same price, Hitachi gives you better business value..."

"The main difference between Hitachi and other vendors is the cost. At the time that we bought the solution, it was the best option but the price, compared to other vendors, is a little high."

"I would like to see better pricing and more discounts."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is competitive when we compare it to other products."

"You need to be careful with the licensing since it can become expensive."

"The total cost of ownership has decreased a great deal. As far as percentages, it's hard to gauge, but we did have quite a few personnel staying up, making sure batches ran well every night. Now, batches are being done by 8:00 in the evening, so we don't have to do that anymore. When you start adding the employee hours that we have for people working in the off-hours, and it is not an issue anymore, I suspect TCO might have gone down 25 percent."

"From an application standpoint, we have seen a lot of return investment on the speeds and responsiveness of the actual storage."

"The list price of AFF is too expensive... they need to be careful with the pricing of the new NVMe disks. They are way too expensive."

"It consolidates a lot of our storage into one or two chassis, which makes money savings in our data center."

"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."

"The entry point for potential customers, who are looking at coming onboard for flash systems, it may be a bit expensive. It would be good if the price comes down."

More NetApp AFF pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user186357

Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees

Jan 28, 2015

NetApp vs. XtremIO

Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform?

For NVMe storage, the pricing is reasonable compared to competitors in India. However, for entry-level SAN storage or...

What do you like most about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

The product's reliability has been crucial for our company's operations.

What needs improvement with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

The interface management and monitoring need improvement. Although I receive emails from Hitachi Virtual Storage Plat...

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparisons

Compared 28% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 8% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF

Compared 16% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp AFF

Compared 9% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs NetApp AFF

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF

Compared 8% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs NetApp AFF

Compared 4% of the time

More NetApp AFF Competitors

Product Reports

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2025

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

June 2025

Download Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform product report

Download NetApp AFF product report

NetApp AFF

June 2025

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, 5000 Series, E Series, N Series, G Series

NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

RETHINK YOUR DEFINITION OF SPEED AND PERFORMANCE

With adaptive, guaranteed data reduction and a 100% data-availability guarantee, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F series helps you tackle complicated business challenges. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) VSP F series delivers up to 4.8M IOPS with sub-millisecond response times.
Featuring legendary Hitachi reliability, VSP F series arrays are backed by the industries only 100% availability guarantee. For these reasons, 80% of the Fortune 500 choose Hitachi all-flash arrays to accelerate the performance of mission-critical applications like Oracle, SAP, Virtualization, Microsoft apps etc. With over 350 patents in flash technology, Hitachi’s innovative mix of flash hardware and software accelerates ROI with enterprise-class reliability and performance.

Hitachi Vantara

The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.

NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.

AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.

AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.

NetApp AFF Benefits

Speed up your critical applications with lightning-fast end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays.
Increase Performance: AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
Save up to 95% of rack space and up to 85% of power and cooling cost over hybrid flash storage.
Reduce cost with guaranteed storage efficiency.
Realize even greater savings by tiering cold data to the cloud easily.
Simplify Operations on premises or in the cloud: Eliminate fragmented and redundant toolsets and combine visibility and manageability of storage instances with data services in a unified control plane across the hybrid cloud.

NetApp AFF Features

Expand capacity with nondisruptive scaling in a cluster without silos or data migration.
Manage data with the ultimate flexibility of unified support across different storage media and protocols, on premises or in the cloud.
Scale performance with technology innovations of NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP connectivity.
Safeguard your data with best-in-class data security, ransomware protection, multifactor admin access, secure multitenant shared storage, and in-flight and at-rest encryption.
Simplify backup and recovery with built-in application-consistent data protection.
Achieve business continuity and fast disaster recovery with zero data loss and zero downtime.
Scale out to 24 nodes, 367PB of effective capacity, and 4 million IOPS non-disruptively.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”

Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Turkcell, Owens Corning, Region Nord, Net Credit Financial Group (NFC Group), Russian Railways

DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan